Marshaling Integrity - Rodney Smith

These excerpts are taken from our interview of Rodney Smith, a former in-house environmental, health, safety and ethics analyst.

I would say a nice chunk of my time is done for training. I do business law and ethics training, though not comprehensively; I just get into a few of the topics, including Harassment Prevention, Foreign Corrupt Practices, Copyright Compliance, and Environmental Law. The majority of my educational emphasis is Environmental, Safety and Health, so occupational health, safety and environmental is what I specialize in. In addition to training, I do a lot of procedure writing, auditing. Those are my three primary roles: auditor, policy and trainer (to make sure they uphold the policies).

They definitely have to be open-minded. A huge mistake would be to be close-minded, not willing to change, because you are going to be challenged, constantly. If you come up with a solution or program you think will work, there are always going to be people that tell you it won’t. They’ll have good reasons why, and you need to be able to defend yourself without being close-minded. You have to be really open-minded to all possible alternatives. There are a lot of ways to approach any single problem, and a lot of solutions. You have to be extremely creative with some of the solutions when it comes to compliance. Especially when the law’s not entirely defined. It’s not always concise; it doesn’t tell you what to do. It just leaves it open-ended, sometimes. So in situations like that, the person has to be willing to work with other people, be a team player and be open-minded. Always open.

Rodney Smith's interview appears in both Working for Integrity and Building a Career in Compliance and Ethics.

(All interviewees spoke to us about their own personal experiences and opinions; interviewees were not acting as a spokesperson or otherwise representing their current or former employers.)