Compliance Perspectives

By Adam Turteltaub For all the talk of tone at the top, the reality is that few employees report to the top. Virtually all report to a manager somewhere in the middle, and it’s the tone that leader sets that is often most important. Susan Du Becker, Director Risk & Compliance at Microsoft believes that compliance teams need to focus on managing from the middle and getting this important level of the organization on board. So how do you get these managers to work with you? How do you earn their commitment to help, especially in risk areas like privacy and anticorruption? For her, it’s about being inventive and thinking about how you can get them to drive compliance rather than you. To do that, she looks for the key influencers who can serve as champions for the program. They can go upstream or downstream and will help carry the message. Gaining the support of these people requires some effort, she reports. You have to sell them on your vision and let them know that it is to their benefit to further it. If,