Corporate Ethics Programs and Security

Rose Shyman added an ethics program to her duties as director of global security at American Standard Cos.

November 01, 2005 — CSO — Organizational integrity is a many-legged stool that more and more businesses are determined to build. The concept has taken hold in the wake of what's been perceived, with justification, as a period of swashbuckling recklessness in business behavior, and in recognition of the resulting overlay of new regulatory and compliance measures intended to drive greater business discipline.

The legs of the stool consist of clear financial controls, models for effective management and governance, corporate reputation, security, compliance, employee morale and productivity, respect for customers and other stakeholders, and an ethical framework to guide both individual and collective business behavior. Surmounting the legs are policies and processes that support all of these attributes.

Among the key success factors in any push toward organizational integrity is the creation of values statements and codes of ethical conductexpressions of what a business believes and how it expects people to model those beliefs. Since CSOs are increasingly entangled in the machinery of organizational integrity, it's not surprising that ethics responsibilities are now becoming a part of many CSOs' roles.

To look more closely at how an ethics program operates within the purview of the security function, CSO Senior Editor Todd Datz spoke to Rose Shyman, global security director and ethics officer at American Standard. Shyman has been at American Standard since 2001. In late 2002, as the company's ethics initiative launched, she added responsibility for its administration to her other security duties.

CSO: What prompted the establishment of American Standard's ethics and integrity program?

Rose Shyman: It actually started about five years ago after [Chairman and CEO] Fred Poses joined the company. He set a goal to move the company to a new level of performance. He wanted to raise the standard in everything that we do in the organization. So he saw [creating] a common set of values and a code of conduct as a way to enhance performance. He thought [such guidelines] would take the guesswork out of decisions that affect our business. Our company was so decentralized before Fred joined; each of the businesses had their own set of values. This was a way to be under one common [framework].

An employee can use the values and code of conduct to make decisions. Some of us have to think about what the right decision is; we've given employees the tools to make those decisions. What's unique is not having the values and code, it's the way we've positioned it: that it will help us enhance our performance, that we see it as a strategic initiative.