Alex Rodriguez announced his retirement from baseball, effective Friday, August 12. In a New York Times (NYT) article he said, “Saying goodbye may be the hardest part of the job,” “But that’s what I’m doing today. As far as 700 [home runs], or any of those type of milestones, I would have had an unbelievable, fun time going after them, those are not the cards I was dealt.” So, in other words, the Yankees released a player, who at one time had the richest contract in baseball.
One of the cards with which Rodriguez was dealt was to be one of the greatest natural talents to hit a baseball in the past 50 years. The card he personally added to the mix was the use of performance enhancing drugs, usually claiming that he did not take them but occasionally admitting so on the public stage as well. The real problem for Rodriguez is that at 41 he is washed up as a major league baseball player. He will end his career with 656 home runs and I for one am glad that such a public cheater did not become the fourth person to slam 700 home runs. Not even the New York Yankees, who still owe him $21MM through the end of next season, could put up with his lack of performance any longer. He will be a ‘Special Advisor’ to the club which is the business world equivalent of an unwanted senior executive being moved to ‘Special Projects’. Still on the payroll but released from any real work.
Rodriguez’s sorry exit from baseball forms the basis for today’s blog post and most interestingly the NYT had another article in its Sunday edition from which every Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) and compliance practitioner should draw a valuable lesson. It was found in the Corner Office column where Adam Bryant interviewed Kevin Warren, the Chief Operating Officer (COO) for the Minnesota Vikings, in a piece entitled “Championships Are Won in the Details”. In the business (and compliance world) this translates to execution. It does not matter how impressive your paper compliance program might be, if you do not execute the program going forward, you will not be doing compliance. Baker Hughes, Inc. (BHI) CCO puts it more colloquially when he says that execution is where the rubber meets the road.
Yet Warren has some additional insights from his position that I think apply to the CCO or compliance practitioner. When asked about his leadership style, he said that it had evolved. He described this evolution through an interesting analogy saying, “in the first part of my life and my career, I was rolling through stoplights. I was so busy. And now in my position, I stop at a stoplight and really take an opportunity to observe the surroundings. Maybe there’s someone on the side of the road who needs some help. Maybe there’s someone in a rush that needs to go ahead. That’s where I am now. There are more demands on my time, but I’ve become a much better listener. I’ve slowed down my thought process and tried to make sure I’m there for everyone.”
As a compliance leader, you must be available to employees literally from the Boardroom to the shop floor. If a compliance matter comes up, there must be someone there to advise, even if that advise is only to confirm the employee’s understanding of doing business in compliance or that their plan of action is within your company’s anti-corruption risk management parameters. The other observation is that compliance is one of the few corporate disciplines which is literally “there for everyone.” In my podcast series Unfair and Unbalanced, I have debated my co-host Roy Snell on this point but I have come around to Roy’s point of view. In many ways, compliance is becoming the key corporate discipline as it moves into the fabric of an organization. This is because it is the fulcrum by which so many corporate disciplines intersect.
Warren had a couple of additional insights for any compliance practitioner. One was around hiring. As you might expect for someone at his corporate level, by the time a candidate gets to him for an interview, the candidate has been thoroughly vetted in technical competence. So Warren wants to obtain a fuller measure of the candidate. He does so by inquiring into their passion for the position and whether they will give a top effort. These are excellent points for any CCO as well. Most compliance practitioners are passionate about compliance. They view it as more than simply a job. As a leader in compliance, you should inquire into this and if you find it in your employees, not only work to harness that passion but also use it going forward. That is one way to become a great leader.
Conversely, Warren intoned that when it comes to advice for employees “I think the best thing is for people to be really honest with themselves. Step off the treadmill a little bit and be honest with yourself about what you really want to do, what you want your legacy to be, what you want your life to look like. And people should really focus on nirvana. I’ve been blessed to reach nirvana because in my quiet times along this journey, I would sit and dream and write things down that I wanted to do. You most likely can’t reach a goal that you have not already achieved in your head. If, in your mind, the best you focus on is running an eight-minute mile, you will never run a six-minute mile.”
There are many people new to the compliance profession. One of the things that struck me at the recent Compliance Week 2016 was how many first time attendees were present. There are many new faces in compliance. If this is what you want to do, get out there and do it. You can attend conferences and meet others in the compliance profession. You can go the 2016 SCCE Compliance and Ethics Institute this September in Chicago, where there is a specific event designed to provide mentorships. The SCCE has one of, if not the top compliance certification programs going and you can become a certified compliance professional. Not only will such a certification give you personal satisfaction but it also provides a market differentiator when you are interviewing so your own personal brand will profit.
If you remember Rodriguez from the 90s during his tenure with the Mariners, you recall one of the greatest raw talents of all-time. Rodriguez chose to waste all of that by using steroids and ruining his legacy forever. He denied, then admitted, and then denied again that he used performance enhancing drugs. He later filed an appeal for his 2014 season long suspension for such use but when the day came for him to testify in an arbitration proceeding, he literally ran out of the hearing room as he would have been required to testify under oath for the first time in his life about steroid use. That to me will always be his lasting legacy.
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