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Contrary to popular belief, judgment can be taught. As I wrote in last week’s post, “Matters of Judgment Can Be Taught: Starting with Leader (Mis)Behavior”, most leaders know the rules, but some choose to disregard them, in a misguided belief that the same standards don’t apply to them, that they won’t be caught, or that their great value to the organization overrides any misdeeds.

Where ambiguous workplace issues are concerned, it has become even trickier to determine when certain behavior crosses a line or whether it is merely a nettlesome business issue that requires careful factual analysis and an examination of the issues within the broader context of multiple circumstances.

For years, I’ve heard people say that you can’t teach judgment. Admittedly, I’ve said it myself a few times.

However, I have recently realized that it’s just not true.

There are two basic areas where judgment in legal, ethical and values-based workplace behavior can be taught.

The first area involves instances of leader misbehavior, as we saw with HP CEO Mark Hurd or even more blatant instances where leaders fraudulently violate rules for their own personal interest or financial gain.

That was the question posed during a recent client meeting. How do we get people to care more about each other? How do we get people to be more engaged and trusting? How do we eradicate negative behaviors from our workplace and encourage a higher level of professionalism?

Watching our clients shake their heads in frustration and wonder out loud about why it was so hard to get people to change, I smiled . . . and waited.

When they grew quiet, I asked, “Do you remember the first time you used hand sanitizer?” Blank stares.

Some time ago, I had lunch with a colleague, a compliance officer for a widely known and respected organization who told me he’d spent several months reading almost one million emails as part of discovery in an employment case. Now he had only about 72,000 more emails to go.

During the discovery process, he reviewed executive correspondence, middle-manager emails, and exchanges between entry-level personnel. He discovered what certain people really thought about their team members, their jobs, roles and the company strategy. He read jokes, some proper and some not, and saw lots of exchanges that had no work purpose whatsoever.

Ask senior executives to assess the risk in a business matter and many will turn first to their lawyers for guidance. They’ll seek a legal opinion on topics ranging from employment decisions, to work practices, to product development, to financial transactions to manufacturing processes.

In our litigious society where legal costs and damages can be crippling, this makes sense.  Skilled lawyers can quickly identify legal hazards and readily find cases where bad outcomes occurred or were prevented.  They will also identify strategies for minimizing risk and lay out defenses which can be constructed to limit exposure.  

But my advice to organizational leaders is to rely on their legal experts with caution and in the proper context.  It’s dangerous to focus only on legal risk and potential limits on exposure alone, or to give them overarching precedence in looking at business issues. 

Miners used to carry a caged canary into new coal mines. As long as the canary kept singing, miners knew their air supply was safe. A dead canary signaled the need for an immediate evacuation.

The last canary disappeared from English coal mines in the late 1980s. Since then, miners have relied on inspections, instrumentation, regulation, administrative processes, complaint investigations, and their gut instincts to safeguard their lives.

Unlike human whistleblowers who often are ignored, called troublemakers, demoted, ostracized or fired, canaries send a clear and unmistakable signal of danger. With the recent tragedies at the Massey coal mine in West Virginia and the oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, it may be time to bring back the canaries or listen to employees or others whose voices deliver the same message, as I suggest in this brief  video.

Two ELI clients recently asked me, “What does your company offer to refresh the Civil Treatment^® learning we’ve just done?” or “What workplace ethics and compliance training should we provide next?”

In some cases, these questions are prompted by new regulatory initiatives such as the Department of Labor’s new Plan/Prevent/Protect compliance strategy. For these clients, the immediate solution may be Wage & Hour-FLSA training.

For other HR executives, the more important and fundamental question is “What can we do now?” rather than “What can we do next?”

I just read and watched William Shakespeare’s history play, Henry V. The story tells how Henry V led his Army through France in 1415, defeating a much larger force at Agincourt.

Tiger Woods is in sex rehab, Jay Leno is returning to Tonight, Curt Schilling loves the Yankees, and Johnson and Johnson is charged with kickbacks and failure to address product safety issues.

Gilbert Arenas is a great basketball player. Not only does he have super skills and talent, but let’s not underestimate his smarts as he’s mastered a game with rules as complex as the Uniform Commercial Code.

No matter what budget cutbacks or resource constraint we are faced with, one simple fact remains clear: It costs nothing for leaders to lead.

I recently facilitated a session for senior leaders of a public utility. In all ways, they were confident that they successfully lived by their values, with one exception: accountability.