By Roy Snell
roy.snell@corporatecompliance.org
Compliance officers must master some elements of about 9 professions to be successful: Legal, Ethics, Risk, Audit, Investigations, Education, Organizational Development, Operations, and Communications.
I may not have this list right but its close enough to make a point. On any given day, at any given moment, a compliance professional needs a working knowledge of all of these professions to be successful. The reason compliance programs are successful is because compliance officers use all of these tools in a coordinated fashion to prevent, find, and fix ethical and regulatory problems.
I am often told that compliance is all about audit, legal, risk, ethics, etc. It’s just not true. Compliance is an orchestration of all these skills. If you focus on one of these skills and ignore most of the rest, it’s almost impossible to succeed. Look at the agenda of our annual meeting. We have people from all of these professions speaking. Compliance professionals that study and use all of these tools are more successful. Most other compliance conferences focus on audit, legal, ethics, risk, or investigations. You can’t be an effective compliance professional by focusing on just one of these skill sets.
Why is the compliance officer’s job hard? It’s hard for a number of reasons. One of the unspoken reasons is that this job requires a working knowledge of many professions. Most compliance professionals came from one of these professions, and these professions are a great place to start from. However, we can’t have people telling leadership, “It’s all about an ethical culture” or “It’s all about the law,” etc. This is why giving compliance to some other existing department is so problematic. They tend to do what they always have done and stick with what they know. What we have always done hasn’t worked. What we need to do is help leadership understand that a compliance professional’s job is an amalgamation of all these professions. Maybe sharing a list like this with leadership might help.
Hey Roy, excellent points! I would also include HR and Change Management. Also. one takeaway from your post is that this is one important illustration of why Compliance is a different and independent subject matter expertise from Legal, with a different mandate, and why not just any JD is qualified to be a successful CCO or compliance professional. I think we both see a world where a new generation of CCOs and compliance professionals, untethered from the shadow of Legal, embraces this “renaissance” profile and breaks out of the legacy Compliance 1.0 structure (captive arm of Legal) to take their rightful places in the CSuite as empowered, dynamic leaders within a Compliance 2.0 structure that is structured to succeed.
Very true Donna. In fact the points you made are why I wrote the article but I lost my way before I got to he end and ended up going off on another tangent. This is why writing posts that people can comment on are more valuable the the old “brick and mortar” articles.
Great article, Roy. I completely agree with your addition of change management, Donna. It’s the closest corporate version of the soft skill influence, which is so important to what we do.
Roy and Donna: You hit the Nail right on the Head, what more can I say! (I may return to revisit this issue).
Completely agree, Roy. Compliance officer has to be a superman. Joking. 🙂
I thing the professional comunity mostly understandst the importance of mastering all of mentioned skills and some others as well. Constant professional growth is a must. In my oppinion the last two sentences in your article are something we have to work on intensively – at least in our region (SEE Europe) given the fact that compliance is here a very young function and still almost a bastard child 🙂
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