Making a pitch for compliance: The great chase for stakeholder engagement

Speakers and attendees at Compliance Week’s Ethics & Compliance Summit in Boston agreed: as stewards of their company’s corporate culture, a significant challenge is chasing stakeholder engagement.

“I’m not in sales,” one panelist joked ruefully. A director of compliance policies and regulatory change, she was responsible for revamping her technology company’s code of conduct. She proudly called it her baby. But the point of the panel on which she sat was not about how to craft a code of conduct–it was about how to sell it. How to make it feel palatable and real to diverse stakeholders. Even if a compliance officer is not a salesperson, she must invoke the talents of one. It’s her job to inspire buy-in from stakeholders beholden to the company’s ethical standards of behavior. Selling ethics is the invisible labor ladled onto a compliance officer’s already full plate.

It’s not an easy ask. Driving ethics in an organization is a perpetual process with no definitive endpoint.