Curiosity, humbleness and diplomacy are great soft skills for auditors

I spent years of hiring and managing audit professionals across the globe. Beyond technical knowledge, and aside from cultural differences, I found that there are three constant traits in well performing auditors: curiosity, humbleness, and diplomacy.

Curiosity. Auditors have the chance to perform audits in multiple units, functions, and geographies of an organization, and it is hard over time to enjoy doing that without having a strong appetite to learn and to explore.

Whether the auditor is a career auditor, or an expert rotating into internal audit for a while, the attraction of internal audit – and its selling point – is the chance for an individual to develop a unique transversal view across an organization, business or activity through its processes and procedures, risks and controls.

Consequently, successful characters often show a strong appetite to learn as well as an intellectual agility to hop from one topic to another across various audit cycles.

There are several indicators of a curious mind:

· A willingness to walk the extra mile, to scratch more than the surface and go for root causes,

· A capacity to ask questions (good ones),

· A dissatisfaction with just ticking the boxes and sticking to check lists,

· A taste (thrive??) for non-conventional approaches, or at least for continuously improving the audit approach and process, a capacity to challenge the status quo, in sum an agile mind,

· An interest in imagining solutions and possible remediations to be discussed with the auditee, a willingness to have an impact, in sum a creative, positive and solution driven mind.

Overtime, while building his/her audit experience, curiosity is an asset that allows the professional:

· To better distinguish what is important from what is urgent,

· To build or to reinforce business acumen,

· Based on the facts, to opine and to make a statement.

Humbleness. With its unique position and role, there are a few pitfalls for the auditor:

· Its reporting line (CEO, AC, CFO or another very senior leadership level of the organization), may lead one to feel “untouchable” and above any criticism,

· Being independent, an auditor may feel he/she is immune to feedback. The auditor can falsely believe that he/she “knows better”, delivers “the truth”.

Such feelings are clearly wrong and are a recipe for failure. One the contrary a humble auditor:

· Despite the authority and independence of internal audit, takes feedback and accepts several iterations with the auditee, and sees this as opportunities to polish observations and recommendations. Humbleness is also accepting exploring alternative and possible better remediation measures and time plans with management,

· Understands that he/she can make mistakes and accepts to be corrected. Auditors have ONE strong area of expertise: controls. For the rest, technical expertise mostly lies with the business: auditors can seldom pretend to know better that the business,

· Accepts that not all is black or white, right or wrong. This is why we weigh risk findings and prioritization of recommendations. Audit is also an “art of the possible”: the quality of a finding is supported by the quality and practicality of the recommendation,

· Finally, humbleness is also needed because audits come to an end. Whether it is a limited review with a narrow scope and takes a few days, or a massive audit of several months, the auditor at some point finishes the job and moves on to the next. It can be frustrating (especially for the curious auditor!) but this is part of the job description.

Diplomacy. Auditors work in vastly complex networks and develop multiple connections.

· Auditors deal with many stakeholders (leadership, Audit Committee, regulators, etc.) and a huge diversity of partners – I like to call them “clients” – across an organization, many of them having few (if any!) or even erroneous expectations from internal audit,

· Auditors interact with different characters and personalities and cultural backgrounds. We meet, interview and work with brilliant and smart individuals, …. and at times not so much!

A diplomatic auditor embraces this polifacetic and proteiform environment:

· Shows and grows great communication skills to explains the purpose of the audit exercise, and then the outcome of an audit.

· Is a chameleon. it is (mostly) up to the auditor to adapt to the “client” to get the job done: blend in, explain and be patient (yet stay firm and independent) to get the information and understand what is going on,

· Is flexible and always manifests respect and empathy in working with colleagues with all levels of seniority,

· Builds and maintains trust with stakeholders and internal “clients”: “we are in the same boat”,

· Demonstrates courage in the delivery of (possible) bad news,

· Is a team player with the other auditors involved in the assignment.

Curiosity, Humbleness and Diplomacy: these great soft skills of auditors, are the drivers that make me always enjoying and love this internal audit profession!