Setting the Tone for Governance and Ethics: Guidance for GRC Leaders

The modern business landscape is dynamic and unpredictable, although we tend to forget that until something jolts us out of our routine. The pace of the world is now at light speed with the changes of globalization, digitalization, risk, competitive velocity, and regulation creating new challenges for organizations every day.

Navigating change requires lucid leadership, and it starts from the top. Developing a methodology to continuously understand your organization’s challenges, define those problems, and reliably pursue solutions is the cornerstone of governance.

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This methodology must touch all aspects of the enterprise to address problems and objectives. To promote growth, leadership must continuously nurture their organization’s governance directives — sometimes weeds must be cleared; other times, pruning is necessary.

When leaders develop a dynamic and adaptive governance methodology, the organization can flourish and be prepared for the unpredictable.

Benefits of Effective Governance

Developing a modern framework for governance helps your organization achieve:

• Cohesion. To get their organization on a common path, leaders need to:
  • Communicate directives and procedures across the organization
  • Train department heads to maintain ordinances under a standard governance framework. Siloed departments and scattered dialogues can’t support operational success.
• Flexibility. Stakeholders expect organizations to turn on a dime and quickly adapt to changing environments and expectations. A lack of flexibility or failure to implement the correct frameworks for leadership can be a death sentence for an organization.
• Efficiency. When organizations operate with a holistic and unified approach to governance, they become more transparent. In turn, transparency reveals unnecessary processes and redundancies, enabling greater agility.