FULL TRANSCRIPT

00:00 – Show Opening

Are you a professional who wants to become a more effective leader? Then get ready for daily tips from the coach with the experience and inspiration to help you succeed in any leadership situation. You’re listening to the Meeting Leadership podcast with Gordon Sheppard.

00:27 – Start Here – Podcast content starts here!

Gordon Sheppard Speaking

Welcome to another episode of the Meeting Leadership podcast. My name is Gordon Sheppard. Honestly, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for being the type of professional who wants to tune up their leadership skills. Thank you for choosing this podcast as the place where you’re going to find the things that you can take action to do just that. If you’re a leader in your organization, tell me if you’d like to avoid these things, headaches, fines, even going to jail. Well, today, we’re going to help you avoid all of those things because today we’re going to talk about why leaders should understand privacy.

01:03 – Jean L. Eaton – Introduction

We’ve got a great guest expert on. Her name is Jean L. Eaton, and she’s going to help you as a leader dig in to the main reasons you want to know, to actually really pay attention to something that is so often ignored in so many organizations, but these days in the headlines, of course we hear the disasters when there’s a privacy breach or that kind of thing. I’m not going to hold you back any longer. Let’s get right to the great interview with Jean L. Eaton.

Gordon Sheppard:    Jean L. Eaton, it’s great to have you here on the show. You’ve been just a wonderful colleague, and I know the impact of the work that you do for so many professionals is super high. This episode that we’re about to do by getting you to be able to bring out the best in your privacy, professionalism is going to be a massive, massive impact. Welcome to the show.

Jean L. Eaton:      Thank you, Gord. I’m excited to be here with you today.

Gordon Sheppard:    Jean, I’ve mentioned a few things about you already but many people don’t know you. Take a second to introduce yourself for the folks who don’t.

Jean L. Eaton:      My name is Jean Eaton. I’m the practical privacy coach and practice management mentor with Information Managers. I help primary care practice managers and health care providers properly manage the risk of a privacy breach, stay out of jail, avoid fines, and keep an effective practice.

Gordon Sheppard:    Before this episode, we spoke about this really important topic that we’re going to tackle today, and that is why leaders should understand privacy. When it comes to this topic, Jean, what’s the first thing that you want leaders to know?

02:29 – Why Leaders Should Understand Privacy Reason #1 – Good for business

Jean L. Eaton:      First of all, privacy is good for business. Now, we all have personal information in our businesses. It might be information about our employees, our volunteers, our directors. It might be information about clients and customers, our business partners, and our business suppliers. We all have sensitive information about our business, so privacy applies to you. When you have privacy practices in place, you’ve got good policies and that are written that are going to allow you to collect, use and disclose personal information with confidence and to make sure that you’re meeting regulatory compliance, when you’ve got efficient business practices that makes it easy to consistently onboard employees and volunteers in a consistent way to make sure that they know what they need to have in place to be able to reflect properly on your business.

Gordon Sheppard:    Boy, I think about the employees in those moments when they hit open on the wrong thing, and I’m then the business owner that’s got to take care of that, or if I think about some of the large institutions that have been hit by somebody not understanding the privacy policy, not understanding what they should be doing, and suddenly you’re just in a world of trouble. That leads us into the second thing that we were talking about before the show, which is just avoiding all kinds of trouble.

03:50 – Why Leaders Should Understand Privacy Reason #2 – Avoid trouble like fines and jail time

Jean L. Eaton:      Absolutely. When you’ve got those written policies and procedures in place and you’ve provided the training to your staff, you can avoid fines and penalties, charges and time fucking notification process and even jail time. We’ve seen recently in the Desjardins breach in July of 2019 where an employee, somebody that was trusted within that organization had access to client information, banking and financial information and improperly used that. They’ve got their name, address, date of birth, and the social insurance number, and other really sensitive financial information.

Jean L. Eaton:      Because this employee wasn’t happy with where they were, they shared that information inappropriately. It’s affecting tens of thousands of clients and individuals in Canada, and it’s being talked about in emergency sessions of parliament. This is big stuff.

Gordon Sheppard:    This is an absolute financial disaster for any large business, because immediately, just the marketing goodwill impact alone, it takes, what, a million years to build up your business in an hour to tear it down and this kind of thing.

Jean L. Eaton:      Well, it’s important for big businesses, but maybe it’s even more important for the smaller business because if you’ve got that one privacy breach that is going to impact the amount of time and reputation and work that you’ve got in place and you’ve got a minimum fine of $200,000, well, I don’t know many small businesses that can suck that up in a business financial cycle.

05:17 – Why Leaders Should Understand Privacy Reason #3 – Grow your reputation and profitability

Gordon Sheppard:    Well, and that leads to your third point, which is knowing privacy from a leadership perspective is absolutely the best way to make better business decisions.

Jean L. Eaton:      It is. When you have good privacy practices in your business, you want to make sure that the business suppliers and vendors that you’re working with also have good business practices because you’re only as strong as your weakest link. It helps you to select the best vendors who can work with you that also demonstrate their knowledge and support about privacy practices. You can build that into your business contracts and your agreements, and then you get a better reputation in your business network. A better reputation in your business network means that you’re going to attract better business partners, business suppliers, and better clients and customers for your organization.

06:08 – Why Leaders Should Understand Privacy – Recap

Gordon Sheppard:    Ultimately, that leads to profitability, so we can see the connection now very clearly with your good advice between knowing privacy, why a leader should know, and understand privacy and actually being more profitable in the end. I’m just going to take a second to pull this together and recap your three key points. The first thing that you said is that privacy, knowing it and putting it in place, is good for business. You can then avoid all kinds of problems including avoiding going to jail, which would be a disaster, of course, for any leader. Finally, when you bundle this all together for the impact that good privacy processes have, it’s actually a better way to make business decisions. Is there a last thing you want people to know before we let you go?

06:48 – Free Checklist – https://informationmanagers.ca/10-key-steps-prevent-a-privacy-breach/

Jean L. Eaton:      I’ve put together a checklist for your audience, Gord, about the 10 key steps to prevent a privacy breach. You can download that checklist and make sure that you implemented these best practices in your business.

Gordon Sheppard:    Where can people get the checklist?

Jean L. Eaton:      You can get the checklist at informationmanagers.ca/10keysteps. That’s a number 10 key steps.

Gordon Sheppard:    I think that’s going to be must read for any of the leaders that have taken this in and so many more people after that. Hopefully they’ll pass it along too. Jean, you’ve given great information. If anybody needs to get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do that?

07:27 – Practice Management Nuggets Podcast – https://practicemanagementnuggets.live/

Jean L. Eaton:      I have a podcast too, so you can catch me on your favorite podcast catcher at practicemanagementnuggets.live.

Gordon Sheppard:    Practicemanagementnuggets.live, that information will be on the show notes. Jean, it has been absolutely valuable to have you here on the show today. Thanks for being here.

Jean L. Eaton:      Thank you, Gord.

07:47 – Conclusion

Gordon Sheppard:    Didn’t that interview make it so clear that this privacy issue is something that you have to get at right away? It’s the kind of thing where you need to take action to actually improve your business overall, not a cost, something to take advantage of. Now that you understand the why, now, it’s time to learn the what. If you’d like to do that, you can listen to Jean L. Eton again in episode 45 of the Meeting Leadership podcast. The title of that episode is What Leaders Need to Know to Start a Privacy Program. You can get that by going to meetingleadershipinc.com/45.

08:22 – Meeting Leadership Academy – https://meetingleadershipinc.com/academy

Gordon Sheppard:    I also want to let you know that this episode or the Meeting Leadership podcast is brought to you by the Meeting Leadership Academy. If you want great live training and online training options to become an outstanding meeting leader, then visit meetingleadershipinc.com/academy to learn more. As always, I’m really glad that you could join me here on the show today, and we’ll see you tomorrow on the Meeting Leadership podcast.

08:46 – Podcast Outro

Thanks for listening to the Meeting Leadership podcast. Be sure to subscribe for more strategies to help you become an outstanding leader, and don’t forget to rate and review so we can bring you fresh content every day. We’ll see you tomorrow right here on the Meeting. Leadership podcast.