An organizational culture focused on compliance places a premium on following “the rules.” Those rules may be spelled out in painstaking detail, or mysterious and unclear. Nonetheless, actors in that culture must comply with them or else they may suffer the consequences of not doing so.
You might consider such compliance simply means being accountable. I’m all for accountability, and for accepting the consequences of my errors. Let me be crystal clear about that. If you’re wrong, you’re wrong. If you made a mistake, you made a mistake. If you need to submit certain paperwork in a certain way and fail to do so, you must recognize that. There are no excuses. But what I’m talking about here goes far beyond that.
For one, despite an effort to be clear, what passes for “compliance” varies from one person to the next. A compliance culture strives to provide black and white solutions. The real world hardly complies. Reality is multicolored and far more complex than the rule enforcers would dare imagine. Compliance authorities, moreover, no doubt have their own motives. These undoubtedly cloud their efforts. They’re looking for wrongdoing, no matter how they define it, and “gotcha” is their end game. They seem to simply want to put another trophy on their mantle. What can happen as a result is a “guilty until proven innocent” mentality. It shines a white-hot spotlight on individuals when the evidence of wrongdoing is unclear, if not nonexistent. That’s all in the name of “compliance” and targeting those who at a glance appear to have violated it in some way.
The far bigger problem is as follows. A narrow focus on compliance neglects the systemic issues raised by the incidence of such noncompliance (real or imagined). Yes, these systemic issues can be messy and hard to address. They also might mitigate the severity of the original “offense” and render the judgment of the compliance officer moot. For example, “wrongdoing” might have resulted due to the neglect, if not incompetence, of others working in the organization. System checks that might have prevented a problem before it occurred may have failed or not even been in place to start.
To build learning organizations, we must seize the opportunities posed by such issues of “noncompliance” to make real and lasting changes. A “gotcha” mentality serves the needs of no one—except for those pesky compliance officers.