Conversation On Ethics Karen Shepard Carter DOW Corporation

Thanks for having me. Really happy to be here. My name is Karen S. Carter. I work for Dow as their Chief Human Resources Officer as well as their Chief Inclusion Officer. I've been at Dow now for more than 25 years, it's really hard to believe. And for the majority of my career, I've held a number of business roles. So I've lived in Shanghai, China, where I led our building and construction business. And before taking on the Chief Inclusion role and then ultimately the Chief Human Resources Officer role, I led our largest business in the company, Plastics, in the North American region.

Yeah, you know, business ethics is something that's been talked about for a long time, but it's certainly trending more now. When I think about the definition of business ethics, it's really the connection between your core values, your business policies, your business practices, and ultimately the behaviors of employees.

Well, if you think about it, employees come to work every day and we don't expect them to check any part of them when they come into the office. And so it's about how you behave in the work environment. And now we have a number of core values. One of them is integrity. Another one is respect for people. We also talk about the importance of protecting the planet. And so our expectation is that the way you behave in the environment is very much aligned with our core values. Respect for people is a great one. We know that everyone comes from different places, that's the beauty of diversity. And so inclusion is really about respecting those differences in a work environment, which requires ethics. Ethics is the foundation ultimately for respect and then ultimately inclusion.

Everyone, of course. It starts at the top of the company, so setting the tone, setting those expectations, defining the guardrails if you will. And those guardrails, I would define those as the core values. But then ultimately, it's everyone's responsibility to behave in a way that's ethical. And it's the company's responsibility to make sure that you have a balance of consequences, so both positive and negative. Most people tend to only think about the negative consequences in the event where employees don't behave in an ethical way. But I would contend that when you have strong leadership that's demonstrating not only those core values but demonstrating ethical behaviors, you should reward that so that that becomes really a demonstration or a proof point in your culture about what's important and what's expected.

You know, I believe that they can. It's better if people show up at your corporate doorstep already understanding and knowing how to behave, being taught in their youth would be the best situation. But we know that people come as they are, if you will, and sometimes you have unfortunate situations where people are demonstrating unethical behaviors. And so I think it's important to first set the expectations, make sure that you have training in your organization where you can train them and equip them to demonstrate those behaviors. And then the third important part, again, is making sure that you have a balance of consequences and that you are implementing those consistently. You hear in a lot of organizations where at the lower levels of the organization we're very quick to punish, if you will, but then as you get to the higher levels of the company, maybe not so much, maybe there's inconsistency, maybe there's more leniency. So it's absolutely critical that you have consistency in how you're holding people responsible, both again from a positive consequence perspective as well as a negative consequence perspective. And that's a demonstration of your culture.

You know, when I think about it, you know, I will go back to my previous point. You know, my mother really instilled ethical behavior in me. So I hope that I show up at Dow's doorstep every day with that already being a part of my character. So I think about things like integrity, you know, I think about showing up authentically every day. And then the third one will be honesty. You know, I believe that integrity and honesty are two different things but are very important. So being honest in my business decisions, being honest in my dialogue. And honesty doesn't mean that you always tell people what they want to hear, but that you tell them what they need to hear. So you know, for example, I've had over my career a couple of situations where either I needed to terminate someone and or give them some really strong and constructive feedback. In almost every case, I'd say every case, after the fact they came back and thanked me because I was honest with them, really with the intent to make them better. And so honesty is really important to me.

You know, I would say that, of course, they're happening. You know, these are topics that are discussed at the barbershop, they're discussed at the dinner table, and then they're discussed in the workplace. And so, you know, I think it's important that we try now to have a culture where we create a safe environment to have what we would call courageous conversations. The reality is that when you have a diverse organization, which by the way is the way to get maximum financial results because you get all those different perspectives to the table, you're always going to have a diversity of opinions. And so you can't just benefit from the diversity of perspectives and experiences and not also be open to a diversity of opinions. And so we try to create situations where we put those very difficult topics on the table for discussion. And the goal is not to agree, the goal is always to expand our understanding. The goal isn't to get to one place where everyone is saying and believing the same thing, but again to get to a better place where we all understand the other person's perspective. And so we've had conversations around race, we've had conversations around same-sex marriage, we've had conversations around politics. I mean, you know, most people say don't talk about politics in the workplace, and I would disagree. If you have a culture that's based on trust, right, then you can have those very complex and courageous conversations on some very difficult topics. Because companies are a microcosm of the larger society. And so whether or not we are helping to facilitate that, they're happening at the water cooler and they don't always end up in a place of better understanding. They can end up in very bad places where people are arguing or you're not getting the richness out of the diversity of perspectives. And so we're very passionate about that. And again, we hope and we really build on that becoming part of our culture so that we can teach people how to do that when they leave the workplace, which I would contend would help better our entire society and ultimately result in more ethical behavior.