General Dynamic’s Director of Ethics Brian Kenney reflects on his group’s award-winning culture, the state of ethics today, and how other companies can create an effective ethics director role.
By David Weldon
On Monday, September 26, The Foundation for Financial Service Professionals will present its annual 2007 American Business Ethics Awards (the ABEA), at a special awards ceremony in Montreal.
Each year, the FFSP honors three companies for their outstanding work in the area of business ethics, with an award given to a small company, a medium size company, and a large company.
ExecDigital had the opportunity to speak with Brian Kenney, director of ethics at General Dynamics Armament and Technical Products in Charlotte, N.C. about the program, about his thoughts on ethics in business today, and about why his company was chosen as one of last year’s award recipients.
ED: What is special about the General Dynamic Armament and Technical Products division that resulted in you folks being an award recipient last year?
BK: It started about three years ago at the Armament and Technical Products facility, where we decided to put a real focus on the ethics program, and our president at the time decided that there should be a full time person in charge of the ethics program, and that they should report to the president. There had always been an ethics program prior to that, but there hadn’t been as much focus. With that full time position came a lot of visibility to the program.
ED: What is the General Dynamics Armament and Technical Products division all about?
BK: We’re about providing weapons systems to the military. Our customers are the U.S. Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corp.
ED: Are there particular types of weapons systems that you are involved with?
BK: There are four strategic business units. We develop and produce Hydra-70 rockets, armor, gatling gun systems, single barrel gun systems, composite structures, and chemical and biological detection equipment.
ED: What is the job role of the ethics officer?
BK: The primary mission is to be a resource to all of our employees so that if they ever feel concerned, that there is an issue that they don’t feel right, or they’re not sure how to handle it, or they aren’t sure what the rules or the laws are in that area, that they have someone to turn to. The basic motto is, “When in doubt, ask.” We get questions. And we get real concerns. About half my time is spent offering training and offering guidance and promoting ethical behavior. The other half of my time is spent doing investigations into real employee concerns and making sure our business is doing the right things in these areas.
ED: When that full time position was created, was someone from within the company put into that role, or was someone brought into the company?
BK: Someone within the company was promoted into this role. Her name is Dawn Archer. She was the person that was the director of ethics before me, and she really focused on the communications side. There was a very deliberate communications campaign in the company. We established what we called local ethics officers. We have eight different facilities in the company, and it is important to have a someone identified at each facility, where employees knew that they could just go into the office of that person and talk to them about a concern.
ED: Had this been a role that had been piggy-backed onto another job function in the past?
BK: Yes, that was a part time role. We made the ethics officer a full time role in the company, and we made the local ethics officers a part time position. But we make it very clear who the person was at each facility.
ED: For a company that does not have an ethics director, would that be a function that would presumably be borne by the H.R. director?
BK: It can be, and often is. For us, it was our director of government finance who was responsible for this function before it became a full time job. There are a variety of places in the organization where the ethics director can come from, but it is unusual for there to be a full time ethics director on the president’s direct staff.
ED: I’ve been covering business for a couple of decades now, and you’re the first ethics director that I’ve spoken with, and I’ve spoken with. Do you have a sense of how many people are there out there in this role?
BK: There are a lot of people that have this job title as a secondary responsibility. But it is a small group of people that have ethics as their prime responsibility. And I realize just how lucky I am to be in a position like this where I do report directly to the president.
ED: Is that a critical component — that you report directly to the president? In order to be successful in your role, would you recommend that your function really needs to be structured in the company?
BK: I think that is very important.
ED: What is your background, and what led you into this particular role?
BK: My background is in mechanical engineering. I worked in the engineering group for five years. And then I worked as a program manager. Then, our president at the time offered me this opportunity. I hadn’t taken a lot of philosophy or ethics courses, but I had been very focused as a program manager in how to do the right thing for the customer. I think that our president recognized that, and gave me the opportunity.
ED: How long ago was it that you took that position?
BK: About 18 months ago.
ED: What do you think were the factors about you, or the personality traits about you that made you an attractive person to serve in this role?
BK: I think one of the key things is that the person be very approachable — that employees feel comfortable working out difficult issues. There is trustworthiness. There’s approachability. And there’s the ability to be a good communicator. The issues that you deal with in the ethics role can be very challenging, and it’s very important to be able to communicate effectively with all the layers of the organization that need to know about a topic or an issue.
ED: What types of issues are likely to be brought to you? How would they be brought to your attention? And how would you follow through on them?
BK: Regarding the method in which issues are brought to us, we have myself, and the local ethics officers, and employees are free to bring up an issue directly to any one of us. We have posters out at every one of our manufacturing facilities, in lots of different locations, that advertise the local ethics officer, with a picture of the local ethics officer, and a picture of me, so people can also call me directly. We also have a strictly anonymous option, in which people can call the General Dynamic hotline that we use across the entire General Dynamics organization.
ED: I would assume that in your role, anything that is brought to you is treated as confidential?
BK: They can choose to be anonymous, and if they do, a big part of my role is in protecting that confidentiality.
ED: Do you have issues brought to you from all levels of the organization, including managers?
BK: I do.
ED: Do you have authority to contact and communicate with anybody that you need to, in whatever area that might be, once something is brought to your attention?
BK: I certainly have the authority to contact and communicate with whoever I might need to in order to completely understand an issue. Once I have completed an investigation, I then provide recommendations to the appropriate leadership personnel.
ED: I would assume that in your role, you have been given the green light to talk to who you need to, and it is expected that people will be candid.
BK: That’s true. It is just a recommendation that I provide to the senior leaders, but then I make sure that we come to an agreement on the fair thing to do with the organization.
ED: Beyond worker-to-worker treatment, what other situations might lend themselves to the need to bring you into the picture?
BK: The majority of situations that we deal with are the worker-to-worker type situation. There are other legal or regulatory compliance concerns, or financial concerns regarding customers, and it’s important that we always do the right thing, so those areas come into play as well.
ED: Obviously a small company would have a difficult time putting someone full time into the role of ethics director. But for a company that really does have a lot of employees, and has that ability, based on your 18 months in the position now, what would be your recommendations to a company that wants to establish this as a new position?
BK: For any company, small or large, the important thing is just to have a defined program. It doesn’t have to be a full time person. There just has to be a way for people to bring up concerns, and there has to be a basic code of conduct, a basic way that we are going to operate.
ED: Is that something that companies generally do well?
BK: I think it’s an area that we all need to continue to work on and continuously improve. One way to really bring focus on the ethics program is to elevate the position. That’s how you can really set the tone for the organization, that this is an important thing that we’re all going to focus on, and provide the resources to make it happen.
ED: What do you do to train yourself and educate yourself to be successful in this role?
BK: First, before I get involved with anything I like to do a lot of research. There are a lot of places, both on the Internet and especially within the defense industry, on best practices of all the defense companies out there. These companies, when it comes to ethics and compliance, share their best practices very willingly with each other.
It’s called the DII — the Defense Industry Initiative on Ethics and Business Conduct. So I had a resource I could go to with what defense companies were doing in best practices in their ethics program. Then I looked around the Charlotte community, and started to speak with some of the people responsible for ethics at local companies, as well as at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
ED: When you started to do your research, were you encouraged or discouraged by what the research was revealing to you about what you could be expecting?
BK: I was very encouraged. And I got very excited about the position when I started to see some of the best practices out there, and some of the things that I could get into.
ED: Are there any awkward situations ever, where you need to approach a senior level executive or manager to discuss a matter that has been brought to your attention, and does it ever produce a cause of friction or tension?
BK: Yes, you could imagine that there might be difficult situations. But the key is just very effective communication. When I have an issue that is within one of the senior managers’ area I maintain the confidentiality of the individual involved. But I let the senior leader know right away what type of issue it is that I’m looking into, and the fact that I will be doing an investigation into their area. By making sure that the right people know what I am doing, I can avoid some of that uncomfortableness that can occur.
ED: Now that you’ve been in the role for 18 months, are there any situations that have come up that have really stumped or challenged you?
BK: For the most part the issues that I get are fairly black and white, where its pretty clear what the right thing, or the wrong thing was, and there are some established rules. But there have been two or three more challenging situations where determining just what the right thing to do is a matter of right-versus-right, rather than right-versus-wrong. Those are the ones that keep me up at night.
ED: Did you have an opportunity to network with other people in your role at the awards event last year?
BK: I did. It was in Philadelphia, and it was a very, very nice event. It was a very small event. There were three winning companies in the small, medium and large categories. I was able to have some nice discussions with the winners in the other categories. It was a very nice experience.
ED: What sorts of things were you hearing from your peers that they are experiencing and they have thoughts on?
BK: Well, we deal with a lot of very similar issues. When I get an opportunity to talk to my peers, it’s amazing how much we can learn from each other about different techniques of how to handle these situations and different ways to make the program more effective.
ED: We hear an awful lot of concern in the public about what is going on in business. They hear and read stories about Enron and constant corporate scandals. They wonder if the business schools are teaching ethics anymore, or, if we are producing uncaring people in the business community where ethics is not on their radar. What is your take in general about the business community and ethics, and how well they are practiced?
BK: Well I certainly see it more and more in the spot light. And I see more and more sharing of best practices. And I see more and more conference and training sessions, and companies out there that can help develop ethics programs. I think those are really good things. And I think they are mostly targeted at making sure that we have a culture at work where people are comfortable bringing up issue, and know where to go to bring up issues. If that is the focus, then it will just become part of business.
ED: Looking ahead for the next 12 months, in your personal role as ethics director, where do you see your attention being focused to improve the handling of ethics issues within your company, and to improve your program?
BK: One of the things that we also started about three years ago was something called Our Basic Beliefs — its sort of a set of nine beliefs that form the core values of our organization. Beliefs such as, we do what we say we will do; we are our customer’s trusted partner; we treat people fairly and with dignity — those are some of our core beliefs.
We established them about three years ago, and where I will be focused for the next 12 months is in making sure that those are the right core values for the organization, because we have changed some over the past three years. And then on making sure that it is clear to employees just what they can do to be consistent with the core values — what you can do as a manager, what you can do as an employee. If people know that you have some core values, and they understand what those core values are, they are able to make better business decisions every day.