Today’s boards are demanding more from their ethics and compliance (E&C) teams. As regulatory complexity increases for most companies and corporate risks evolve, directors don’t just want to know that compliance programs exist, or a quick summary of hotline reports from the last quarter, they want clear, data-driven insights that help shape corporate strategy, reduce risk, and enhance ethical leadership.
Findings from The State of Board Effectiveness in 2025 by Board Intelligence highlight a major disconnect between the data boards receive and the insights they need. LRN’s 2025 Ethics & Compliance Program Effectiveness Report reinforces that high-performing compliance teams are already leveraging benchmarking and advanced analytics to meet these demands, while others risk falling behind, and the gap is getting bigger.
The takeaway? Boards don’t need more compliance data, per se, they just need better insights. Leaders who embrace benchmarking, trend analysis, and real-time reporting can bridge this gap and transform compliance into a driver of strategic decision-making.
Beyond compliance metrics: what boards really want
For many organizations, board engagement with ethics and compliance is still heavily focused on traditional reporting metrics like hotline complaints, training completion rates, and policy updates. While these indicators are important, they often fail to provide a forward-looking view of risk. They are merely numbers that don’t hold any context for a busy board and Board Intelligence’s research highlights the growing demand for compliance leaders to provide real-time, predictive insights, rather than just historical data. LRN’s research findings reinforce this, showing that:
- High-impact E&C programs are 1.9x more likely to use benchmarking data to measure effectiveness and drive improvements and are and 1.3x more likely to report benchmarks and external comparisons to their board.
- Organizations with strong compliance analytics programs are better at identifying misconduct trends, with 63% of high-impact programs leverage misconduct trend analysis, compared to just 33% of mid-tier programs.
Benchmarking: the key to transparency and data-driven compliance
One of the clearest ways compliance leaders can strengthen board oversight is through benchmarking, demonstrating their ability to compare ethics and compliance performance against peers and industry standards. LRN’s research underscores how critical this is with those high-impact programs prioritizing benchmarking data as a critical tool for evaluating their effectiveness. Benchmarking was the top-ranked priority for high-impact programs, with 43% identifying “benchmarking our E&C program against other organizations’ practices” as a critical enhancement, compared to 31% for medium-impact and 27% for low-impact programs.
Bridging the disconnect between boards and leadership
One of the starkest findings from the Board Intelligence report is the disconnect between what senior leaders believe they are communicating and what the board understands. Too often board materials on ethics and compliance are either too high-level to be useful or too dense to be actionable. The LRN 2025 Report reinforces this misalignment, but from within organizations’ management and operating teams. A 42-point gap exists between executive leadership and middle management on whether ethical decisions are made consistently with company values. Meanwhile, frontline employees, especially Gen Z workers, express growing skepticism about managerial fairness, signaling potential cultural risks that boards may not even be aware of.
Bridging this gap requires E&C leaders to shift from static reporting to dynamic insight-sharing. Instead of overwhelming the board with compliance metrics, organizations can:
- Provide trends over time: show how key risks and cultural indicators are evolving rather than presenting a quarterly snapshot.
- Use real-time dashboards and visualizations: present data in a way that allows boards to explore risk trends interactively.
- Make the board’s role in compliance clear: ensure directors understand how their decisions impact compliance outcomes.
From oversight to action: helping the board lead with data
The findings from both our research and the insights from the Board Intelligence report make one thing clear: boards don’t just want to oversee compliance; they want to lead with it. But to do so effectively, they need better, more actionable insights from E&C leaders.
For compliance professionals, this means evolving their role from reporting function to strategic advisor. Instead of simply sharing compliance updates, they can help the board:
- Identify where cultural risks are emerging, before they turn into crises.
- Prioritize compliance resources where they are needed most, based on data-driven insights rather than assumptions.
- Take a more active role in shaping ethical leadership, ensuring that company values are reflected in day-to-day decision-making.
With the right data, E&C leaders can turn compliance from a reactive function into a forward-looking driver of corporate integrity. As boards continue to demand sharper insights, the organizations that embrace benchmarking, analytics, and real-time reporting will be the ones best positioned to meet these expectations and build a stronger culture of ethics and accountability in the process.
With a refined, intuitive interface and insights-first analytics, our enhanced Catalyst Reveal solution simplifies dynamic data exploration for E&C leaders and provides organizations with real-time, actionable insights to manage risk and measure, improve, and demonstrate the impact of compliance programs. Developed with collaborative feedback from LRN’s community of leading E&C executives, Catalyst Reveal addresses critical gaps in existing analytics solutions. Compliance teams today face pressure to prove program effectiveness and impact, anticipate emerging risks, and streamline reporting for leadership and regulators. Catalyst Reveal was strategically designed to tackle these challenges, providing a seamless, insights-first experience tailored to the unique workflows of compliance professionals.
