Shelina Ajani’s keen knowledge of ethics, management, and compliance inspired more than 500 managers at Colgate-Palmolive to embrace an ambitious ethics and compliance outreach program she created.
Ajani, director of Global Ethics and Compliance at Colgate-Palmolive, and Compliance Week’s 2025 Rising Star Award winner, doesn’t believe in having employees memorize ethics policies.
Her goal is for them to remember to pause and seek out their manager or otherwise speak up when “the rubber hits the road,” and they are faced with an ethical gray area, she said.
“Even though we talk about regulations and policies, ultimately it’s people, culture and trust” that creates a day-to-day ethical environment, Ajani said.
Ajani “is a trusted advisor who brings clarity to complexity,” Earl Rattray, Colgate-Palmolive’s senior vice president, Global Ethics and Compliance, said in his nomination of Ajani for the award.
“She is recognized for her moral courage and her ability to surface uncomfortable issues, advocating for the right course of action before risks materialize. She combines analytical rigor with a global mindset, anticipating how compliance must evolve to meet emerging regulatory and cultural challenges,” Rattray said.
Winning Compliance Week’s Rising Star award is “a powerful validation of how we approach ethics and compliance at Colgate-Palmolive. It’s less about my individual contributions and more about my philosophy that compliance is a business enabler,” Ajani said.
It also validates Ajani’s significant shift in career, when, six-and-a-half years ago, she moved out of finance and consulting and took a chance on the ethics and compliance field, and joined Colgate-Palmolive.
“I absolutely love my job and always have since I started,” Ajani said. “Too often, compliance is a policing function. It should be an integrated model that moves the compliance function from behind-the-scenes into the daily flow of work.”
This past year, she created an ethics and compliance engagement program in which middle managers throughout the company were encouraged to hold discussions with their reports about ethical issues relevant to their particular positions in the company.
Ajani’s group provided a toolkit, including 32 ethical scenarios, about speak-ups, artificial intelligence, harassment, bribery, code violations, conflicts of interest, and more, which included actual situations that employees had encountered at Colgate-Palmolive and that Ajani’s group anonymized. The toolkit included up to three questions about each scenario for the managers to ask their employees, to spur discussions.
But the leaders ran their own sessions and chose which materials to use, based on what applied to their units and their employees. They weren’t required to follow a traditional model of a staff meeting. They could engage with their employees in a way that made sense to them.
In fact, they didn’t have to hold the sessions at all: they were not mandatory.
“Sometimes conversations can feel like a corporate mandate from the top. We wanted managers to own it,” Ajani said.
Her efforts resulted in 535 leaders holding discussions that reached 12,150 people and an impressive 81 percent participation rate.
The idea was to empower the managers around ethics and compliance, she said.
Focusing on the managers, who are often employees’ first point of contact when they have a question or concern about an ethical issue, was key.
“We got resounding feedback that they loved these sessions,” she said.
The program, which started as a pilot in 2024 and was then scaled in 2025, used Colgate-Palmolive’s Ethics Month as extra motivation.
Managers who hadn’t yet held a session were told that Ethics Month was coming up, and that it would be a great time to hold an ethical session then, Ajani says. In 2026, the program is being expanded to include senior leaders.
“What distinguishes Shelina is her understanding that a truly effective compliance function is not one that simply ‘polices,’ but one that inspires local ownership and integrates integrity into the daily flow of work across a global organization,” Rattray said.
Ajani sees herself in a larger leadership role in the future, as the growth of artificial intelligence in compliance means less reliance on lagging indicators and more “predicting where the pressure points are and where you may need to focus.”
“From the outside, we may be viewed as the Department of No. But I view it as the Department of Know, as in knowing how to do things the right way,” she said.
Her enthusiasm for ethics and compliance came through loud and clear in even a short conversation.
“When you start to really open the hood and create engagement activities or programs that touch people where they are, they start to find trust in the program, that’s where you find the magic happens,” Ajani said.
