Contrary to what you might believe lately, the National Football League does have an ethics & compliance program. What’s more, the program actually looks pretty good.
Except, of course, for that small bit about deciding to have high standards in the first place.
That is the flaw I see in the NFL’s handling of Ray Rice, its (former) star running back for the Baltimore Ravens who knocked his wife unconscious earlier this year. By now just about everyone knows of Rice’s misconduct, thanks to TMZ posting a security video of Rice punching his wife. His violence is appalling, and as soon as the video became public last week, the Ravens and the NFL both banned Rice from the league indefinitely, and hopefully forever. No word yet on whether prosecutors will now re-file charges against him. (Rice was indicted for assault in March, but given pretrial intervention and his case would be dismissed if he stays out of trouble for 12 months.)
Frankly, Rice and his misconduct are the easy part. The NFL Players Code of Personal Conduct is clear: “Criminal activity is clearly outside the scope of permissible conduct.” The code even lists several types of misconduct where just an arrest or indictment, without a conviction, is grounds for immediate dismissal. Domestic violence is the first listed. And let’s be honest: A company should not need to train its employees not to commit a felony. That should be assumed among reasonable human beings. If Rice had been an employee anywhere other than the NFL, he would have been fired immediately and the company done with him.
Eventually that’s what happened. Once the NFL faced public pressure amid the TMZ video, the league and the Ravens moved quickly to punish Rice. In other words, the NFL has the mechanism to impose a high standard of conduct swiftly and effectively.
The problem is that the NFL didn’t take that action for many months. Rice cold-cocked his wife back in the spring, and at the time the League suspended him for two games. Only when TMZ posted the video of Rice punching his wife, causing outrage across the country, did the NFL cut him loose like a bad tryout in summer training camp.
That’s a problem of organizational culture and values. It’s a problem of leadership, including NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and the 32 NFL team owners. It is a problem of financial interests overruling ethical values.
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Last year I wrote a column about the difference between core values and core priorities. Core values are easy; they are the words on the mission statement posted in the breakroom, about integrity, honesty, passion, and the like. Core priorities are what the business wants to do, and they can test a company’s commitment to its core values severely. Or in the case of the NFL, they can show that your commitment to core values isn’t worth the paper those values are printed on.
The conflicting priorities here are clear: protecting the brand value of the NFL, versus enforcing a high standard of conduct for a very public business. All evidence points to the NFL instinctively pursuing the former at the expense of the latter. Or if you want to view the NFL’s problems through the lens of the COSO framework, it fails to meet the very first principle of internal control—demonstrating a commitment to integrity and ethical values. The NFL has demonstrated a commitment to protecting its brand value.
Even more depressing, the NFL has demonstrated that priority of brand value time and time again, as it keeps mishandling one case of player misconduct after another. (Already Ray Rice is old news, displaced by Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson indicted last week on charges of child abuse.) The NFL struggles all the time with the question of how to discipline or fire errant employees, and that is a symptom of a dysfunctional culture. At organizations with a strong commitment to ethical culture, the question is wholly different: How do we hire the right employees in the first place?
If compliance officers want to use Ray Rice and the NFL as a teachable moment, it is a rare opportunity—the lessons here are really more applicable for the CEO and the board, more than rank and file employees. You do not need to train employees that committing a felony is misconduct. You don’t even need to spend much time telling them that ethical behavior should trump pursuit of profits; most employees want to behave ethically rather than close a big deal through improper means.
For the CEO and the board, however, the conflicting pressures of maximizing brand value and enforcing strong ethical behavior is something they grapple with all the time. How do they decide when pursuit of profit starts to work against a strong culture? How do they articulate their commitment to good conduct to employees? How do they articulate that to the public, so people who want to work there know that if you beat your wife or your child, don’t even bother to apply no matter how good you are?
Ponder those questions, if you ponder any. The NFL, alas, should start doing the same.
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