Compliance with the rules and policies of an organization is serious business for a good reason.
When team members cross lines, violate rules, and take unethical risks, they can severely damage an organization’s reputation, invite legal scrutiny, and undermine team cohesion and morale.
Sometimes, even a minor violation can impact the integrity, safety, and legal standing of the organization. As one well-known leader likes to say, one team member can do more harm in one hour than the rest of the organization can do good in their entire careers.
While it is not a popular topic for leaders to think about and address, organizations that do not have safeguards against bad behavior and rule violations are destined to experience them.
But organizations can also be overzealous in their fixation on compliance and stifle creativity, experimentation, and trust.
Compliance efforts and the messages associated with them can become an organizational straitjacket. Balancing the importance of compliance with the need to trust team members to do the right thing is a delicate line.
The best leaders and organizations don’t continually broadcast the many rules, policies, and regulations that team members are expected to follow.
Just as no one enjoys patronizing a retail store with signs everywhere that remind shoppers that shoplifting is a crime, team members feel uninspired when compliance looms over everything. Instead, the best leaders embed compliance into the culture and decision-making without letting it dominate the conversation.
Rather than talk about compliance, they know the greatest deterrence is a strong monitoring system where everyone understands regular checks are a part of the organization’s normal processes to protect the franchise.
The mere possibility and expectation of compliance checks act as a deterrent to rule-breaking behavior. People are less likely to violate rules when they believe there is a higher likelihood that they will be caught.
As it turns out, getting caught is worse than the consequences for most people. Research has consistently shown that random or regular monitoring is a stronger deterrent than the severity of whatever the punishment might be.
The presence of a monitoring system signals that non-compliance will likely be discovered and addressed. The simple existence of a system acts as a deterrence against rule-breaking and cutting corners.
By adhering to a consistent monitoring system for the most important rules and policies, team members comply without the need for constant reminders.
Too many organizations don’t believe they need to employ random or regular checks and rely instead on group pressure and trust to ensure compliance. Even after a significant breakdown, they often fail to implement this simple solution. That puts everyone at risk.
Compliance is about building a stable, ethical, and sustainable organization of success. The possibility of detection is all that most organizations need to strike a healthy balance with compliance.
When everyone knows there are checks, they are less likely to break the rules.
In the words of legendary NBA center Bill Russell, “The idea is not to block every shot. The idea is to make your opponent believe that you might block every shot.”
The same is true with compliance in organizations.
A Daily Dispatch from the Front Lines of Leadership.
