Let’s put relationship, trust and positive reputation at the heart of legal, compliance and HR
Why is the aspect of integrity
so important in today’s business?
It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation and only one bad one to lose it. An ethical misbehaviour in today’s high speed business environment can ruin the reputation of your organization, can make your stock price drop, trigger contract termination, and prevent you from attracting the right talent. Agreements between contractual parties, are, at the core, ways of formalizing a relationship. What kind of relationships do you wish for your business?
Where there is integrity, there will be trust. Where there is trust, there will be an atmosphere for success.
Sadhguru
A relationship oriented business climate based on integrity translates itself in 3 major assets for the successful organization:
Sustainable partnerships, built on trust
Good agreements make good friends. Today’s organization needs legal agreements and business practices to be emotionally intelligent, interest and values based, trust generating, agile, clear on expectations, balanced and in plain language. The result is a more equitable, principled marketplace, strengthened by sustainable partnerships that are built on trust.
A work culture of trust, openness and caring
Compared with people at low-trust companies, people at high-trust companies report: 106% more energy at work, 76% more engagement 74% , less stress, 50% higher productivity, 40% less burnout, 29% more satisfaction with their lives, 13% fewer sick days.
-Source: Harvard Business Review
A reduction of company risk + building of a stellar reputation
Companies conducting their business ethically attract business partners who share the organization’s commitment to ethics in business. This in turn draws more investors toward the business, generates higher profits, builds customer loyalty, enhances the company’s reputation, avoids legal issues and retains good staff. Leading to important competitive advantages.
What are organizational ethics?
The term “ethics” is often referred to as doing the right thing, when no one else is watching – even when doing the wrong thing is legal.
In organizational or business ethics this takes the form of the values, principles, and standards that guide the individual and group behaviour of the people in an organization. Business ethics are set up to steer and manage activities and business situations to proactively avoid harmful behaviour. It’s an important factor in the prevention of corruption, quite quitting etc..
While there is no checkbox for ethical leadership as it is an ongoing, individual and organizational journey, ethical leaders have the following beliefs: their purpose is to create value for others, how they treat people matters, they must take responsibility, they value a moral grounding above everything, they want to be proactive, they want to serve as role models, they want to build a better world, they embrace the learning journey and they will enjoy a competitive advantage.
Some keywords in a comprehensive, efficient, forward looking, and sustainable ethical framework: code of conduct, conflict of interest, gifts & invitations, due diligence, whistleblowing, human rights, inclusion, harassment, supplier code, conscious contracting, corporate governance, CSR, trust, accountability, transparency, fairness, responsibility, risk management, compliance, UN sustainable development goals, ESG, sustainability, vigilance plan, anti-bribery, values-based change, business culture.
We must think beyond ourselves to make intentional, ethical choices. How skilled is your organization in detecting and proactively dealing with ethical issues and concerns that arise ?
Would you like a hands-on, pragmatic and reliable approach around integrity?
From a solid in-house legal and compliance foundation in various organizations and with strong coaching skills,
Celine will work with your organization giving equal importance both to ethical issues and risks and to ethical goals and opportunities.
- With an relationship-oriented legal approach assuring legal accuracy
- With a pragmatic compliance approach that serves effectiveness
- With a HR leadership attitude that ensures everybody is on board
- With a business goal in mind aiming that the business reaps the benefits of the efforts made
- Including authentic, clear and persuasive communication
- Customized to the actual needs of your organization
A range of integrated services under the umbrella of coaching, consulting, implementation and project management is available to your organization’s needs.
What are the most pressing ethics needs, the highest ethical risks long-term goals in your company? Each organization is unique. We dive deep and learn about the organization’s culture and governance and work in order to create the desired results. What follows is a set of concrete examples of services your organization may wish to get help with. If you have other requests, feel free to ask.
Coaching
- Organize a workshop around an integrity related topic
- Coach executives in ethical dilemma’s
- Facilitate values-based change
- Empower teams in integrity related communication
- Assist in integrity investigations
- Support & coach victims
- Mediative coaching
Consulting
- Deriving existing organizational ethics principles & identifying organizational values and priorities
- A governance scan on the effectiveness of your current framework
- Explicating the core ethical questions and risks that the organization faces
- Propose an ethics roadmap
Implementation
- Implement new legislation
- Draft good and clear policies, procedures, contract clauses and reports
- Create guiding materials for the business
- Operationalize organizational ethics principles and policies
- Train teams on policies + risk awareness
Project management
- A combination of various of the foregoing services
- Harmonisation of the existing company material and initiatives
- Start-up of a new compliance initiative
- Manage another integrity project
Found or didn’t find what you were looking for?
FAQ
Let’s turn the question around: what happens when working in silos?
An organization with a lack of ethical awareness runs the risk of entering into unbalanced or illegal contracts, which will result in disrupted commercial relationships. A compliance policy that is far from the business and does not take into account the people who have to apply it will meet resistance from employees and lose efficiency. A legal department that is not supported by a strong (compliance) framework of what can and cannot be done within the organization will have a much weaker position both in negotiating with external parties and internally for monitoring business risks. Ethics is therefore not a standalone topic pertaining to either legal, HR or a compliance department.
In order to assure the respect of organizational ethics throughout the organization, a wholistic approach to practicing law is required, bringing in harmony, values, creativity, curiosity & compassion, besides an excellent understanding of the business.
Celine has gained 20 years of professional experience in various companies, firms, sectors and departments within the legal sector, international organizations and especially in the corporate world. In 2017 she decided to give up her function of legal director in a NYSE company. She took a break of more than 1 year to take a new direction in life based on living in integrity with her own truth. She embarked on a journey of deep inner exploration. This led her to the commitment to integrate her new perspectives on life into her career, thus becoming an extension of her life-purpose. She has worked on various integrity-based projects since then, in on of which she took up an ethics & compliance role in an international energy group for a duration of almost 3 years. During this time she immersed herself into many different aspects of this vast subject.
