11 - Our Stakeholders Will Know our Business and Will Be Engaged

~ Our Stakeholders Will Know our Business and Will be Engaged ~

Our ability to collaborate with our stakeholders is critical to our success. Successful collaboration requires deep understanding of, and compassion for our stakeholders. We must know their business. We must understand how they think, and what is important to them. We must have compassion for the difficulties they face, and ride that compassion to help them reach their goals in any way we can.

However, successful collaboration is a two way street. We can no longer allow this relationship to be too one sided. We cannot allow ourselves to feel like, and become a function that is here to hassle others, to become a function that is a necessary evil due to laws and regulation.

We are valuable. The work we do is valuable. We are risk and control subject matter experts. We help the firm avoid significant risks before they materialize. As such, we will demand our stakeholders to understand our business of auditing. We will demand the same level of collaboration. We will demand the same level of compassion.

Our Stakeholders and Control Owners will also know our business. They will know our business well. Our business is Auditing. Our business is advice. Out business is providing trusted advise. We are trusted advisors.

Our stakeholders will will know what we do, and how we do it. They will also understand their role in enabling our value, and they will play that role because they know how important it is. We will have Rules of Engagement, and our control owners will play their role in it. We will keep them engaged and will call them out when they are not fulfilling their responsibilities in the relationship. They will respond and make the changes necessary to enable our success. They will know and support the outcomes of what we do because they know what we do is important to their success.

Audit is a huge player in the success our the business. In and of itself, audit is a business. We provide a critical service. It’s the critical service of identifying and reducing risk. It’s the critical service of understanding the firm’s barriers to success, to fulfilling their strategy, and providing recommendations to break down those barriers. We have various mechanisms to execute our Audit business, these mechanisms have certain key inputs, and they produce key outcomes and outputs. We recognize how critical our control owners are on both sides of our mechanisms. They are a critical input, and are impacted by our output.

So, for us auditors, enough is enough. No longer will we not take the time to educate our stakeholders on our business. No longer will we tolerate having control owners who do not understand our business. Control owner education of the audit business is a critical enabler of our success. We will seek out those who must be educated in our business, and we will educate them. They will learn who we are, what we do, why we do it, and who we do it for. We will share how we do it. We will educate them on their role in how we do it. We will educate them on how important their role is to our success. We will establish rules of engagement.

And We will engage! We will consistently engage per the rules we’ve established and agreed. We will hold up our end of the bargain. We will not violate our own rules. We will no longer delay meetings to understand changes in the business, we will no longer update our risk assessments 6 months late, we will no longer be shocked to learn about a new risky development, we will no longer be shocked by an overdue issue that nobody is working on.

And They will engage! They will consistently engage per the rules we’ve established and agreed. We will remind them of the rules whenever required. We will call them out when they violate the rules. We will remind them how their violation is impacting the success of our business. And they will respond. They will fix the engagement and play their role, for they know the importance of the work we do, and their importance in enabling the success of our work.

Our control owners play a big role in the success of our business. To meet the goals of their businesses, control owners are perpetually introducing new risks and changing the control environment. We must remain engaged during this perpetual evolution to properly run our audit business of identifying risks and improving the control the environment. They will call us. They will share information. They will ask us for help. They will see us, treat us, and expect us to provide our service as a trusted advisor.

We are a business that provides incredible service to the firm. We have mechanics in how we work to deliver our service. Our control owners are a big part of those mechanics. They will be engaged in our mechanics and we will keep them engaged.

Their engagement will significantly impact our success and value add.