1. ethicalleadership.nd.edu
Thank you for your interest in the Notre Dame Deloitte Center for
Ethical Leadership. Enclosed you will find a description of our outlook
and how we aim to serve, a few select writeups from our To the Point:
Dispatches from the Ethical Frontier research series, and a collection
of takeaways from our most recent forum. To see our multimedia
content including our Walking the Talk: Putting Insights into Practice
CEO interview series, please visit us at ethicalleadership.nd.edu.
Our Standpoint 1
Increasing Your Odds 2 - 3
Making Feedback Normal 4 - 5
Why Ethics Education Needs to Stay Positive 6 - 7
Hiring for Guilt 8 - 9
The Power of Storytelling 10 - 11
Breakthrough Behaviors:
Takeaways from our 4th Annual Forum 12 - 14

2. Ethical leadership is the bedrock on which enduring,
successful organizations are built. If you have integrity
at the helm, committed employees, a culture that
supports your values, and the public’s trust, you’re a lot
better off. Your company is strong internally, and that’s
not only good for you—it’s good for your industry, your
community, and the global market.
Yet every discussion of ethics seems to start with a
litany of wrongdoings—from judgment lapses to
outright fraud, the focus is on the bad things people and
companies have done.
At the Notre Dame Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership,
we see ethics as more than just a safety net that catches
us when we fail. We believe it can be a powerful force in
driving the world forward.
Our Center arose from a partnership between the
University of Notre Dame and the professional services
firm Deloitte. Having identified a shared value of personal
integrity in today’s business world, we developed
the NDDCEL as a forum by which to advance the
understanding and implementation of ethical leadership
practices in the corporate sphere.
We deal in ideas—not just about business or
management or how to train employees, but also
about the human mind, behavioral science, culture,
interpersonal exchange, and personality theory. We
explore how people work, how their individual traits and
ideas and actions make larger organizations work, and
how leaders can affect culture and inspire their followers.
We’re interested in a lot of things here at NDDCEL, and
they’re not just the things you would expect.
So, how do we aim to serve you? From our diverse
interests, we fund original research projects and search
for and synthesize content from the academic and
business worlds into“dispatches”for your consumption.
We show you what we’ve found, tell you why we
think it matters, and give you ideas on how to use the
information. We provide forward-looking, pragmatic,
and provocative content to assist you in bettering your
organizations and, ultimately, in making business a force
for good.
ethicalleadership.nd.edu
Here’s how we do that:
• Produce a video series of interviews
with C-Suite executives discussing values
• Create accessible, pragmatic writeups
of cutting edge behavioral research
• Present content at various forums and
conferences on ethical business behavior
• Contribute thought leadership pieces to
ethics blogs and business management
publications
• Annually convene executives and scholars
around innovative topics in ethical
leadership
• Award funding to academics pursuing
research projects on ethical behavior and
leadership
• Identify ethics centers with shared
interests and form collaborations to create
valuable content
• Publish a monthly newsletter with fresh
content and updates on Center activity
1
OUR
STANDPOINT

3. TO THE
POINT
The words that sealed the terrible fate of
the Challenger crew might seem innocuous:
“Take off your engineer’s hat and put on your
manager’s hat.”
NASA was working with a contracted en-
gineering firm on the 1986 space shuttle
launch. The contractor’s engineers had been
warning managers that if the temperature
became too cold, O-rings that joined the
shuttle to its rocket boosters would fail.
But NASA wanted to launch as soon as pos-
sible. That’s when the contractor’s general
manager told his fellow executives to con-
sider the issue as managers, not engineers.
The conversation instantly shifted from one
about design and safety to one about bud-
gets and deadlines.
And so the mission went forward as
scheduled. Seventy-three seconds after it
launched, the O-rings did come undone, and
the shuttle broke into pieces. Two minutes
later, as their cabin hit the water, all aboard
were killed.
The lesson of the Challenger explosion—and
of the unheeded warnings leading up to
it—is not just to listen to engineers. It’s also
to make sure we approach important issues
through more than one prism, University of
Notre Dame ethics researcher Ann Tenbrun-
sel says.
Separating what an engineer would recom-
mend from what a manager would—rath-
er than examining the whole picture—is
compartmentalizing. And that leads to what
Tenbrunsel and her colleague Max Bazerman
call“ethical fading.”
The prism through which a dilemma is
viewed, the researchers find, can affect the
Increasing
Your Odds
Dispatches from the
Ethical Frontier
“People think that they’re acting
according to their values, but in
fact they’re not,”Tenbrunsel says.
“We find this across the spectrum
of people. Situational influenc-
es and psychological processes
contribute to us not living up to
even our own standards. We all
fall prey to this.”
Across the spectrum, re-
searchers say, we’re all prey
to thinking we’re more eth-
ical than we really are. The
good news is that there are
proactive steps businesses
can take to avoid common
pitfalls.
ethicalleadership.nd.edu 2

4. Acknowledge ethical illusions
The first step employees, leaders, and organizations need to take is acknowledging that they most likely
hold some illusions about their own ethical behavior. As the great ethicist and philosopher Sissela Bok
pointed out in her book, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life,“If we could rid ourselves of self-de-
ceit, we’d be capable of making more a moral decision.”
Be conscious of language
In one study of ethical behavior within law firms, Tenbrunsel found that attorneys were more likely to use
the term“judgment call”when describing an ethically dubious decision. The lesson is to take a hard look
at what euphemisms are being used at an organization. Is it cooking the books or“creative accounting?”
Firing or“right-sizing?”
Don’t compartmentalize ethics
We tend to divide business from personal life. And with the rise of corporate compliance officers, that’s
become even easier. Employees and managers can cast ethical decisions as the compliance department’s
decision, not theirs. Remind all employees that ethics are everyone’s responsibility.
Examine both formal and informal systems
Over and above hotlines, codes of conduct, and ethics trainings, informal forces such as pressure from
coworkers, supervisors, and top management can make a huge difference. In Tenbrunsel’s studies, these
informal systems explain 10 times as much of the observed misconduct in an organization as formal ones.
The takeaway: examine both, paying particularly close attention to departments that are isolated, bread-
winning, or perceived as untouchable.
Key
Points
Ann Tenbrunsel
outcome for the worse. One study showed
that people are more likely to lie after
being asked to think about what a business
decision entails than after considering what
makes an ethical one.“Business can create
a context in which ethical behavior is not as
likely to occur,”Tenbrunsel explains.
The researchers explain the ethical fading
phenomenon in their recent book Blind
Spots: Why We Fail To Do What’s Right and
What To Do About It. Ethical fading occurs
when people are so focused on other aspects
of a decision that its ethical implications fade
from view.
Based on their findings to date, Tenbrunsel
and her fellow researchers recommend these
approaches to avoiding ethical fading among
individuals and companies.
3ethicalleadership.nd.edu

5. TO THE
POINT
Google’s doing exactly that. At our 4th
Annual Forum, we caught up with Mary Kate
Stimmler, People Analytics expert at Goo-
gle with a PhD in organizational behavior.
Stimmler and her team work to understand
the entire lifecycle of a“Googler”—from
recruitment to compensation to promotions
and team dynamics—in order to develop the
best possible management system for the
tech titan.
As Mary Kate explains,“Every single manager
touches every person on their team. And if
you can improve how well someone manag-
es, how they take that position of authority
and how they provide strategy for their team,
then you get happier, healthier, more pro-
ductive and innovative employees. We asked
ourselves, how great would our company
be if we had only great managers?”Sounds
good, right?
Operating from the premise that the best
leaders are the best learners, the People
Analytics team decided that what manag-
ers really needed in order to improve was
the opportunity to get feedback from their
team. They designed a platform for regular
upward feedback for every manager with a
team of three or more people, and thus, the
Manager Feedback Survey (MFS) report was
born. Twice a year, employees complete an
anonymous survey about how their manager
performed on specific, actionable items, such
as providing career development coaching.
Each manager reviews his or her MFS report
and reflects on the data, then schedules a
conversation with the team to consider the
results. Stimmler notes,“We knew it had
to be conversational. Managers needed to
hear something out of the mouths of the
people they work with every day.”Through
dialogue with their teams, managers receive
not only a tool for better engagement with
their reports’data, but also a space in which
to get more actionable feedback items. For
example, if a manager is seeing that she is
micromanaging, she can say to her team
members,“OK, what does that look like? How
can I change that?”
The MFS report works not only to improve
Making
Feedback
Normal
Dispatches from the
Ethical Frontier
“Can I give you a little
feedback?”It’s something
we all hear or say from time
to time, and what follows
is often accompanied by
awkwardness and anxiety
on one or both ends of the
conversation. But what if we
could release the tension
and leverage feedback on a
more regular basis?
“We asked ourselves, how great
would our company be if we
had only great managers?”
ethicalleadership.nd.edu 4

6. Make it normal
Add clockwork to your feedback process and make it a regular, predictable part of the year. Google has
found that this consistency makes the process more comfortable for employees.
Make it conversational
Use the platform to understand how a manager could improve, and then have real, in-person conversa
tions to make the feedback more concrete, more impactful, and more effective.
Make it developmental
Emancipate the tool from evaluative processes, allowing employees to be more comfortable giving feed-
back and encouraging managers to be more open to receiving it.
5
Key
Points
managerial style; it also functions as a way to
empower employees. The People Analytics
team has found that these conversations
make it 50% more likely that employees feel
heard and believe that their feedback will
actually impact their manager’s behavior.
Mary Kate elaborates on the impact of the
reports:“For a moment once at least every
six months, the power barrier is lifted, and
people can give the feedback they want
to give to their managers confidentially
without fear of recourse and open up that
communication.”
Mary Kate notes three elements of the MFS
that have been critical to the success Goo-
gle has enjoyed in building their feedback
culture. First, it’s normalized. It happens
like clockwork every six months, making
it a part of the flow of the workplace. Sec-
ond, it’s conversational, promoting dialogue
between managers and their teams. Third,
it’s purely developmental. On this aspect,
Stimmler notes,“One of the things we don’t
do with our manager feedback is use it to
affect punitive action or compensation, and
we’ve reinforced that time and time again.”
Creating this safe space where people can
give feedback without worrying about the
consequences allows employees to be more
honest and realistic in their responses.
This third element of the tool also empha-
sizes the priority Google places on people.
Though the results could probably be quite
useful in compensation or promotion deci-
sions, the People Analytics team protects the
data in order to secure the purpose of the
survey: making better managers. By insisting
that the results be purely developmental, the
team enables Googlers to focus on learning
and growth rather than the results’impact
on their careers and compensation. This
method promotes communication and open
dialogue.
Google has enjoyed so much success with
the manager platform that they have begun
open-sourcing the tool. Currently, the State
of California is working with Google to adapt
the platform to its organization. Consider
adopting some of Google’s recommenda-
tions in your own approach to management
and feedback.
“For a moment once at least ev-
ery six months, the power barri-
er is lifted, and people can give
the feedback they want to give
to their managers confidentially
without fear of recourse and
open up that communication”
ethicalleadership.nd.edu

7. TO THE
POINT
In almost any discussion of business ethics,
things start off with a litany of transgres-
sions: Enron, Madoff, and on from there. We
seemingly can’t help but set the stage by
taking about what’s gone wrong. But in her
recent research Look at the Bright Side: A
Comparison of Positive and Negative Role
Models in Business Ethics Education, Denise
Baden of the Southampton Management
School suggests that this negative emphasis
sets a perception of business that may in fact
be reducing the likelihood of ethical behav-
ior among business students. And if this is
happening with students, it may be happen-
ing in corporate compliance trainings and
workshops as well.
Baden’s interest in the issue of negative and
positive examples in business ethics curricula
stemmed from the growing dissatisfaction
with the ethical effectiveness of business
school curriculum. Faced with the recent
ethical failings of businesses and the ensuing
dire consequences for the global economy,
many are calling for a reassessment of how
well business schools are educating their
students.
Knowing this, Baden designed an experiment
to test how negative and positive role mod-
els affect students’ethical behavior inten-
tions. The experiment tested two modules of
undergraduate business majors for 10 weeks,
with each group receiving positive role
models (PRMs) for 5 weeks and negative role
models (NRMs) for 5 weeks. After the 10 week
course, the students completed a survey on
the effects of the PRMs versus the NRMs on
their perceptions and beliefs.
The results? We need to be more positive
when teaching about ethics. Negative exam-
ples have their place, but without positive
role models, we could be not only failing to
teach ethical behavior, but actually increas-
ing unethical behavior.
Why Ethics
Education
Needs to
Stay
Positive
Dispatches from the
Ethical Frontier
This negative emphasis sets a
perception of business that may
in fact be reducing the likeli-
hood of ethical behavior among
business students. And if this is
happening with students, it may
be happening in corporate com-
pliance trainings and workshops
as well.
When designing ethics
curriculum, focusing on the
examples of failed ethics
could actually decrease
ethical behavior of students
and trainees.
ethicalleadership.nd.edu 6

8. We need to think about how we talk about ethics in business when we’re trying to foster more ethical
business leaders. Whether we’re training university students, MBAs, or employees, teaching only the un-
ethical side of business can end up perpetuating unethical behavior and silencing those who would speak
up if they felt like it would make a difference. In the words of Dr. Denise Baden, we must“walk a fine line
between making students aware of possible ethical pitfalls in business, without giving the impression that
unethical behavior is the norm.”
Key
Points
Denise Baden
Students who received PRMs were inspired,
empowered, and optimistic. They believed
that being ethical in business was possible,
they had ideas on how to do it, and they felt
compelled to do it. Their self-efficacy (sense
that what they did mattered) was higher, and
their descriptive norms about the business
world were more positive and ethical. Those
students who received the NRMs, on the
other hand, had much bleaker outcomes.
They were more aware of the consequences
of unethical behavior and formed stronger
injunctive norms against unethical behavior
than did the students who received PRMs,
but they also experienced reduced self-ef-
ficacy and formed descriptive normative
beliefs that business was inherently flawed,
and that they could do little to change that.
The two different role models interacted with
each other as well, with the PRMs softening
the cynicism produced by the NRMs and the
NRMs lessening the empowering impact of
the PRMs. In the end, the NRMs had a stron-
ger emotional impact, and therefore were
more affecting than the PRMs.
So, what do we take from this? According the
Baden’s framework, lower self-efficacy and
negative descriptive norms could mean that
the students who receive only NRMs just give
up on behaving ethically, or in the worst case,
may even engage in“defensive ethics”to
avoid being the sucker who follows the rules
and loses while everyone else cheats and
wins. Conversely, the students who get PRMs
will be more likely to take an ethical stand
because they know others have before and
they believe it might make a difference.
Negative examples have their
place, but without positive role
models, we could be not only
failing to teach ethical behavior,
but actually increasing unethi-
cal behavior.
Teaching only the unethical side
of business can end up perpetu-
ating unethical behavior and si-
lencing those who would speak
up if they felt like it would make
a difference.
7ethicalleadership.nd.edu

9. TO THE
POINT
How can an employer tell if someone is going
to behave ethically? Is it the way he thinks?
Her social demographics or beliefs? When at-
tempting to predict behavior, we oftentimes
give people hypothetical ethical dilemmas
and test them on how they cognitively work
through the issues. But recent research by
Taya Cohen, Assistant Professor of Organiza-
tional Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mel-
lon, suggests that knowing what people will
do comes less from knowing how they think
and more from knowing who they are.
During her presentation at the Notre Dame
Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership’s 2014
forum, Cohen explained that it’s more useful
for employers to get a sense of someone’s
personality when attempting to predict their
behaviors. Of note to employers are two of
Cohen’s variables: Counterproductive Work
Behavior (CWB) and Organizational Citizen-
ship Behavior (OCB). These two concepts
essentially boil down to behavior that harms
a workplace versus behavior that elevates a
workplace. An employee who demonstrates
CWB might show up late, belittle her cowork-
ers, or shirk blame for his errors, while an
employee who exhibits OCB may help train
a coworker, advise or mentor a new hire, or
volunteer for projects. Cohen found that,
regardless of other factors that might affect
workplace conduct (e.g. intention to leave
one’s job or interpersonal conflict at work),
one trait predicted these positive or negative
behaviors: something she calls“guilt prone-
ness.”
Cohen describes guilt proneness as a“pre-
disposition to experience negative feelings
about personal wrongdoing, even when the
wrongdoing is private.”The trait is especially
useful because it matters even when you take
social monitoring away: people with high
guilt proneness seem to have strong internal-
ized values, making them more likely to do
the right thing, whether or not they have an
audience. Cohen states,“public surveillance is
not required to prevent moral transgressions;
instead, their consciences guide them.”
Hiring for
Guilt:
How a
Simple Test
Might Help
You Hire
More
Ethical
Employees
Dispatches from the
Ethical Frontier
Knowing what people will do
comes less from knowing how
they think and more from know-
ing who they are.
Knowing that hiring ethical
people means building
a better organization,
what predictors can savvy
employers use to assess a
potential employee’s ethical
fiber?
ethicalleadership.nd.edu 8

10. As we try to predict and promote ethical behavior, we can’t afford to miss the importance of individual
character. When interviewing, companies should consider using character assessment tools. It could mean
the difference between strengthening your company from within and hiring a proverbial weak link.
Key
Points
Taya Cohen
This is good news to the employer looking to
hire. The guilt-prone employee doesn’t need
to be policed. She will act ethically because
of her character.
The even better news for employers is that
Cohen and her colleagues have developed
a simple, four-question test that can assess
a candidate’s guilt-proneness. The Guilt and
Shame Proneness (GASP) test gives inter-
viewees hypothetical situations in which
they act unethically but are not caught; for
example, keeping extra change that a clerk
mistakenly gives them or hiding the fact that
they spilled wine on a colleague’s new carpet.
It then asks them to imagine their likelihood
of feeling guilt about their actions on a scale
of 1 to 7, one being very unlikely and 7 being
very likely. The results are then tabulated into
a distribution of guilt proneness.
But this test was used in laboratory settings
where the participants’answers had no
consequences to them. So the question is:
Could the test still be useful in a high-stakes
personnel selection process? Recent research
from Cohen suggests that it could be. When
she and her team incorporated the GASP
test into intensive psychological testing for
applicants to public safety jobs in Colorado,
they found that though the results were
skewed toward the higher end of the scale,
the job applicants whose guilt proneness
scores were in the lowest tenth percentile in
the sample were deemed unfit for employ-
ment by other psychological and behavioral
measures. So, in pressurized settings, though
people overrepresented their guilt prone-
ness, the distribution was still telling.
Though this research must be expanded
and repeated before it will be at the stage of
implementation in personnel selection pro-
cesses, the evidence is encouraging that the
GASP test may be a new and important tool
for vetting applicants.
The guilt-prone employee
doesn’t need to be policed. She
will act ethically because of her
character.
9ethicalleadership.nd.edu

11. TO THE
POINT
Corporate values can be crucial elements of a
company’s ability to encourage ethical deci-
sion-making in its employees, or they can just
be words on a page. The difference has less
to do with how dynamic and comprehensive
your trainings are and more to do with the
neuroscience of memory.
We intentionally structured our 4th Annual
Forum to emphasize experiences, group
sharing, and social dialogue. With guidance
from Chris Adkins—Executive Director of the
Undergraduate Program at the College of
William & Mary’s Mason School of Business
and NDDCEL board member—we scrapped
the usual format of speakers and presenta-
tions, opting instead for a somewhat un-
conventional tactic: storytelling. This choice
augmented our discussion and led to the
creation of our vignette-based deliverable.
Our experience with our own event was a
kind of beta test for a message that we’ve
seen frequently in our research: storytelling is
the superior way to teach.
There are two neuroscience-backed reasons
to use story-telling over memorization in
teaching your values. The first is that we
make sense of new experiences through
the lens of previous experiences, both our
own episodes and the episodes of others. In
other words, we tend to call upon what we’ve
learned through personal experiences and
stories than on rote knowledge. The second
is that stories provide an evocative, sensory,
and meaningful sense of a concept whereas
words and paragraph descriptions often lack
specificity and emotional impact. Moreover,
concepts mean different things to different
people, and thus can lead to miscommunica-
tion. Stories offer a richness that helps clarify
concepts.
Adkins explains that we are wired to look for
patterns when making sense of experiences,
connecting the present situation to episodes
we have had ourselves or observed in others.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio highlights
that our past experiences are tagged with
emotions, and such“marking”helps us
process our current reality. If the present
moment matches past episodes tagged with
the emotion of fear, then we are likely to
process the current experience through the
lens of fear.
This phenomenon relates to the divide be-
tween two types of memory: semantic and
The Power
of
Storytelling
Dispatches from the
Ethical Frontier
Trainings are ubiquitous
in the corporate world. In
addition to learning about
their actual jobs, employees
go through trainings on
their organizations’poli-
cies, procedures, norms,
strategies, and of course,
values. But not all learning
is created equal. When it
comes to impacting behav-
ior, consider leveraging the
good old-fashioned power
of story.
ethicalleadership.nd.edu 10

12. Leverage the power of storytelling
There are bound to be legends and exemplars at your organization, stories that get told in break rooms
and on elevator rides about people who have exemplified leadership, values, or integrity. Harness these
stories, crafting them into teachable moments that reinforce your organization’s values, making your com-
mitments more salient to your employees.
Use leaders’experiences to communicate values
Have senior leaders talk about ethical dilemmas they have faced, but not in a way that eulogizes them.
Instead, encourage these leaders to share their thought processes during the decision: why was the choice
difficult, what were the feared consequences, and were they tempted to make a choice they knew would
be wrong? By giving employees the process of making an ethical decision from the perspective of a leader,
you create a cultural context in your organization where difficult issues are more easily discussed.
Promote stories at all levels
Reinforce the notion of storytelling as a highly effective method for engagement and reflection across the
organization. Use stories to unite cultures around core values in mergers, across different functions of your
organization, and among your employees at every level. As stories are shared, individuals are prompted to
reflect on their own situation and look for connections across the organization.
Build an ability to make the complex simple through storytelling
Stories can capture the complexity of situations, and yet can provide a powerful and simple way to com-
municate what matters most. Foster in your leaders the habit of communicating important values through
simple, concise episodes that clearly illustrate the core values of the organization.
Key
Points
episodic. Semantic memory is comprised
of facts, general meanings, and concepts.
Values, such as integrity and honesty, or
codes of ethics, are ideas residing in seman-
tic memory. Episodic memory captures our
experiences, either those in which we were
the main actor or those we have observed.
The distinction is important to behavioral
ethics because ethical dilemmas are often
personal and emotional—when you’re
making an ethical decision, you’re not going
to your semantic memory, combing through
values statements or learned codes. You’re
pattern matching your current situation to
past experiences.
Stories also offer a better chance at convey-
ing your values properly. When he facilitates
conversations with executives about their
organizations, Adkins begins by asking them
to think of a story about a person at their
company who exemplifies the“organization
at its best”(the company values) and then
share the episode with their group. He calls
this method the exemplar exercise, and he
says that it is powerful because it asks not
about a specific value, but about someone
or some action that exemplifies a value. The
group conversations have immediate energy,
with people sharing and building on each
others’comments. Adkins notes,“The stories
provide richer definitions of what the orga-
nizational values really mean and reveal how
individuals see that value in action inside the
organization.”By telling a story of an employ-
ee refusing to sell a product he suspected
to be faulty and incurring a cost in order to
ensure that the product was functional, you
much more powerfully represent a compa-
ny priority than if you just list“quality”on a
sheet of core values. One C-suite executive of
a multinational insurance corporation shared
with us that his organization avoids even
writing down their corporate values, opting
instead to have keystone stories that illus-
trate each value.
No matter your company’s principles or
values, consider employing this method of
learning when training employees. As Adkins
summarized,“Stories help us see if our values
on paper are truly values in practice.” Wheth-
er done formally or informally, in new-em-
ployee orientation or over a coffee break,
employing this strategy of experiential learn-
ing will help solidify the culture you’re trying
to build in the employees that will ultimately
live it.
Chris Adkins
11ethicalleadership.nd.edu

13. BREAKTHROUGH
BEHAVIORSIn March, we brought together
40 corporate leaders and a few
hand-picked scholars for an
intimate, practical discussion
about“breakthrough
behaviors”—ways that
successful organizations have
generated ethical leadership
from unexpected angles.
The concept behind our
fourth annual forum was
that institutional habits and
goals can naturally align an
organization, allowing it to
flourish not only ethically, but
also across the enterprise.
We framed the discussion
around three areas: process,
purpose, and people. Experts
from varied industries kicked
off each topic with their
insights. Among them were
Google’s Mary Kate Stimmler,
a people analytics expert; Jim
Quigley, CEO emeritus of Deloitte;
General Denny Reimer, retired Army
Chief of Staff; Giving Voice to Values
founder, Mary Gentile; Keith Darcy,
one of the godfathers of the ethics and
compliance field; and Perry Minnis,
who headed up ethics at Alcoa during
Paul O’Neill’s legendary focus on safety.
Our goal was to offer the participants
a space in which they could create
personalized, concrete takeaways
based on the ideas exchanged
throughout the event. We wanted
them to look inside their own
organizations, apply what they heard,
and use it when they got back to their
desks. One way we encouraged this
was by emphasizing stories, since our
brains best remember things that
are shared socially—the emotional
and relational. The group recounted
anecdotes and described exemplars
from their own organizations,
identifying common threads between
and building upon one another’s
experiences.
Here’s a sampling of ideas and
action items that emerged from the
presentations, group discussions, and
informal conversations throughout
Deloitte University’s campus.
March 23-24, 2015
Deloitte University
“A must-attend
event. It presents
a holistic view
of culture,
compliance,
and ethics from
the business
and academic
perspectives.
Valuable
information
packaged into
the perfect
amount of time.”
ethicalleadership.nd.edu 12

14. A Focus on People
A Clear Purpose
When communicating values and
ethics to employees, acknowledge the
reality of their context, come to them
from a place of respect for their values,
and then create thought experiments.
Talk about hypothetical situations,
ask them what they would do when
confronted with an ethical decision in a
certain set of circumstances.By freeing
them from the constraints of their
immediate realities, you’re giving them
the space to be creative. You tap into
their aspirations.
Raising issues with peers when you’re
a senior leader is tricky—maintaining
congenial relationships and balancing
egos can leave you knowing what you
need to do, but not how to do it. It’s
worth thinking about as an executive
team and setting norms for those
conversations.
Learn how to listen for employees
voicing their values to you. Acknowledge
that the conversation will be difficult.
Show gratitude for their courage, and
make action plans to take what they say
into account.
Emphasize team impact over individual
performance. By framing success
as a team pursuit, you foster group
accountability and safeguard against
exceptionalism and siloing, two fertile
grounds for ethical breaches.
As a manager approaching employee
feedback and leadership, ask the
question,“What do you need from
me to succeed?”Looking at the other
side of the equation, make sure your
employees believe that their feedback
will make a difference. If you can gain
your employees’trust that what they say
will matter, odds are they will be more
honest, more thoughtful, and ultimately
more engaged.
Frame your company values as
participatory. You’ll create a sense of
team accountability that promotes
agency and ultimately unifies the
entire enterprise.
Adopt the Aristotelian idea of
flourishing when approaching
ethics and compliance. Instead of
focusing on avoiding bad behavior in
employees, complement compliance
by encouraging them to be their best
selves.
Beware of malicious compliance, or
people giving you exactly what you
ask for and nothing more.Rather
than being rules-focused, be more
inclusive—help the people who live
the values shape the rules.
A culture of ethical behavior must be
led by people committed to ethical
principles for their own sake. It can’t be
solely about avoiding a lawsuit or the
money you make by having a good
reputation.
Resist the temptation to create new
vision with each new leader. Build
on what was great about the former
program rather than changing course
and starting from scratch.
The Latin root of the word profession
shows that it comes from the idea of
“committing to something bigger than
oneself.”When we ask people what their
profession is, do we ever say,“What are
you committed to that’s bigger than
yourself?”Recognize the obligations
associated with being a professional.
When Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski
led Team USA to victory in the 2012
Olympics, he had a bunch of high
performers. The task of getting them
on the same page was an uphill battle.
He got it done by having the players
themselves make a set of commitments.
He didn’t call them rules. He asked,
what are the standards we all want to
uphold? He created ownership in the
team by having the players draw up the
list.
Ask yourself: What does it mean to
have your company’s name on your
business card? What does it mean to be
part of this organization? What are your
obligations as a member of this team?
Compliance can then be linked to a
sense of belonging and representation
rather than rule-following.
“A great
combination
of high-ranked
and experienced
managers,
academics and
storytellers
discussing ethics
and values in a
very practical way.”
13ethicalleadership.nd.edu

15. A Good Process
There are two kinds of memory:
semantic memory, or things you’ve
memorized, and episodic memory, the
experiences that have taught you to
make sense of your environment. When
you’re making an ethical decision, you’re
not drawing on your semantic memory
of values statements or learned codes.
You’re pattern-matching. So reconsider
how you’re teaching people ethics,
and recognize the importance of
experiences over learned knowledge.
Leverage the power of storytelling.
There are bound to be company
legends and exemplars, stories told
on the elevator or during company
lunches. Harness these stories,
crafting them and articulating them
to showcase the crucial values of the
company. They are teachable moments
that reinforce what your organization is
all about.
Feedback shapes behavior best if it is
both timely and accurate. This way, it
can be used to develop intuitions into
how to deal with ethical questions.
Critically analyze your feedback system
and make sure it meets both criteria—
you’ll be doing your organization a
huge favor.
Retire the strategy of thinking your way
into a new way of acting. Instead, focus
on acting your way into a different way
of thinking. Don’t start by trying to
grasp or teach higher-order concepts
of integrity and honor. Concrete action
around your values can be much more
impactful than mental frameworks and
semantic lessons.
Don’t just put your values in writing on
posters and business cards. Take a
page from one CEO’s book and don’t
write them down at all. Instead, tie
each value to a story that came out of
your organization of when someone
exemplified it best.
When you want to change a behavior
in your company, tap into a set of
habits employees already have and
translate it to your new goal. One
legal firm, for example, improved its
internal operations by appealing to its
attorneys’skill of client care, adopting
the maxim:“We treat our colleagues in
our fir the same way we treat our best
client.”
Have senior leaders talk about ethical
dilemmas they faced, but not in a way
that makes them heroes. Encourage
them to share their thought processes
during the decision: why was the
choice difficult; what were the feared
consequences; were they tempted
to make a choice they knew would
be wrong? By giving employees the
process of making an ethical decision
from the perspective of a leader,
you create a cultural context in your
organization where difficult issues are
more easily discussed.
Understand the power of a learning
experience versus a training experience.
We can be so focused on evaluations
and performance reviews that we
starve our employees of true learning
opportunities, spaces where they
can develop without the threat of
consequences.
Pay attention to growth mindsets—
look for openness to feedback and
feedback-seeking. You want high-
potential leaders to be hungry for
feedback, to have an appetite for
growth. (And hey, you might want to
seek it yourself!)
Feedback sessions can be awkward.Try
to combat this mood and make feedback
normal.Treat it like a conversation, make
it systematic, give it a regular rhythm,
like clockwork. By creating these habits
of feedback, you normalize the process,
making it a richer experience for both
employees and managers.
Script difficult conversations. Having
something tangible around which
to organize talking points gives you
structure and steadies the interaction.
Create an expectation with your
employees that your communications
are going to be valuable. Make them
believe that it’s going to be insightful,
thoughtful, and interactive. Be brief,
and put power in your words.
Ask people you train how they define
success at the end of the training rather
than deciding for them what effective
training should be.Why not start with,
“How would you consider this to be a
useful?You’re giving up time that you
could be doing something else, how
would this be useful to you at the end?”
Build an ability to make the complex
simple. Achieve that level of clarity
required so each communication
can be short and direct. This will take
immense effort at times, but the
salience of the
final product
will greatly
increase the
odds of your
employees
grasping and
acting on the
information.
ethicalleadership.nd.edu 14
Our forum bore fruit. These items are a buffet of sorts—tidbits arising not only from planned remarks from speakers and
selected experts—but also from the conversations that naturally arose throughout the event, often between two previous
strangers from different industries. How could they resonate in your organization? What impact could you make? What
relationships and resources could you leverage? Where will you go to start the process?
“It’s amazing
what you can
accomplish
in 12 hours.”