Enjoy this series of shorts on Leadership from Jim.

​This issue looks at one of your most powerful competitive advantages.

The headline in the Wall Street Journal page one article reads: “Wells Fargo Bankers, Chasing Bonuses, Overcharged Clients.” Ignore for a moment whether they did it, and did it for the reason in the headline. Consider the scale of damage to any business, let alone one that has a trust reputation headed for the basement. Despite our best logic, our emotions scream, “If they did it to those people, they’ll do it to me, and I won’t know until it’s too late.” Do you want your customers spiraling that way about you and your business?

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Here is a short lesson for Chief Financial Officers from athletes. In most sports, like business, success is measured in degrees and is often the culmination of many small victories and small failures. For example, in American football, the cornerback – a player whose main job is to defend against the forward pass by the opposing team – fails over 65% of the time, the percentage of forward passes completed in Professional Football. How do cornerbacks thrive – the best make over USD 30 million/year – when their success rate is less than 35%?

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Developing self-awareness is important work. It is not easy. Most work to better understand ourselves and become better leaders isn’t easy. This is what makes it significantly important.

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Since the beginning of the new millennium, it seems that at least once a week something appears in the news that another person or organization has been found to have lied about their credentials, the finances of their company, or committed a crime that resulted from some type of dishonest behavior. It makes you wonder why we do not see more examples of people stepping up and exposing the crimes or dishonest behavior while the acts are being committed and not waiting until after the behavior is discovered. But very quickly I remember why prevention does not happen!

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I. Why the need for “Straight Talk”?

Building an ethical corporate culture requires more than admonishing employees to do the right thing. Companies need to focus on the specific skills that create a positive and open work environment. From our experience, in most organizations it is poor communication that poses the greatest risk to integrity, while cultures in which employees feel free to raise issues issues tend to be ones that maintain higher levels of integrity. A lack of open communication in an organization can have serious consequences. Confusion and lack of awareness, employee isolation, a drop in productivity, a perceived lack of fairness or potential harassment issues, and fear of retaliation all can result when leaders and managers fail to take appropriate measures to promote transparency and openness

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