Capabilities
Ethics Training
Since 1996 David Gebler has emphasized values and culture issues in ethics training. For Gebler, compliance training should focus on clear articulation of what standards of behavior are expected, while ethics training should focus on what are the challenges and hurdles that employees must overcome in order to the do the right thing.
The most successful ethics training is small-scale sessions led by direct supervisors addressing issues relevant to that workgroup. The format of the session may be informal; the challenge is in the development process to identify key culture risks and prepare easy-to-facilitate sessions that managers can be confident in presenting.
Representative engagements include:
- Development of break-through ethics training program, “Ethics Challenge” featuring DILBERT characters. CEO sought to promote ethics as the primary cross-corporate value in merging two major defense and aerospace organizations. The Ethics Challenge served as a foundation for a broad-based corporate initiative to refine key values needed for success of the new venture. Format: “meeting-in-box” 1 hour sessions led by managers without prior training.
- Development of behavior-based training featuring Roger Ebert on his balcony giving thumbs up or down on how well the characters handled ethics issues in video segments. Format: “meeting-in-box” 1 hour sessions led by managers without prior training.
- Intentions-based ethics training program for global aerospace and defense manufacturer focusing on managers’ need to evaluate motivations in decision-making. Format: “meeting-in-box” 1 hour sessions led by managers without prior training.
- Global in-person training program for global manufacturer with over 250,000 employees in 100+ countries. Three-tiered training: master trainers were recruited to lead train-the-trainer sessions in their local countries.
- In-person ethics training for multinational lawn care manufacturer led by in-house trainers. Scenarios and video segments addressed specific culture risks identified in focus groups in the discovery process.
