Risk, Liability and How to Strengthen Your Brand Against Them

Today's front-pages are covered with events that hold Leaders accountable for events that occurred in their organisations. However, it often would have just taken a few simple proactive awareness sessions, better leadership decisions and policies to potentially save careers, millions of dollars lost, brand names or an individual's health and well-being.

Boards and CEO's have always been accountable for what happens in their organisations. But now, more than ever, it seems that individuals are being held liable rather than overarching bodies.

Deaths in the workplace, serious injuries, sexual harassment or physical attacks are no longer tolerated by the courts, the public or the commercial customer. And more and more departments such as ASIC and the courts seek to hold individuals accountable through goal terms, hefty fines and termination from employment or Board positions. While, simultaneously, the image a company takes years to develop, and nurture is destroyed in seconds.

So, how can this be prevented? How can we take action to address risk and liability and prevent avoidable crises from happening? Well, there are several ways.

The first step to addressing liability and risk is to find where the problem may potentially lie. A Governance and Risk Audit can take less than 8 hours to conduct but can provide you with peace of mind that your organisation is in a strong position to withstand an event that you cannot possibly predict will or will not happen.

When it comes to addressing company-wide liability and strengthening your company against it, training, delegations of authority, induction and compliance programs, performance review systems, individual competence assessments, and sound organisation constitutions are the way forward for boards and CEOs to commence getting the balance right for their organisations.

For individual liability and risk, this is where Individual Knowledge and appropriate Systems come into play. These systems are designed to be put in place to limit precisely these kinds of individual exposures, which lead to liability risks that can leave a business in ruin.

Risk and liability are inevitable parts of business, but that doesn't mean they aren't preventable. If you would like to know more or are interested in any of these services for your business, don't hesitate to get in touch today.