Nicole Rose (nicolerose@createtraining.com.au), Director of Sydney-based Create Training, and Jason Meyer (jason@leadgood.org), President of LeadGood LLC in Princeton, New Jersey, USA, are cofounders of the Eight Mindsets Initiative.
Congratulations on your new role!
Some quarter-century into the maturation of corporate compliance programs, your remit covers more risk areas and training topics than ever. Your program is speaking to additional and increasingly diverse audiences: line producers, knowledge workers, middle managers, salespeople, executives, even third-party contractors and suppliers, many of whom are scattered across the globe.
You have rolled up your sleeves and embraced the regulators’ demands for that all-important “culture of compliance.” And when it comes to one of your primary weapons in building, managing, and demonstrating this culture (i.e., your training and communications), you will recall from the first part of this article series that it is mission-critical for all your messaging to be salient—tailored to and resonant with each of your different audiences.[1]
Meanwhile, the post-pandemic workplace has only expanded the demand and desire for virtual forms of training. Technologies, virtual working, and social channels both internal and external have given you more channels for communication than ever before. This means more opportunities for messaging, but it also means more challenges, as each format and channel demand their own kind of content for effectiveness.
Even more, the “Great Resignation” suggests employee engagement is lower than ever, with teammates persisting in doing those things you are telling them not to do. And oh, by the way, have you seen this year’s numbers? You will need to implement that new initiative without a budget increase, again.
The reality of compliance, risk, and ethics leadership is requiring you to use all your creativity, insight, ingenuity, passion, and optimism to continually innovate something new and exciting despite a shortage of time, money, and other resources. In short, you have to make more with less.
So what is your new role exactly? You’re an entrepreneur, of course!
It’s about mindset, not money
We don’t just say this as service providers watching from the outside, but also as professionals who have worked in organizations heading up risk, legal, and compliance teams. Jason has long worked for and represented entrepreneurial companies as a lawyer and a compliance officer. Nicole has done extensive work in financial crime with leading Australian banks. With this background, we know that to provide the best possible outcomes for our clients, we need to effectively become part of their team. So we don’t just feel your pain—we live it.
But we’re also serial entrepreneurs in the traditional sense: We’ve founded, led, and continue to run small businesses within the compliance, risk, and legal space. And here’s what we’ve come to learn from our view as “outside insiders”: There’s not much difference between the way we must work and the way the most successful corporate compliance leaders must work.
“Entrepreneur” is no longer a job title reserved to the start-up! Leaders, aspiring leaders, and—indeed—everyone with an interest in developing an in-house career in compliance are now entrepreneurs. You manage budgets to the last half cent, negotiate priorities to align with business goals, and do a mountain of behind-the-scenes public relations work not reflected in your key performance indicators. You’re wearing all the hats, and you are still delivering unbelievable results and changing your company’s world. This is what other entrepreneurs do.
So own the challenges you must face and have fun with them. Ultimately, more money and technology won’t get you out of this mess since your problems are ones of expanding demands against finite resources. A fundamental part of the solution is how you look at your challenges and consider how to tackle them. The solution, in short, is the right mindset.
From our decades of experience facing the inherent challenges of compliance from in-house as consultants and as leaders of start-ups, we have derived a set of eight mindsets that lead to effectiveness, success, and satisfaction in training and communications. Where Part 1 of this series focuses on the mindset of the learner (i.e., how to make the content “stick” through salience and empathy), this article will explore the many virtues of another mindset: that of the entrepreneur.
What can the entrepreneur mindset do for those of us in compliance and ethics programs, even in very large organizations? Let’s break it down.
