On this retrospective episode of the Culture & Compliance Chronicles, Amanda Raad and Nitish Upadhyaya from Ropes & Gray’s Insights Lab, and Richard Bistrong of Front-Line Anti-Bribery, reflect on the key themes and insights from season one. They emphasize the importance of culture in driving compliance and regulatory practices, highlighting discussions with various guests who shared their experiences and strategies. Key themes include the significance of contextualizing culture, humanizing compliance, and using data intentionally to inform decisions. The hosts also share practical tips and exercises for maintaining focus and creativity in the compliance space. As they look forward to the next season, they challenge the community to bring new ideas and perspectives to the conversation. Tune in to hear their reflections and stay curious about the evolving landscape of business, compliance and culture.
Transcript
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[0:00] Introduction to the Anniversary Edition
Nitish Upadhyaya: Welcome back to the Culture & Compliance Chronicles, the podcast that gives you new perspectives on legal, compliance and regulatory challenges faced by organizations and individuals worldwide. The clue is in the title—culture is at the heart of everything. It’s the endlessly shifting patterns that govern our environment and behaviors. The magic is in amplifying certain patterns and dampening others. Let’s see if we can pique your curiosity, get you to challenge some of your perceptions and give you space to think differently about some of your own challenges. I’m Nitish Upadhyaya, and I’m joined by Amanda Raad and Richard Bistrong. Hello, Amanda and Richard. Can you imagine, it’s been 12 episodes since we started this season of the Culture & Compliance Chronicles?
Amanda Raad: It’s hard to believe but time flies when you’re having fun.
Richard Bistrong: And so much learning and fun. It’s been great.
[1:00] Why Culture Matters
Nitish Upadhyaya: On that note, we thought we would pull together some of our favorite ideas for you, the listeners, the wisdom and the stories, the challenges, and the tips and tricks that people have conveyed to us from all of their varying backgrounds. As we’ve been through the series, a number of key themes have emerged. Unsurprisingly, the first one is that culture matters and culture is at the heart of everything that we do, but also, how we should think about everything from interventions to our day-to-day activities. We were lucky to have Stephanie Niven on, who talked about using culture as an advantage. Giving employees, for example, lower levels, the opportunity to drive change very quickly as an investor. Not just thinking about the top level but thinking about across the organization, how do you uplift the chance for individuals to innovate, to drive change, can make a real difference, and how that changes for clients, the view that they see. How do you increase compliance touchpoints, again, not just for individuals, but for groups, for teams, all the way across the organization? So, I love Stephanie’s chat that gave us a sense that this matters, and not just in the artificial sense but to investors, and the investors are investing off the back of culture, which was something new to me, I think, that is really coming to the fore of the market.
Richard Bistrong: I think the next step to that, we had two guests that talked about we have culture with a capital “C” and a small “c.” And the small “c” culture is the contextualizing of culture. Letitia Adu-Ampoma and Tal Freilich gave us some wonderful examples of how you can have global policies, rules, and procedures, but if you don’t contextualize them to the people in what might be small local communities so that these policies make sense to those that work in the middle of what these rules, policies, and procedures are, the probability is they might circumvent them, or they might ignore them, as opposed to understanding them and saying, “This is a perfect fit for what we do and how we do it.” It’s making being compliant easy.
Amanda Raad: Yes, I love that, Richard. We also heard from Nicole Rose when we were talking about humanizing compliance, but not just in the policies and in the procedures but also in the interventions. I loved what Nicole told us about really working with the team to understand what their actual challenge was, and then, actually having them co-solve for potential solutions together for what might actually work in the moment. She gave us just a great example of the team coming up with a solution that I don’t think any of us that weren’t living the facts on a daily basis would’ve ever come up with. It really is that not assuming that we know what the right way forward is or what the best way forward is and trying to work through that together.
Richard Bistrong: That’s so interesting, Amanda, because if we look at some of the themes and sub-themes, this proactive feedback loop where we’re not just thinking about how do we implement this but how do we inspire people, how do we influence them, and so many of our guests—Dina Denham Smith, Megan Reitz, Alexandra Belmonte—talking about we need to get information to help people make informed decisions. So, this theme around culture and reaching out to the field to get information to help the field, ran through so many of our episodes.
[4:50] The Human Aspect of Compliance
Nitish Upadhyaya: We have the first theme then, that culture matters—culture, context, understanding what’s going on. And then, we moved to that second theme about being human and having empathy and really learning from the people on the ground where this is. I go back to our first episode with Guillem Casoliva Cabana, where he talked about the work that he’s done at Booking.com to triangulate issues across divisions, but then, importantly, add the human factor once you’ve got the data to feed back to individuals what compliance and legal are hearing, what’s being done about those situations, what worked, what didn’t work. He talked about this rule: disclose three actions that we’re going to take off the back of the information that’s been provided. And so, we had some really neat tips from our guests on how you can be more human in the data collection and data provision. What else did you think caught your attention?
Amanda Raad: I love the discussion of being human. What else can we really be, right? I loved how Dina Denham Smith talked to us about not only is it okay to bring your whole self to work, but it’s so important to bring your whole self to work. The value of that, the importance of normalizing sharing who you are and what’s really going on with you so that you can form an actual connection. Going back to culture, it sets a scene for enabling people to really share what’s going on with them and put them in the best frame of mind to be able to connect and find solutions that really work. And the same point, Katie Daniels also talked to us about the importance of using empathy and being vulnerable, but also considering, as leaders, what you may be bringing into any situation and what energy you may be bringing into any situation. After that discussion with Katie, I really realized that I maybe haven’t focused on that enough, and that’s something actually that I’ve tried to apply this year since we started this podcast, is really thinking what kind of energy am I bringing into any potential room? And, yes, be vulnerable but also be mindful of that point.
Richard Bistrong: Yes, that’s a great point, Amanda. And I love Dina’s little quote about positive contagion—what we bring to work is contagious either way, and our whole selves. Tal also talked about how we build that energy by bringing in diverse opinions so that we’re not just getting in the middle of confirmation or conformity bias, but to look for people that disagree. Megan Reitz, her book has a great story called “truth tellers”—bringing in diverse opinions, forming working groups, again, getting back to that sub-theme of open feedback loops. What I loved about what Tal shared, you don’t have to wait—the earlier, the better. When people feel that they’re part of the process, they’re more likely to buy into the process. And he also talked about learning from mistakes, which is wonderful. Another sub-theme that came up with our discussion with Nicole (and there’s some other data to support this) is with your Gen Z-ers, it’s really important that they understand why these policies, rules, and procedures exist. Nicole recommended show them under the roof, show them under the hood what’s going on, why you do this, that resources aren’t unlimited, and bring them in—show them why this is so important.
[8:30] The Importance of Bringing in Different Voices
Nitish Upadhyaya: Being human then, from a compliance officer’s perspective, from HR, from risk, from audit, isn’t just about mastering yourself—of course, parts of that are, as Amanda, you related—they’re also about mastering how people perceive us and what their context actually is in the first place. Whether it’s Gen Z, whether it’s a different geography, whether it’s a different seniority that you’re dealing with, that human factor, I think, makes a massive difference to the effectiveness of relationship building, and that’s what we’ve heard a lot of during the podcast itself. A client came to me not too long ago actually off the back of some of these podcast discussions, and said, “We are now actively seeking out people that do not share the same view that we have of compliance. We are tapping into those anomalies, the ones who hate it, and giving them a forum to talk, to moan, to sit on our couch and just tell us what’s wrong, and we’re not being defensive about it. We are just listening without judgment, without ill thought.” And I thought that was brilliant because it wraps into place so much of the wisdom that we’ve heard on this podcast about just letting it go, not being too precious about the strategy, and allowing that human experience to come through, and then they’ll go off and do things about it. This client actually then talked about triangulating some of that with existing data. So, with the stories that these “anomalies,” as they call them, within the business—who dislike it, don’t do the training, etc.—are those actually bearing out in the data that they see around speaking up, around investigations? That, for me, comes into this third big theme that we see. We saw culture, we talked about being human, and we talked about being intentional—about how you use data. I think that kept coming up time and time again.
Richard Bistrong: We’ll have to bring in a guest for next year, Anna Romberg, who we’re all very familiar with. What she shares, Nitish, is be aware of narratives that are just overpowering, so I think that speaks to your last remark in terms of we need that diversity of opinion, we need to have difficult discussions. Now, moving forward to the use of data, I so enjoyed the interview with Danny Mayhew. Beside the fact that he’s also a fan of Panerai watches, it was such an enlightening discussion, and I love his quote, “There are no losses—just winning and learning.” The way he brought that to life is how, in his investigatory role, he takes that data, and instead of what we see a lot of organizations do—you have an investigation, you close out the investigation, and then you move onto the next one—he’s taking that and saying this is such valuable data to inform our ethics, integrity, and compliance teams, as to what’s going on. Where are there maybe some hotspots? Maybe we need to supplement some of our e-learning training with in-person training. So, it’s such valuable information to an organization as to how do we help people make better decisions, and using decisions that didn’t turn out so well as a way of better informing more responsible decision making. I was just fascinated by our whole discussion with him.
Amanda Raad: I have to jump in on that one too, Richard, because I, too, really loved the discussion with Danny. I think the perspective of his “why” still sticks with me, because I feel like all of this is really because he wants to help enable the person, the human, to slow down and make the best decision they can. Instead of it being, “I want to control this for the benefit of the company,” I feel like he’s really focused on, “How do we use all this data to help us get to the person before they make a mistake?” I love that—I think it’s a really powerful “why.”
Richard Bistrong: The other conversation we had was with Alexandra Belmonte, and she talked about her business compliance ambassador (BCA) network, also speaking to the humanization of all of this and how she built this wonderful network of individuals. They’re a little bit helping in directing traffic when people have issues. These are people that are embedded in finance, in all sorts of different support functions, so who do we like to turn to when we’re unsure? The people that we know. And what I loved about the interview with her is it’s not as daunting as you think. For our listeners today, I would encourage you, if you’re thinking about a compliance ambassador network, she literally walked us step by step starting with the risk assessment, because if you’re going to only have a few, have them where you need them the most. I think now she’s got a waiting list, and it’s become a part of their change culture. So, what a fantastic story.
Amanda Raad: One of the things that you just touched on was the resources and prioritizing your risk area, and that ties into something we talked to a whole bunch of our guests about, which is avoiding silos. There are limited resources, there are so many risks that we can talk about and that we do talk about, and if you are too siloed in how you look at any of them, one, you’re going to drain your resources, and, two, you’re just not going to be able to effectively tell the story of whatever your data is trying to tell you—you’ll miss something. We’ve spent time talking about what regulators have reminded us in this space. We’ve been told that you should be using data effectively—the same way you’re using it for the business you should also be using it for compliance.
We also had the opportunity to talk to one of my partners, Ryan Rohlfsen, who’s the co-leader of the anti-corruption and international risk practice at Ropes & Gray. We were talking, at the time, about when the Foreign Extortion Prevention Act (FEPA) came out, which criminalizes the demand side of bribery in the United States. Since that time, we’ve had so many developments from regulators all over the world, whether we’re talking about the recent guidance that has just come out from the Department of Justice (DOJ) with relation to the end of the pause on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement. We just came off a webinar talking about those developments as well as developments in the UK, talking about failure to prevent fraud and how fraud crosses across both of these jurisdictions. And so, now, we have fraud to add to the mix. We have demand side of bribery. We have all the traditional risk areas that we’ve also looked at. The reality is we need risk assessments, we need the same data to address all of these risks. I think our colleagues and guests have given us a lot of tips about how to effectively navigate the ABCs of risk.
[16:00] Stepping Out of Your Comfort Zone
Nitish Upadhyaya: Absolutely. And I think it comes back to the flow of information. You talked a little bit about silos, you talked about how we bring some of these disparate data points together to try and better understand what’s going on in the business, and what the impact is of interventions, initiatives, and ideas that we are putting into the business. What are they actually doing to humans who are in those businesses—to the behavior, to the attitude, to the actions of those individuals?
Now, I think we can go from the flow of information as one theme to getting our own flow on, which I thought was a really interesting piece that came up. Lots of our guests came up with their own exercises and ideas for maintaining flow when it comes to creativity, to channeling energy, and to getting yourself in the right headspace as a leader in the compliance space, to then act on some of these other themes. I really loved Dr. Brennan Jacoby’s exercise that he gave us. Brennan comes from a philosophy background, so a slightly off-piece idea for the podcast, but he gave us an exercise regarding attention, and actually it’s one that I have been using before going into big workshops or trainings to ensure that my attention is focused on the task at hand. There are lots of things going on in my life—personal, professional—and before I go into a big session, I found it really powerful to offload what’s in my brain onto a piece of paper. It’s a Post-it note, folding it up, and exerting my own will over it, and saying, “Actually, this is important, this is relevant to me, but it’s not something that is from now.” I choose where to give my focus and for the next hour or two hours, whatever it is, that’s not my focus. I am going to set it aside here, “for better or for worse” (in Brennan’s words), and I will come back to it—I’m not going to lose it. Sometimes, I’ve enjoyed ripping it up and throwing it away, which is also quite cathartic, but most of the time, you pick it up when it’s done, and it’s really helped me focus in on the work that I need to be doing in the moment. What about you all? Any favorite tips, tricks, or exercises that have come up?
Amanda Raad: I just wanted to add onto that one, Nitish, because I’ve talked a little bit, including on some of our podcasts, about the difference between busyness and effectiveness, which personally is something that I really was struggling with and have spent a lot of time this year trying to focus on. I think it’s creating that space—that you just talked about, and that Brennan helped us tap into a little bit—to actually put down the busyness and try to be proactive and effective, and show up in the room and the moment for what I need to show up for. That’s a big one that I think cuts across all we do, because it’s very hard to connect with people if you’re multitasking. And that was another thing for me, was trying to cut out the amount of multitasking that I do, because it really does distract, and I think that’s a good tip that Brennan gave us for that one.
Richard Bistrong: We had Megan Reitz on and she said, “It takes leadership to change culture and to make the time to do it in a pathologically busy world.” And her book, Speak Out, Listen Up, is really a step-by-step—and very similar to Dina Denham Smith’s Emotionally Charged—in how we show up. She first presents us with the dilemma that especially in ethics and compliance and a lot of the control function roles, we’re scarier than we think we are. It’s easy to say, “I have an open-door policy,” or, “We have a speak-up line,” but as she shares, who’s all the pressure on? It’s the pressure for the person to walk through the door. It’s the pressure to pick up that phone. It’s no coincidence that her first book was just Speak Out and the next book is Speak Out, Listen Up. She gave one exercise which I love, a truth teller exercise. If there’s someone senior in a meeting, I like to use a real FIFA red flag, and hand that to the most junior person in the room for the speak truth to power, and say, “You’re the truth teller. I want you to challenge me. What am I not thinking about? What can I do better? How should we approach this subject matter differently?” I was patting myself on the shoulder that I used this in my client work, and after our podcast with her, Megan was, like, “If you have someone do that, you are going to scare the person that you hand that card to, because if you haven’t spent so much time developing a ‘listen up’ culture just to take them to that exercise, you’re going to frighten someone.” So, I stand corrected now. It also shows that this sparking a culture of listening up is very much a journey in how we show up, and how we show that having an open door means that we created the environment where someone wants to walk through it.
[21:30] What’s Ahead for Next Season
Nitish Upadhyaya: And it goes back to culture. It comes full circle, it comes round to the environment, the atmosphere, the ecosystem in which we work—the environment that we create for people to work, to live, to understand what is expected of them. Then, to show up in the tough moments—to support them and to guide them where it’s necessary, or to make sure that we have put them in the best position, if they are in a place where they don’t have that support or can’t have the support in the relevant moment, so that they make a choice that lives up to the organization’s values and the way in which we want them as compliance, as legal, risk, HR, to behave.
That brings us round to the end of an amazing set of wisdom from all of these brilliant guests that we’ve had. I’m going to finish our little conversation by asking both of you what you’re curious about as we go into the next season of the Culture & Compliance Chronicles. I, for one, am interested in whether or not we’re going to change the conversation that we’re having. Do we move on? Can we move on from this conversation? We have a great base. Whether it’s at conferences, workshops and seminars, can we now take this foundation and bring forth some more practical ideas, some new ways of thinking that are genuinely going to impact us in such uncertain times, that folks can pick up and run with? Folks see themselves in it, that makes people smile? That’s my challenge, I think, to the community, is, what next? We’ve been talking about some of the same stuff for a while now, so I’m curious, will we do that? In a year’s time, will there be something new to add to the conversation? What about you all?
Amanda Raad: I’m curious if we’ll have the courage to really test and measure whether what we’re doing is working, and to talk about what isn’t working. I chose “courage” as my word of the year this year, and so, I’m going to push myself to really call out what isn’t working as well as what is working. I hope we do that on this podcast too, to point out both sides of the coin.
Richard Bistrong: My word is “resilience,” and if there’s ever a time to be resilient, it’s now because we don’t know what our newspaper headlines are going to look like tomorrow. And I’m not just talking about regulatory headlines, I’m talking about what everybody else reads. I think I’ve become a better person from these 12 episodes—I learned a lot. When we see these themes that run through each one of them it really gives us pause to think about, is there a time for shifting this narrative and get away from the Groundhog Day mindset that I think a lot of organizations have been in, which is, what does the regulator want, and how can we make them smile in really difficult circumstances?
[24:30] We Want to Hear from You!
Nitish Upadhyaya: What a great call to the community, to our listeners. We’ve heard some of our favorite moments today. I’d love to know from our listeners, what their favorite moments are, what their lessons are on client stories. We have had so many people reach out to share what they’ve done, what they’ve sent to their executive teams, how they’ve been utilizing some of the podcast episodes as a way of connecting with their own people about situations they find themselves in, showing their vulnerability, having book clubs, podcast clubs, and discussions. And for those of you who are listening maybe to this for the first time, or you missed a couple of episodes, go and find the back catalogue, because, honestly, I don’t think we could ever do justice to the stories that our amazing guests have told. The stories make it, so go back and hear about Nicole in Laos, Tal working across Asia and the culture shock factor, Letitia working across Africa and what it means to really enhance your cultural programs there. There are lots of things to bear in mind.
I ask everyone to stay tuned for the next season of this podcast, all of the wonderful guests that we’ve got lined up. And any ideas that you all have, come and give it to us because the challenge is thrown down. Can we change the conversation? Can we help you build resilience? Do we have courage to make a change and do something different and be creative? Thank you, Amanda and Richard, as ever for your ideas, for your thoughts, and good company. I’m excited to see what we come up against in the next 12 months.
Amanda Raad: Thank you, friends. Take care.
Richard Bistrong: Thank you, everybody.
Nitish Upadhyaya: Thank you all for tuning in to the latest episode in our Culture & Compliance Chronicles series. For more information about our series and any of the ideas discussed today, take a look at the links in our show notes. You can also subscribe to the series wherever you regularly listen to podcasts, including on Apple and Spotify. Amanda, Richard and I will be back very soon for our next chapter. If you have topics you’d like us to cover or novel perspectives you want everyone else to hear about, get in touch. Thanks again for listening. Have a wonderful day and stay curious.
Show Notes:
