In many organizations in Nigeria, the Disciplinary Committee is one of employees’ most dreaded committees, as receiving summons from it was considered as getting closer to encountering a‘career death sentence’. Hence, most employees try to avoid itsterrifyinginvitation by behaving responsibly. Further to this, generally, in corporate organizations, especiallyin the financial services industrywhere customer patronage is hinged on trust, integrity matters are usually placed on a high pedestal.
Against this background, one may be tempted to assume that many organizations would have developed a coordinated approach to managing integrity and integrity-related issues. Unfortunately, this is not the case; as what appears dominant is the haphazard approach to the control and management of integrity as a corporate-level regimen.
Some organizationsexecute this in the form of instituting a Whistle Blower Policy that is hardly implemented to its full intents and purposes because most employees do not wish to be responsible for the termination of the career of their colleague(s); or because they feared debilitating witch-hunt by sympathizers of an employee whose conduct may have necessitated the whistle-blowing action.
Others organize seminars/trainings on ethical conduct, which holds in bits and parts over a few years, or as a one-off activity as part of the on-boarding process upon recruitment. In other companies, it was all about dedicating a few pages in the Staff Hand Book to a perfunctory listing of infractions that may result to the employee being summoned bythe Disciplinary Committee.
Certain organizations provide a space on their intranet for logging-in of employee complaints. However, experience has shown that after the initial enthusiasm that heralds such an initiative, the level of interest, focus, and lessons learnt from various outcomes significantly wane and the initiative becomes almost completely forgotten.
These afore-mentioned examples are generally simplistic, ad-hoc, and largely uncoordinated approach to creating an integrity-focused organization.The missing link, in my view, is what I refer to as the “integrity strategy”.
In seeking to integrate the integrity behavior among staff, organizations should consider having a clearly defined “Integrity Strategy”.This could either be a part of the organization’s corporate strategy, to ensure alignment; or as a separate strategy, but which must be in consonance with the firm’s overall strategy.
There are examples of organizations that have successfully developed and executed an integrity strategy. One of them is Martin Marietta Corporation, a USA aerospace and defence contracting company which operated at a time the American defence industry was notorious for outright fraud and mismanagement.
The company issued and executed a firm integrity strategy that included a combination of: code of conduct, compulsory ethics training program, methodical disclosure of violations of federal law on procurement to the government, setting up of an Ethics Steering Committee (which drew membership from the President, senior executives, field operations staff, etc) which oversaw the Ethics Office, and an Ethics Committee of the Board of Directors.
Martin Marietta Corporation reported that their integrity strategy enabled them act proactively regarding early signals on inaccurate and false records, quality defects, safety defects, racial and gender discrimination, environmental concerns, employee grievances, poor management, etc. This was in addition to better relationships with government based on trust (hence far less time was spent on redundant audits) and opening of new business opportunities, resulting into far higher contracts which accounted for 75% of the company’s revenues.
A second example is a private supplier of electrical parts, Wetherill Associates Incorporated, a company which turned around its operations on account of a new integrity strategy of “walking the talk”, where the company rejected the common conceptual boundaries that separated morality and self-interest.
Management of the company ingrained into the minds of staff that right behavior was a combination of behaviors that are logically, expediently, and morally right, just as the needs of customers, suppliers, and the community (including the company and its employees) should be considered when making decisions. In fact, in that strategy, new recruits were inculcated with the notion that absolute honesty (note: not “relative honesty” or its recent variant called “alternative facts”), while mutual courtesy, and respect were a major part of the company’s standard operating procedure!
In a certain instance at Wetherill Associates Incorporated a recruit stated that when she was told, during her interview, that lying was not allowed, she said: “What do you mean? No lying? I am a buyer. I lie for a living!” That same employee subsequently became a champion of the integrity strategy. The company, after sustainably executing its integrity strategy saw revenues rise from a mere $1million to $ 98million in a few years, in spite of the industry’s famous low-growth nature. Also, feedback from employees suggested that resulting from the integrity strategy the work environment was productive and supportive. It became a “pure” work environment in an industry where kickbacks and bribes were an integral ingredient.
Recruiting popular high-flyers, who are also crooks, may yield huge profits and public acclaim in the short term; but in the long term, which is most enduring, both the so-called high-flyers and the organization will likely pay the price. Therefore, organizations in Nigeria should start considering codifying a clear-cut, well-defined “Integrity Strategy”.
Concluding, I assert that developing and executing an integrity strategy is not an academic prescription meant for term papers or for research purposes, but rather, it is a practical framework from which an organization benefits in the long run. Its utility, in tangible and non-tangible terms, has been proven in other climes. Hence, as companies in Nigeria continue to adopt organizational management themes from the developed world, developing and executing an integrity strategy should be considered. This is a call beyond morality; it is a call for business sustainability hinged on organizations’ positive and enlightened self-interest!
Tajudeen Ahmed
