By Adam Turteltaub

Tone at the top is essential, but it’s also important to ensure that middle and front-line managers are echoing the same tone when it comes to compliance and ethics.  If employees hear great-sounding values from up on high, but see or hear something less laudable from their immediate boss, a lot of good compliance work can quickly become undone.

Marsha Ershaghi Hames, Managing Director Strategy of LRN, Inc. explains that compliance teams need to remember that leaders are employees, too.  Like all employees they need to understand what’s in it for them when it comes to compliance and ethics in general, and setting the right tone in particular.

She shares in this podcast techniques to help make managers more willing and frequent voices for compliance and the organization’s values.  One key, she observes, is to connect the manager’s compliance responsibilities to the business and its goals, including the importance of ensuring that the manager is accessible when employees have concerns.

Listen in as she discusses how to build in metrics and the value of providing managers with a toolkit for communicating with their direct reports.