We continue our King Arthur themed week with an exploration of one of the most interesting characters in the Arthur canon, The Green Knight, so called because his skin and clothes are green. The meaning of his greenness has puzzled scholars since the discovery of the poem that identifies him as the Green Man, a vegetation being in medieval art; a recollection of a figure from Celtic mythology; a Christian symbol or the Devil himself? According to Wikipedia, C. S. Lewis suggested the character was “as vivid and concrete as any image in literature” and J. R. R. Tolkien called him the “most difficult character” to interpret in the introduction to his edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. His major role in Arthurian literature includes being a judge and tester of knights, and as such the other characters see him as friendly but terrifying and somewhat mysterious.
In his primary story with Sir Gawain, the Green Knight arrives at Camelot during a Christmas feast, holding a bough of holly in one hand and a battle-axe in the other. Despite disclaim of war, the knight issues a challenge: he will allow one man to strike him once with his axe, under the condition that he return the blow the following year. At first, Arthur takes up the challenge, but Gawain takes his place and decapitates the Green Knight, who retrieves his head and tells Gawain to meet him at the Green Chapel at the stipulated time. One year later, while Gawain is traveling to meet the Green Knight, he stays at the castle of Bercilak de Hautedesert. At Bercilak’s castle, Gawain’s loyalty and chastity is tested, Bercilak sends his wife to seduce Gawain and arranges that they shall exchange their gains for the other’s. On New Year’s Day, Gawain meets the Green Knight and prepares to meet his fate, where upon the Green Knight feints two blows and barely nicks him on the third. He then reveals that he is Bercilak, and that Morgan le Fay had given him the double identity to test Gawain and Arthur.
I wanted to use the Green Knight to introduce three areas which I think every Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) and compliance professional needs to assess about themselves. They are Trust, Reputation and Brand. First is trust. There are multiple formulations of trust in the business context. Trust Across America has an excellent one which they call Trust Alliance Principles (TAP). Edelman annually assess trust through its Trust Barometer, which in 2019 found that over the past decade there has been a loss of faith in traditional authority figures and institutions and that many have increased their trust in their employers. Of course Sam Silverstein would say that trust is only a part of Accountability, which he assesses through the Accountability Assessment. However, I would posit that trust in the workplace has some of all these great organizations’ characteristics of trust leading to others having an emotional connection with you.
The next area is Reputation. Eden Gillott says, “Reputation is your most valuable asset. Hard to achieve. Easy to lose. And, once lost, very difficult to redeem.” My definition about reputation is what others think about you. I also want you to remember that Andre Agassi was right, perception is reality. At the most basic are you reliable? Is your word good for something? Compliance is about execution as is leadership. If you say you are going to do something, do you follow through? As a CCO, you do not have to deliver stunning results, but you do have to lead with a steady hand. Of course, setting realistic expectations are important but you must consistently follow through on your commitments. The bottom line is that no one in the corporate world wants surprises; certainly not negative surprises but there is even unease if a positive surprise is too great.
Brand. What is your brand? Many people think it is your image or perhaps even your reputation. However, those are not the words I use to define brand. Your brand is your relationship with your customers, your clients, your employees, your Board of Directors and other stakeholders. For a CCO or compliance professional, the relationship you have with a wide variety of stakeholders is critical to being successful. If you begin to think of your personal brand as a compliance professional and your corporate compliance program as a relationship with these stakeholders, you begin to see things in a very different light. What are some of those relationships?
As a CCO, you have a relationship with your customers; who are most generally described as the employees in your organization. Are you Dr. No From the Land of No? Or are you seen as a trusted partner who will not only protect the employees from running afoul of laws but also help facilitate the business process so that it is more efficient and allows the company to do business more quickly and efficiently? Are you present to respond to inquiries? Does your corporate compliance function respond to your employee base in a timely manner? Do your due diligence processes seem to go on forever or are they done quickly and efficiently? In short are you there to prevent, detect and remediate from the compliance perspective?
How does all this tie back to the Green Knight. I think the Green Knight had all these characteristics. I found the word of the Green Knight was his bond, so you could trust him. He certainly had a fearsome reputation. However, the one shining characteristic was his brand, through which he gave Gawain the ultimate test.
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