They were in a state of deep shock.

How could something so shocking happen in Germany’s largest corporation, and to one of its most iconic brands?

On episode 28 of the Leading Transformational Change podcast, I have the privilege of speaking with Hiltrud Werner about Volkswagen's journey from shock - to shame - to change, after the diesel emissions scandal.

Hiltrud is head of Integrity and Legal Affairs and a part of the Volkswagen Management Board.

We talk about:

- Why it was vital to make the whole organization take ownership and not merely blame a few bad apples.

- How Volkswagen is working to create a speak-up culture, and why they needed to rethink their hierarchical model to decrease the distance between employees and leadership.

- How to drive change in a global organization with more than 600.000 employees.

- How the self-image at the company had to change to be willing to listen, learn and change, and the importance of practicing courageous humility.

- How they developed an Integrity Index to assess change and success.

- Why compliance doesn't have a finish line.

What distinguishes a great culture, and how do we achieve it?

How can we avoid hiring narcissistic leaders that corrupt culture?

Jennifer Chatman, Paul J. Cortese Distinguished Professor of Management at Berkeley Haas School of Business and a world-renowned corporate culture researcher, has focused her career on how leaders can leverage culture for business impact.

Recently she also published a highly publicized study on the destructive impact of narcissist leaders on corporate culture.

On Episode 27 of the Leading Transformational Change podcast, I talk to Jennifer about:

- Why culture needs to be strong, strategic, adaptive, and healthy.

- The three keys to distinguish between visionary and narcissist leaders.

- How narcissism hurts culture and how to heal it.

- The 4C's that can create a great culture.

- Why leaders cannot abdicate their culture responsibility.

- How to continually assess your culture.

#corporateculture #culturechange #cultureassessment #leadership #narcissism #corporatevalues #adaptability

How do you overcome your ethical blindspots?

Ann Tenbrunsel, Professor of Business Ethics at Notre Dame, has researched why we believe we are more ethical than we are, why that is a serious problem for every organization, and what we can do about it.

This is vital for every organization that wants to lead with values.

On episode 26 of the Leading Transformational Change podcast, I talk to Ann about:

-How ethical fading can remove ethics and corporate values from the decision making process.

-Why we need to dispel the myth of being a "good organization".

-How we often put too much trust in our formal system - our corporate values or codes of conduct, and overlook the informal system that has ten times more influence on observed misconduct.

-How whatever your employees perceive to be what's rewarded in your organization will ultimately drive behavior.

-How moral licensing can make us hide behind a noble mission or good values and, as a result, become more open to unethical behavior.

-Why and how we can assess our leadership and organizations to get a better understanding of how ethical we really are.

#integrity #corporateethics #ethics #corporateculture #values

"I think I’ve got an idea for another study. I think we should talk about how we lie in the Army”

Anna & Michaela share their learnings, building up ethics, and compliance at the Telia company in the wake of a corruption scandal.  

Michaela Ahlberg is a lawyer with over thirty years of experience working with ethics & compliance programs at several multinational companies and is currently the Chief Ethics & Compliance Officer at Getinge. Anna Romberg is an anti-corruption, compliance, and corporate governance expert who has deployed ethics and compliance programs in global organizations. Anna and Michaela worked together to establish ethics and compliance in the Telia Company after a major corruption scandal, Michaela as the Chief Ethics & Compliance Officer and Anna as the Global Anti-Corruption Program Lead.  

Together they have authored The Grey Zone: A Practical Guide to Corporate Conduct, Compliance, and Business Ethics.

Richard Bistrong shares his story - from being a successful Vice President at a Law Enforcement and Defense company to being sentenced for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, going undercover for the FBI, and finally to prison. 

Today Richard speaks and advises leaders, HR, and compliance professionals on ethics and compliance challenges. 

We talk about:  

As the CEO of Front-Line Anti-Bribery, Richard consultants and speaks on bribery, ethics, and compliance issues at institutions such as the World Bank, The International Anti-Corruption Academy, and global multinationals. Learn more about Richard’s work here: https://www.richardbistrong.com/

Max Bazerman, Jesse Isidor Strauss Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, takes us through four key aspects of ethical leadership, based on his new book - Better, Not Perfect.

Max shares how research on decision making can help give better output on philanthropy, why we need to make wise trade-offs to decrease waste and how we can all be a part of disrupting corruption. The key is our moral obligation to notice and not close our eyes when we see signs of corruption in our organizations, industries or communities. 

Max drives the message home with stories from the pharmaceutical and auditing industries, as well as companies like Amazon, Theranos and Enron. 

Max is a frequent Harvard Business Review contributor and has authored a number of books including The Power of Experiments (with Michael Luca), The Power of Noticing, Judgment in Managerial Decision Making (with Don Moore), and Blind Spots (with Ann Tenbrunsel). 

His latest book, Better, Not Perfect: A Realist's Guide to Maximum Sustainable Goodness just came out.

Rob is the former Chief Ethics Officer at Airbnb. A role he took on after nearly 4 years as Airbnb’s General Counsel. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School. Rob worked for 14 years with the U.S. Justice Department, including 10 years as an Assistant United States Attorney. He is the recipient of the Justice Department’s John Marshall Award for litigation, and the CIA’s Outstanding Service Medallion. In 1999, Rob moved to California to become eBay’s third attorney and was later promoted to Vice President of a newly created Trust and Safety department. He worked at several other companies in Silicon Valley before joining Airbnb in 2016. During his time at Airbnb he developed a popular interactive employee program, Integrity Belongs Here, to help drive ethics throughout the culture at the company. His highly relevant new book “Intentional Integrity: How Smart Companies Can Lead an Ethical Revolution” is available for purchase!

In this episode of Leading Transformational Change, Rob shares how a conversation with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, about the risks of ethical scandals, led to them to devise a strategy to build integrity into the culture of the company. Rob takes us through a six-part strategy for any organization, that wants to be intentional about integrity, and gives us lots of helpful examples along the way. He challenges every leader to put integrity on the agenda and decide what kind of company they want to become.

Mary Gentile is the Professor of Practice at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, and senior adviser at the Aspen Institute Business & Society Program. She is the creator and director of Giving Voice to Values, a pioneering business curriculum for values-driven leadership, which has been featured in publications such as, Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and piloted in over 1200 business schools and organizations globally. Mary is the author of the award-winning Giving Voice To Values: How To Speak Your Mind When You Know What's Right. In her ten-year tenure at Harvard Business School, Mary was one of the principal architects of the school’s Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Responsibility curriculum.

In this episode of Leading Transformational Change, Mary shares how the Enron scandal and a self-defense course made her rethink the way ethics was taught in business school and led to the Giving Voice to Values experiment. She realized that we do not merely need ways of theoretically discerning the ethical course of action based on philosophical models, but knowing what is the right thing to do, how would we actually go about doing it? Mary shares the main reasons why we do not voice our values in the business world and how we can build a framework for doing it in a thoughtful and strategic way. She shares practical examples of how the Giving Voice to Values framework has been implemented in companies like McKinsey and Unilever and why it needs to be a part of the leadership development strategy and not merely an HR issue. 

Joan Lurie is a development psychologist and one of Australia’s leaders in systemic change & culture, known from her expert commentary in the media on organizational culture. With over 20 years of experience both as an internal change leader in organizations and as a consultant, she founded Orgonomix in 2008 with the mission to help leaders and organizations be free from the systemic patterns keeping them stuck. Joan has developed ‘Orgonomics’ – a proprietary systemic methodology, designed to help top-tier leaders fundamentally transform their businesses and thrive in the ‘gig economy’. She works with the CEOs of some of the country’s largest businesses.

In this episode of Leading Transformational Change, Joan helps us understand how a systems thinking lens can help us bring about organizational change easier and faster. To make it practical, we use a case study to explore how this would apply to an organization struggling with a lack of innovation and internal conflict. Joan shows that, as leaders, we can never see ourselves as outside the issue with the role of fixing the organization, we instead need to see ourselves as an integral part of the system. For the system to change we need to change our own mental maps and the way we frame our roles.