Risk and Audit Practitioners: Stop Wasting Leaders' Time

We can all agree that our top executives are very busy. Their days (and often their evenings and weekends) are consumed by meetings, both virtual and in-person.

I once asked a division president where he spent his time (because I wanted to make sure my audit plan addressed the areas of concern to him), and he said he was usually running from one fire to the next. In fact, he said that the hour or so he spent with me on my periodic visits was the only time he was able to sit back and think about the business as a whole (I always focused on the business, not the auditing technobabble of “risks and controls”).

Managing by Exception

In my experience and opinion, based on decades of working with top executives around the world supplemented by my own experience as a vice president in IT, effective executives “manage by exception.”

The principle means you let your direct reports handle the routine and you spend your time elsewhere. I followed that myself, describing it as:

• Hire the best people.
• Mentor and guide them as needed, but don’t “manage” them.
• Trust them and get out of their way. (For example, I was very conscious of the fact that I could be a roadblock if I delayed my review and approval of draft audit reports.)
• Check in regularly (usually monthly) to confirm things are on track and ask if they need help.
• Get involved when there are issues of great importance, such as control deficiencies that merit the attention and action of top management, as I had broader and deeper insights into the business as a whole. I also had, usually but not always, better relationships with the top executives.
• Provide advice or assistance (if advice isn’t sufficient) when they say they need my help, generally not inserting myself when they don’t.
• Ask questions when there were indications that they are struggling, not to micromanage but to add my advice and guidance.
• Intervene if they are not performing. On those rare occasions, either their customers or their team members usually alert me.

Just like the top executives, I was busy and couldn’t afford to spend my time on the mundane and routine.

Related Article: Courage Coach: How to Tell the Micromanagers From the Concerned Bosses

You're Busy. Now Think How Busy Your Audience Is

Why should risk and audit practitioners and leaders expect their stakeholders to have the time, let alone inclination, to read detailed reports into the mundane and routine that run many pages?

Why should these busy people spend their precious time on reports that:

• Won’t change any strategic decisions they are making or actions they are taking?
• Can easily be handled by their direct reports (or their direct reports' direct reports) without intervention by them?
• Have information that they really don’t need to know. It might be information that the practitioner thinks is important and they want the executive to know, but that doesn’t change anything?
• Demonstrate only that the practitioner is doing their job?

My advice is:

• Spend your time on the areas and issues that matter to the success of the organization, the achievement of its objectives.
  • For the risk practitioner, that means helping management navigate those sources of risk that are significant to the achievement of objectives, only considering less important risks to make sure they are not becoming significant (and perhaps that they are being watched by lower levels of management).
  • For the audit practitioner, only include audits in the audit plan, and risks in the scope of those audits, where a control deficiency would threaten the achievement of enterprise objectives. Focus on the issues that matter, providing related and valuable assurance, advice and insight.
• Only report to the executives what they need to know, when they need to know, in a clear fashion that is easily consumed, understood and acted upon. If necessary, let them know that additional information on matters of lesser importance is available and that they are being handled lower in their organization.
• Don’t waste their time.

When leaders of the organization know that you only speak when it is important, they will listen. I am reminded of this brilliant EF Hutton commercial from the 1970s.

I welcome your thoughts. Are you or your team wasting people’s time? Do you get their full and complete attention when you speak or send a report, because they know what you have to say is important to them?

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