By Adam Turteltaub

Few corporate scandals begin in isolation with one person perpetrating a crime that absolutely no one else in the entire organization knew anything about.  More often, people saw something and feared speaking up.

For Josh Toas, Vice President of Compliance and Chief Compliance Officer for the Research Foundation for the State University of New York (SUNY), compliance is about more than the compliance team being willing to say “no” when it sees something wrong.  It’s about the entire organization feeling just as empowered.

The challenge, he reports, is that it is too easy for people to hold their tongue.  Employees either don’t know how to frame the conversation, fear retribution, wait until a decision has already been made, or until they are angry.  Many also feel it just isn’t worth it.  They want to just get along or believe that they are not paid enough to take the risks inherent in saying no to people in power.

To meet this challenge Josh offers several pieces of advice for the compliance team and the workforce as a whole.  These include avoiding confrontations when already angry, not sweating the small stuff, and helping people realize that everyone makes mistakes.

Listen in to learn more about how to handle confrontations professionally, and how to teach your workforce to do so as well.