The leadership of a firm plays a pivotal role in ensuring that its people act with honesty and integrity. It’s often summed up as setting the right ‘tone from the top’ but what is that made up of? What is your existing tone like? And how can you go about improving it?
Setting the right tone, and then maintaining it, is not always an easy task. It involves a number of different elements, applied over the short term and reinforced over the long term. Here are a few points to think about:
- Do your board reports track measures of ethical risk?
- Do you recognise and reward good ethical behaviour?
- Are your senior leaders seen as role models for honesty and integrity?
Tone from the top can’t be left to chance. With over 20 years of working with boards and management teams, I am ideally positioned to guide your leadership team along a programme to raise that tone in a managed and embedded fashion. I help you see beyond the usual flurry of short term actions, to a clear set of robust and consistent stages for achieving the right ethical tone.
Duncan is an independent adviser on business ethics, with a particular focus on the insurance and financial planning sectors. He worked in insurance for 18 years and has been an ethics adviser for 11 years. He's a Chartered Insurance Practitioner.