Ethics Training

There are three elements to effective ethics training. First, the organization must develop substantive, comprehensive rules of conduct. Second, executives must communicate those rules in a readily understandable and repetitious manner. Providing a dense set of manuals is as bad as trivializing ethics with coffee mugs. Invincible executives skip the trinkets and supplement the paperwork with accessible, interesting online training, as well as in-person seminars delivered in a dynamic and engaging way. If employees read about ethics in a manual, take an online course, and then attend a seminar that focuses on real-life cases, the message will come across loud and clear.

Finally, invincible executives insist on monitoring success, according to Walter Metcalfe, chairman of Bryan Cave, one of the country's largest international law firms. They have employees take tests that show they understand their ethical obligations, and they monitor "ethics trends" within their organizations—i.e., how many transgressions occurred in a given period of time and the remedial actions taken.