Ethics and Liberation
By Steve | July 10, 2006
Independence Day for me is usually about fireworks, family, food and flag. While I didn’t give any of those up this year, for some reason I found myself thinking about what our country has stood for over the past 230 years. And because I obsess about the work we do, this led me to thinking about a conversation I had with a foreman late last year.
It was a crisp, clear day in one of the most gorgeous settings I had ever done ethics training in: an isolated town in the Sierra Nevada mountains. In between sessions a foreman who had spent almost twenty years in this picturesque place offered to take me for a tour. At the end, he grew very serious and said “I want to thank you for helping to liberate us.” Bewildered, I asked him to explain.
“Thirteen years ago we got a new manager. He was a tyrant. He abused people and took advantage of them and the company. Early on a few people tried to do something about it, but he got rid of them real quick. So for the last ten years, we just kept our heads down and did our jobs.”
“And then this summer the President of the Company and the new Ethics Officer came here to talk about ethics. They seemed like they meant the stuff they said. So I decided to take the risk and call that new Hotline. Now the old manager is gone, and it feels like we have been liberated. You just can’t know how good it feels to be working here now.”
There are lots of measure of success in the field of Ethics and Compliance, but I can’t think of a better one than that.