Managing Risk Across Relationships

For any size organization, its relationships with suppliers, vendors, and partners are increasingly essential. But how do organizations ensure that the third parties they are engaging with are in alignment when it comes to compliance and ethical standards? How does that get communicated? How can we enhance due diligence processes to better identify risks?

These are some of the tough questions we tackled last week at Ethisphere’s London Ethics & Compliance Forum, a one-day event that brought together diverse leaders from some of the most reputable multinational and leading regional companies to address issues of corporate integrity. It was a great forum for sharing best practices and offering new insights on ethics and compliance across Europe and around the world.

I had the pleasure of moderating a riveting panel discussion entitled Third Party Due-Diligence: Managing Risk Across Global Relationships. Comprising my panel were Nick Devereux, Senior Director, Ethics & Compliance, Europe at Eli Lilly and Company; Andrew Law, Chief Integrity Officer & Deputy General Counsel at ABB; and Anny Tubbs, Chief Business Integrity Officer at Unilever. Each of them were able to draw on their deep experience managing risk across international programs as they shared best practices around relationship management, risk assessment, and building trust on a global scale.

The discussion was a universal reflection on the fact that culture is key to both understanding how things are done in local markets and to setting the tone for what is expected within your organization. Bottom line: Finding ways to ensure that values and expected behaviors are embedded in the organization—and that suppliers and third parties understand those expectations—is vital to growing in new markets.

At LRN, we help organizations foster winning, ethical cultures rooted in sustainable values. Learn more about our solutions, or contact us to learn more.