By Adam Turteltaub
adam.turteltaub@corporatecompliance.org
I was in Salt Lake City recently to give a talk, and everywhere I went I kept seeing giant billboards that read William Harrison 9th President. At the bottom was the URL: www.9thpresident.com.
With this being an election year, I assumed that the message was political. I was wondering what group wanted to talk about an obscure President from long ago. What agenda were they pushing? Was it some strange conspiracy theory about his death? Was there something that Harrison said or did that would blow our minds? Or were there just some nut jobs with a crazy fixation on our shortest-serving president?
When I got back home and had time to look up the URL, I laughed at myself and the genius of the billboards. I was wrong on all counts. The ads were designed to show how much impact billboard advertising can have.
As I marveled at my willingness to leap to conclusions, I realized that there’s a good lesson in this for compliance programs: people bring all kinds of their own preconceptions with them that can lead to misinterpretation. Just because you want to tell them something, doesn’t mean they’ll hear it the way you intended. Employees will listen to it through filters that can warp the meaning.
A simple message such as “talk to compliance when you see something wrong” may lead to speculation of all sorts: “is there something they want to talk about?” “I bet this is about the time when Dave saw his boss at an expensive restaurant”, “I can tell they don’t trust our boss, which is why they want us to contact them,” “they’re just saying that because…”
Overcoming these idle speculations can be difficult. It takes time for people to trust your message. To earn that trust, you need to be consistent, transparent, and let them know why you’re communicating that message. And, you need to ensure you keep on communicating over and over again until they realize you mean it.
If you don’t, you may end up as ill-remembered and unappreciated as William Harrison, our 9th President.
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