Page 23 - An Indispensible Resource for Being a Credible Activist

● You can remain and try to graciously, directly, and professionally address the
wrongdoing in the spirit of being a chief learning officer and a chief compliance
officer as well as the HR professional you are.
● You can approach what you see needs to be remediated in a careful, diplomatic, and
direct manner. This approach will only add to your professionalism and credibility as an
HR professional who is concerned with the company operating within legal compli-
ance and who is concerned with being part of a lawful, respectable operation.

Here is why the disclaimer at the beginning of this book is necessary: most people do not
like to be told they’re mistaken. This, of course, circles back to emotional intelligence, com-
munication, and conflict resolution skills, but we’ll get to that later. There is a Seinfeld episode
in which Jerry says that the only difference between lawyers and everyone else is that they’ve
read the entire inside top of the Monopoly box and know all the rules, while the rest of us
haven’t. Oprah frequently says, “Knowledge is power”; she is correct. The knowledge is there
for us all. We can choose to learn whatever we need to; we can choose to know and practice
our compliance responsibilities in order to abide by them. So what’s the problem?
“Role confusion” and “ego” get in the way. If you’re reporting to or working alongside exec-
utives who don’t have this technical knowledge and who assume that HR is meaningless fluff
that anyone can do, they’ll often assume they know as much as you do—or more than you do—
even if they don’t. If you’re reporting to or working alongside executives who don’t care to know
what their compliance responsibilities are, your memos telling them what the inside of the
Monopoly box top says might not be welcome. And it may not even be because they’re bad peo-
ple, because they don’t respect the laws, or because they have an unconscious desire to be sued
for millions of dollars. They just don’t want to be wrong. They don’t want to be “not right.”
You report to them, you may be younger than they are, you may have less workplace
experience, and you probably earn less money than they do. It sounds ridiculous, and it really
is ridiculous, but instead of the grateful response of, “Thank you for doing your job properly,
for letting us know this, and for helping to save us costly regulatory fines and lawsuits!” what
may happen instead is that you may be met with retaliatory anger that you read the inside
of the top of the Monopoly box and had the nerve to point it out to them. Some people will
react this way. This book will help you deal with such people, should you be unfortunate
enough to encounter and report to them. In addition, it bears pointing out that there are those
executives to whom you may compose the most perfectly worded and informative memo ever
written who will still react as though you had just committed murder.
However, let’s be optimistic for now. For a sample form you may use to truly invite and
welcome any kind of employee feedback, including complaints about unlawful harassment and
discrimination, please see the HR Tool entitled “Sample Feedback Report to HR/OD,” at the end
of the chapter, on pages 10–11. Feel free to customize this form for your own company.

❱❱ CORPORATE GOVERNANCE
What is organizational development and how does it relate to corporate governance? How is it
different from HR, and why should HR professionals and leaders care? Here are three defini-
tions from pioneers in the OD field, which were given in a Multi-Rater Feedback graduate class
that was taught by Allan Church and Janine Waclawski.

6 The H R Toolkit