By Rebekah Mintzer , Corporate Counsel

When people tell you they are looking for the CCO, they don’t necessarily mean the chief compliance officer anymore. A new position, “chief culture officer,” has emerged at some companies, including Google Inc. and Zappos.com Inc., but not everyone is in love with the idea.

The question of whether a chief culture officer can keep a company successful and ethical arose at Ethisphere Institute’s eighth annual Global Ethics Summit, held in New York City this week. The event brings C-suite leaders together to discuss important ethics and compliance issues.

During a panel on building better corporate values and ethics, moderator Jean-Marc Levy, president of the ethics and compliance firm LRN Corp., pointed out that companies, most recently Sea World Entertainment Inc., have hired chief culture officers to lead the charge in building an ethical culture. These culture officers help with oversight of employee ethics and compliance and help manage companies’ operations and human capital.

One of the panelists, Melissa Stapleton Barnes, chief ethics and compliance officer at Eli Lilly and Co., said that while she’s all in favor of elevating the role of ethics within an organization, it would be “naïve” to believe that one person can hold the key to culture.

“I think it’s an impossible job in many respects because culture by definition is the sum of its parts,” she said. “Everyone has to be a chief culture officer.”

Other panel members were more welcoming of the idea. One proponent was Robert Bostrom, general counsel at Abercrombie & Fitch Co. (a company that, not unlike Sea World, is seeking to improve its image and better its ethics and compliance policies). “Someone needs to coordinate those efforts as you try to transform your brand,” Bostrom said.

At Abercrombie, there is a “small committee” that operates a bit like a chief culture officer, Bostrom said. But empowering a single person to lead these efforts “wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing,” he said.

The benefits of a chief culture officer will really vary from company to company, said panelist Brian Beeghly, Johnson Controls Inc.’s vice president of compliance. “Maybe in a twist of irony, it depends upon the [existing] culture as to whether or not a position like that is the right thing to create,” he said.

IMAGE: zennie / iStock

Read more: http://www.corpcounsel.com/id=1202751836937/Do-Companies-Need-Culture-Chiefs#ixzz42i9Axukx