Most everyone agrees on the need for an organizational code of conduct these days, but there is less confidence that employees actually read them, much less find them useful guides in their day-to-day decision-making. But there is, indeed, a way to make these documents come to life through a pre-scripting and action-planning approach.

The usual tactics for sharing codes of conduct involve distributing them to all new employees; requiring an annual signed employee commitment to abide by their guidelines; reviewing the code content in orientation and training programs; and even posting the codes on the walls of offices and conference rooms. This approach, although necessary, is not sufficient to take the code from behind its Plexiglas frame and move it into the living, breathing organizational conversation where it needs to be.

An innovative approach to thinking about and enacting values-driven leadership that is being pioneered in business education around the globe offers a path to bringing your organizational code of conduct to life. Rather than an emphasis upon simply determining where the “bright lines” are and whether a particular course of action falls on the right or the wrong side of the rule, this “Giving Voice To Values” approach (GVV) asks a new question. Instead of asking, “What is the right thing to do?” in a defined situation, GVV asks, “Once I know what is right, how do I get it done?”

By shifting the conversation in this way, employers and employees can move beyond an endless parsing of the rules to see just how close an employee can get to the line without stepping over it, and instead focus on enabling and preparing employees to act on their own values and the best values of their organizations. What’s more, this approach acknowledges the many real pressures employees face to violate conduct codes, and it provides tools and, importantly, practice in responding to these pressures. In this way, training and communication programs that often can feel like a sort of rote or even hypocritical explanation of the code are transformed into true leadership building exercises.

Steps in the Giving Voice To Values Approach

1. State the position you want to take (i.e., the position that is in accord with the conduct code and the employees’ values at their best).
2. Identify what is at stake or at risk for all parties involved: the individual employee, whomever may be asking or pressuring the employee to violate the code (inside or outside the organization), the organization itself, customers/clients, investors, the wider community, other stakeholders, etc.
3. Identify the “Reasons & Rationalizations:” that is, the predicable pushback or objections you are likely to hear when you try to voice, enact and uphold the conduct code.
4. Identify the most persuasive responses to these objections, including examples of previous experiences from your own or other organizations and consider to whom and in what sequence and setting (alone or with allies, for example) to deliver your “scripts.”
5. Practice delivering responses to these objections. This can take the form of training sessions with peers or even one-on-one coaching sessions, formal or informal.

Increasingly there is research in the fields of social psychology and cognitive neurosciences that support the effectiveness of this approach: that is, literally pre-scripting and practicing behaviors, in order to influence how one acts. But don’t we already know this? Isn’t this really a matter of “practice makes perfect?” And so the genius behind the GVV approach is simply to ask ourselves just WHAT do we want to practice? Do we merely want to practice the analysis of whether an action complies with our rules, or do we also want to practice how to respond effectively once we know that we need to?

The answer is clear: we need both. And the good news is that employees find this process of action-planning and scripting more engaging, more empowering and frankly more fun than a session that focuses only on communicating the “rules.”

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About the Author

Mary C. Gentile, Ph.D., is director of Giving Voice to Values (GVV), a business curriculum launched by Aspen Institute and Yale SOM, now based and funded at Babson College. GVV is a pioneering approach to values-driven leadership that has been featured in Financial Times, Harvard Business, Stanford Social Innovation Review, among many others, and is being piloted in over 100 business schools and organizations globally. The book – Giving Voice To Values: How To Speak Your Mind When You Know What’s Right – is out from Yale University Press (www.MaryGentile.com, 2010).

Gentile is also senior research scholar at Babson College, senior advisor at the Aspen Institute Business & Society Program and an independent consultant based in Arlington, Mass. Previously Gentile was a faculty member and manager of case research at the Harvard Business School.

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