The Corporate Ethics Committee

In some organizations, ethics is managed by a corporate committee staffed by seniorlevel managers from a variety of functional areas. This committee is set up to provide ethical oversight and policy guidance for CEO and management decisions. It also represents an affirmation that top management really cares about ethics.

At Lockheed Martin, the Ethics and Business Conduct Steering Committee meets once every quarter and has done so since 1995. The committee provides the organization with strategic direction and oversight on matters of ethics and business conduct. Each business area and business unit has also established a steering committee to oversee its ethics and business conduct operations. Members of the corporate committee include the general counsel executives of large operating entities, and vice presidents from functional areas such as human resources, finance, audit, and communications. The two-way communication between the ethics office and these senior executives is essential. It gives the ethics office information about what concerns senior-level management, and it gives the firm’s leadership information about the types of issues that are coming into the ethics office from employees. The group’s role is viewed as strategic. The steering committees at all levels of the corporation review the ethics awareness training and business conduct compliance training programs, metrics on investigations and requests for guidance, trends, employee survey results, and matters referred by the business areas and business units.er individuals, takes responsibility for managing ethics.

The first thing to do when designing a communication program is to analyze the needs of your audience. Consider what employees already know, what they need to know, what biases and abilities they have, what the desired and required behaviors look like, when they should be asking questions, and where they can go to report their concerns and to ask for help.

When designing ethics communication for a typical employee population, organizations need to consider three kinds of people.

Be careful to note that these aren’t just soldiers who follow orders, right or wrong. They know that good soldiers are expected to question an order they believe to be illegal or morally wrong, and they would do so. Loose Cannons In Group II are the ‘‘loose cannons’’—these people may have good ethical compasses, but they don’t know their corporation’s policies. They may not even be familiar with general ethical standards in business. Loose cannons may be inexperienced; or they may have transferred from, unrelated industry with another very different norms; or they may never have read a policy manual. Whatever the reason, loose cannons may be well meaning, but they’re naive. Without guidance, loose cannons may not even consider ethics in the business environment.