Importance of ‘Feeling Heard,’ Yet Again
By now most people have heard that grand juries in Washington and Chicago are declining to indict people arrested for anti-ICE protests. The political subtext here is that juries in Democratic regions won’t indict people arrested by the Trump Administration. What does that tell us about the breakdown in cultural norms within large organizations?
That question has been on my mind since a recent post by Todd Haugh, business law professor at Indiana University and superb thinker on corporate crime enforcement issues. Haugh made the excellent point that if the United States slips into “red” and “blue” grand juries depending on where a case is filed, that’s not good for federal enforcement of white-collar crime — because federal law enforcement should, as much as possible, follow one single standard for charging decisions from coast to coast.
For example, could grand juries in blue states stand ready to indict a gun company executive for fraud, but red state juries won’t? What about a cryptocurrency executive, since the crypto industry is in bed with the Trump Administration like a married couple on their wedding night? Would that make a grand jury in Chicago more likely to indict, and another in Miami less? If Democrats win the White House in 2028 and begin a corporate misconduct crackdown, would firms in Texas or Arkansas stand a better chance of avoiding accountability than others in Massachusetts or New York?
Corporate legal and compliance teams can see the potential headaches that might arise from all this. If we stumble into a world of politicized grand juries, you might need to worry more about which U.S. districts have jurisdiction over you and where your riskiest lines of business are located. And if politicized grand juries become a thing, politicized trial juries will too, and then jury nullification becomes mainstream legal strategy.
Fascinating stuff, and Haugh is right to raise the issue — but ethics and compliance professionals have a few more immediate points to ponder about social divisions and corporate misconduct.
Power Dynamics and Feeling Heard
We should start by thinking about how the public perceives corporate misconduct generally. I would submit that rather than viewing it through a left versus right political lens, most people view corporate misconduct through a top versus bottom power lens.
So I’m not particularly worried whether a “red” or “blue” grand jury will or won’t indict an executive for corporate misconduct. I worry that a grand jury of aggrieved citizens will always indict a corporate titan accused of misconduct no matter how weak the facts; or won’t indict some nutjob who tries to blow up an office or shoot a CEO on the street.
The real issue here is how people — regular people, who work for a living and worry about their livelihoods and sit on grand juries — can feel like they have some sort of agency over events in their lives.
That’s the through line between Haugh’s fears of left-versus-right juries and my fears of top-versus-down ones. We both worry that people are seething with anger at forces larger than them (the Trump Administration, impersonal corporations, highfalutin billionaires), and are ready to strike back with whatever tools they have at their disposal.
Well, why do people get so frustrated with organizations larger than them? That’s easy: because people don’t feel heard. They don’t believe the large organizations are listening to them.
That’s clearly true of the Trump Administration, whose operating principle seems to be that beatings will continue until morale improves. Trump and his henchmen aren’t interested in persuading people to move toward certain policy goals; they’re interested in imposing their policy goals on people, like it or not. In that case, why wouldn’t grand juries in blue states start declining to indict? It’s the only way they can exercise agency against an organization that’s lost all sense of leadership and proportion.
The question that ethics and compliance officers should ask (that all senior executives and the board should ask, really) is to what extent does a similar dysfunction exist within your company? To what extent do employees not “feel heard,” and where does that disconnect come from? And then, how might frustrated employees then lash out at your business for ignoring their concerns?
Spaces for Speaking Up Strengthen Culture
What we’re really talking about here is how to get all members of your organization — employees of a corporation; citizens of a country — to feel like they’re all on the same side. Everyone feels that they can trust one another, and are all moving in roughly the same direction. Everyone feels that when questions or concerns arise, those issues can be resolved in some way that the whole group will find at least tolerable, if not perfect.
That’s the corporate culture every CEO wants. That’s the culture ethics and compliance teams should be striving to build. And you can’t do it without developing mechanisms for employees to feel heard.
Partly that takes the form of specific channels, such as hotlines or suggestion boxes. Mostly, however, it takes the form of senior leaders demonstrating an eagerness to listen, to receive feedback, and to engage in dialogue to find a fact-driven way forward to the company’s objectives. Senior leaders need to demonstrate all that listening capacity; and they need to hire middle managers who also demonstrate listening capacity.
That’s what is missing from the Trump Administration, so no wonder all its objectives are a mess and no wonder that grand juries and citizens as a whole just aren’t taking it — but there are plenty of ways corporate cultures can avoid the mistakes he’s making.