How to Be an Effective Compliance Officer
Consider for a moment the value of good advice. Those nuggets of wisdom you collect as you move through your life and career are precious. Advice derives from the Latin vedere (to see). Indeed, good advice can help you to see what you couldn’t before, revealing a best course of action, or maybe inaction.
Surf the digital waves about good advice and it will reveal what you already know intuitively: Good advice – if you act on it – helps you to (i) solve problems, (ii) find new ideas and perspectives, (iii) make better and smarter decisions, (iv) feel empowered and take confident actions, and (v) improve your life and do better personally or professionally.
For good advice on how to be an effective in-house compliance officer or counsel, please read on. The nuggets below, collected by your author from several seasoned professionals, include tactical advice on how to accomplish compliance goals as well as strategic advice on where to focus and how to maintain perspective.
Keeping in mind that the best advice in life is free, here goes:
Many of us strive for perfection, which can lead to over-compensation for a lack of clarity or lingering on familiar ground instead of going to where the risk lies. To those, this piece of advice may be helpful: "Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good."
In both small and large organizations, teambuilding is key to getting things done. The first team to focus on is your own. June Tan, SVP of Legal & Compliance at NEON in Singapore, finds that “team culture is the foundation” to ensuring an organization receives the best legal and compliance service. She advises to “look inwards before looking out” to create trust and respect within the compliance team.
Compliance officers also need to be part of the larger team. Pedro Medrano, an experienced in-house compliance attorney, emphasizes that “an effective ethics and compliance leader needs to be able to wear multiple hats simultaneously and be embedded in the business.”
Justin Dillon, Compliance Counsel at Red Hat, emphasized a similar point in co-opting John Donne's famous meditation: “No compliance officer is an island, entire of itself." Justin believes that “we best serve our clients when we collaborate across functions in our organization and with others in the compliance community.”
“Be comfortable with ambiguity” summarizes the sage advice offered by a few compliance officers from different industries. Ideally, the challenges presented by the many unknowns and surprises in practicing compliance is balanced by the joys of working in a collegial office. But even if you are comfortable with your office environment, don’t get lulled into a false sense of security and lose sight of core principles. “Always remember who your client is – it's the company, not any individual executive or business unit” advises Michelle Hylton, the SVP of Ethics & Compliance at Warner Bros. Discovery.
From the hall of fame of good advice, here’s a two-carat nugget: Trust but verify! Put another way, follow up on your instincts even if that sometimes feels counterintuitive.
If your follow-up leads to an investigation, you may find this advice from David Kennard, Associate Director of Corporate Investigations at Accenture in London, to be very useful during interviews: “Often the most powerful question to ask is nothing at all. Most people feel uncomfortable with periods of silence and will speak to fill them.” He adds this tip: “make sure your fellow interviewer knows the plan!”
As they say, it takes a village to accomplish challenging tasks. This sentiment is echoed in the advice offered by Pascale Helene Dubois, an international anti-corruption and governance expert and former Integrity Vice President at the World Bank. She recommends that compliance officers “cultivate a broad network of subject matter experts outside their organization. This will enable you to stay informed about industry trends, seek peer support and advice, and benefit from shared experiences with others facing similar challenges.”
Charles ‘Chuck’ Duross, who co-leads Morrison & Foerster’s FCPA and Global Anti-Corruption Practice, spoke of a former client, a CCO who worked at several companies with a history of pre-existing problems, who felt that compliance is like ‘safety’ in that there is little or no margin for error, so it is important to get it right the first time, every time. Whew, no pressure! The advisory footnote here is to know when to get help. Sometimes getting it right may require calling external counsel for a sense-check to ensure that you are within the safety zone.
Alison Taylor, Clinical Professor at NYU Stern School of Business and the author of Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World, advises compliance officers that connecting the dots from different subject matter areas results in better compliance. Her good advice: “Study behavioral science and design compliance with human cognition and social influence in mind.” To understand how those dots connect, be sure to read her remarkable book.
Your author’s humble advice is to be approachable and a good listener so people and issues will find their way to you. Being the trusted one in a room is empowering and makes our intense jobs a whole lot more fun. And it is unlikely that even the smartest software will replace soft skills anytime soon.
General Counsel, Room to Read