Do your responsibilities and duties seem to change with the wind?
Do your leaders all have a different idea of what your job is?
Ellen Hunt, Melanie Sponholz, and Adam Belfour explored the issue of Scope Creep at the SCCE Ethics and Compliance Institute. Highlights of their session are captured in this latest article:
Watch out for compliance program ‘scope creep’
The “boiling frog effect” suggests that a frog placed in warm water that is gradually increased to a boil will not realize what is going on until it is too late. The gradual, incremental changes result in a cumulative impact that brings serious and damaging consequences.
“Scope creep” is similar to the boiling frog effect and is something that ethics and compliance professionals need to be on the lookout for and carefully manage to ensure that ever-increasing responsibilities and workloads do not result in serious and damaging consequences for the ethics and compliance program, the organization, other employees, or the ethics and compliance practitioner (both professionally and personally).
In this article, we will explain what scope creep is, how to intentionally choose opportunities that will provide for good outcomes, and how to effectively say “no” to others.
While we frequently refer to the chief ethics and compliance officer (CECO) in this article, we believe scope creep is an issue for many ethics and compliance professionals, so our guidance applies to all professionals.
