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On the podcast, we talked about Why Leaders Should Understand Privacy.

Here’s a summary of our discussion.

Privacy is Good For Business!

Privacy applies to every leader in every business. We each have personal information in our businesses. It might be information about our employees, our volunteers, or our directors. It might be information about clients and customers, our business partners, and our business suppliers. We each have sensitive information about our business.

When leaders understand privacy, you have privacy practices in place including good written policies and procedures about how you will collect, use, and disclose personal information you will be able to make sure that you are meeting regulatory compliance. Written policies and procedures makes it easy to consistently onboard employees and volunteers in a consistent way to confidently and properly manage personal information in your business.

Avoid Fines, Penalties, Charges, Time-Sucking Notification Process and Even Jail!

When you have written policies and procedures in place and you provide privacy awareness training to your staff, you can avoid fines, penalties, charges, and time sucking notification process and even jail time!

We've seen recently in the Desjardins data breach in July 2019 where an employee–somebody that was trusted within that organization—who had access to client banking and financial information improperly used that information for their financial gain. This included access to client’s name, address, date of birth, and the social insurance number and other really sensitive financial information. Apparently, because this employee wasn't happy with where they worked, they shared sensitive personal information inappropriately. This breach has affected tens of thousands of clients and individuals in Canada and it's being talked about in emergency session of parliament.

This is an absolute financial disaster for any large business because you know 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 in this kind of thing.

But maybe it's even more important for the smaller business. That one privacy breach is going to have a huge impact the amount of time and reputation of your business. If you also receive a fine of, say, $200,000, well I don't know many small businesses that can absorb that in a business financial cycle.

When You Understand Privacy, You Make Better Business Decisions!

When you have good privacy practices in your business, you will make sure to also select the best vendors who can work with you that also demonstrate their knowledge and support about privacy practices. You can build privacy practices into your business contracts and your agreements. This will also help you to grow your business reputation and attract better business partners and business suppliers and better clients and customers for your organization.

I've put together a checklist for you about the 10 key steps to prevent a privacy breach.

Download the checklist and make sure that you implement these best practices in your business.

Check out the Meeting Leadership Podcast here!