Unstoppable People - Nicole Cuadrado - Director - Ethics Compliance and Social Responsibility

Milliken’s Unstoppable People series highlights Milliken & Company associates who guide us to success and embody our values: integrity, excellence, innovation, sustainability, and people.

Nicole’s Unstoppable Journey

I attended Converse University, and then I went to law school at the University of South Carolina. After law school, I joined Nelson, Mullins, Riley, and Scarborough, where I worked as an employment and business litigation attorney. I served on their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee, chaired their Greenville office women’s network, and provided pro bono legal aid for unaccompanied minors living in South Carolina.

From there, I transitioned in-house to Regional Management Corp., a publicly held finance company. When I was at Regional, I worked as their employment counsel and then took on a formal human resources role in 2020 as their head of diversity, equity, inclusion. The role had a lot of exposure to their Board of Directors, who were truly invested in change, which made it a positive learning experience.

When the opportunity to lead the ethics, compliance, and social responsibility strategy at Milliken came up, I saw it as a chance to apply my employment law background in an expanded way. I advise our company leaders and individual stakeholders on how to operate in a socially responsible way. Ethics and business conduct includes how we treat our people, prioritize a safe work environment, and realize our impacts in our communities .

What does your role look like?

My role spans many areas such as anticorruption and human rights and requires a lot of collaboration with others. Ethics and compliance start with policies. Our foundation is the code of conduct, and we bring those values to life in our day-to-day practices through training, our communication strategies, monitoring and auditing our practices, and reporting on our progress publicly for transparency and accountability. Our commitments and practices have continued to expand globally with a focus across our value chain. It is crucial, as Milliken continues to expand operations around the globe, that we are coming in with a global lens to mitigate human rights and environmental risks and manage third-party risks which is where my role comes in to guide our governance and strategy.

What does it mean for us to prioritize ethics?

Milliken prioritizes ethics across every pillar of our business and doing business the right way is how we lead from the top down. It is important to have leadership that wants to succeed the right way. It makes my job easier, honestly, to have senior and operational leadership support ethics. It is important for us to do business the right way because it is how we positively impact others.

What does the World’s Most Ethical Companies® (WME) application process look like?

The WME questionnaire covers 240 questions over 9 sections along with document requests to evaluate our governance, ethics culture, communications, training, monitoring, and commitment to external reporting. Last year, they dedicated a new section to third-party management which shows the growing expectation that business conduct goes beyond our own operations.

I partner with around 20 to 25 stakeholders from our Sustainability Council which includes compliance leaders from human resources, finance, security, sourcing, internal audit, IT, and marketing from across our businesses to complete the WME application. It is a team effort to make sure our application is accurate and the best representation of how Milliken's programming works on a day-to-day basis. 

Why do we still continue to prioritize this award?

Ethisphere’s World’s Most Ethical Companies® recognition provides a great benchmark for our ethics program. The other frameworks we follow are valuable in evaluating our environmental and labor commitments, but none go as deep on ethical practices as Ethisphere. We can evaluate how our ethics programming compares against our peers in the manufacturing space, other honorees, and applicants globally.

And we also get access to resources available through Ethisphere’s benchmarking platform, which is valuable to keep up with DOJ guidance, best practices, and emerging trends. We are continuously evaluating and monitoring how to improve, not just checking the box once the application is submitted. We are committed to providing an ethical and positive work environment for our associates.

What does being recognized as a World’s Most Ethical company mean?

We are one of six honorees that have received this recognition for all 18 years, and we are one of 136 total honorees in 2024. It means we are doing something right and thanks to all the data we get from Ethisphere, we know where we need to put in the work to improve. And our Board of Directors and leadership team appreciate the awareness it creates of where we can improve as a company and continue to follow best practices. It is an incredibly difficult application in terms of resourcing and volume of documents, but it is very much worth the effort with all the value we get out of it, not only in the celebration with associates that made valuable contributions, but all the resulting data and improvement opportunities.

What do you like about working at Milliken?

I appreciate the accountability and collaboration between our associates and the management team. My job depends on other stakeholders being invested in the outcome of ethics programming. I cannot launch Awareness in Ethics and Compliance training or submit to World's Most Ethical without their support and contributions. There is a lot that I could not do without other’s buy-in and taking time out of their day to help advise me on their practices and areas of expertise. I appreciate the individual stakeholders on our safety, sourcing, security, finance, information technology and security, human resources, and internal audit teams for their accountability, partnership, and commitment to improvement. I never feel like I am on an island at Milliken.

Tell me what makes you unstoppable?

I have a personal drive and passion for ethics and social responsibility. It may sound nerdy to some, but I genuinely do care about the impact we have as a business. I understand money is what makes the world go ‘round’ and keeps the lights on, but it is also important to realize our business impacts.  It is important that we do business the right way to benefit others and not just ourselves. As long as we maintain that mindset and awareness, we can make positive changes and move in the right direction which makes Milliken – and myself – unstoppable.

Want to join our team of #UnstoppablePeople? Visit our careers webpage to learn more about your next opportunity.

Do you know an Unstoppable Person you’d like to recognize? Nominate them at [email protected].