Ever heard the expression “beating a dead horse?” It has nothing to do with animal cruelty, but simply means a particular effort is a waste of time as there will be no outcome.

Well there are some efforts #internalaudit continues to push that are also as big a waste of time as beating a dead horse, and in this #jammingwithjason #internalauditpodcast I’m going to talk about them in a very candid way.

If you find yourself doing these things, it’s time to STOP. You are wasting your energy and likely damaging the reputation and relevance of internal audit in your organization.

Listen in at: http://www.jasonmefford.com/jammingwithjason/ or wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts.

Jamming with Jason has interviews and discussions (jam sessions) relevant to internal audit leaders, and professionals in internal audit, risk management, and compliance. If you want to up-level your life and career you need to be listening each week.

Join the leadership program Jason mentioned in this episode here: https://jasonmefford.mykajabi.com/caebriefing

Transcript

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Jason Mefford: Welcome to another episode of jamming with Jason. Hey, my friends. It’s good to be back in a solo episode with you.

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Jason Mefford: Now, like I’ve been doing. Let me, let me just share a couple of comments that people have had one kind of came in here from Mark earlier.

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Jason Mefford: That said, I just listened to the death of traditional auditing and I couldn’t agree more with what you say internal audit has to reinvent itself constantly

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Jason Mefford: To better serve its clients. So thank you Mark appreciate that feedback craft. For those of you that are listening, send me some feedback like that as well. And you could be featured on a future episode.

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Jason Mefford: Now, before I get too much into today’s discussion. I figured I probably need to do a little disclaimer at the beginning.

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Jason Mefford: So some of you that might have looked at the title or thinking oh my goodness, Jason. Are you advocating animal cruelty or violence.

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Jason Mefford: And I am not okay. I have no use for violence in my life, or for it in the world. But in fact, it just comes from a saying that’s been around for over 100 years

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Jason Mefford: About beating a dead horse, and I know that some of you English may not be your first language. So let me just kind of explain that as well.

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Jason Mefford: It’s it’s a metaphor that really kind of describes a particular effort just being a waste of time.

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Jason Mefford: Because this is just as if you were, you know, trying to encourage a horse to move along. But if the horse is dead. All the encouraging in the world isn’t going to get it to move forward. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: And so, again, the, the analogy kind of comes back and it actually reminds me of a joke. There was, there was a couple of man and a wife and they have their wagon.

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Jason Mefford: Their horses pulling the wagon and the horses is kind of moving along, and then all of a sudden the horse stops. And so the man starts whipping the horse to try to get it to move along.

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Jason Mefford: And and is cursing at it and says, that’s one and you know after a little cajoling and whipping then the horse starts moving again.

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Jason Mefford: And they go down the road for a little bit further and then the horse just stops again. And so the man starts beating it and cursing at it again and says, that’s too. And finally, the horse ends up kind of, you know, moving along a little bit. They start going down the road again.

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Jason Mefford: And the horse stops for a third time, and the man just pulls out his gun and shoots the horse and his wife just, you know, what are you doing, how can how are we going to get home and he turns to her and he says, that’s one now.

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Jason Mefford: I think it’s funny. And again, it’s not about the violence, it’s about

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Jason Mefford: I wanted to use this as well as a way to describe sometimes how we act. Okay. And the fact that there are some efforts that internal audit continues to try to push along

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Jason Mefford: That are as big of a waste of time as beating a dead horse and so today we’re going to get in. I’m going to talk about some of these things.

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Jason Mefford: Because honestly when our friends. If you’re doing these things. It is time to stop stop doing them.

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Jason Mefford: Because you’re probably wasting your energy. And you’re likely damaging the reputation and relevance of internal audit in your organization.

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Jason Mefford: But let’s go back to this to this little joke. And in this happens often right is that, you know, again, when you think about that metaphor wide. Why would a horse, stop if it’s walking along

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Jason Mefford: It usually stops for a good reason. Right. Often it senses that maybe there’s a snake or there’s some other danger in the area.

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Jason Mefford: And so it doesn’t want to move forward right but but instead the human who’s trying to drive it as thinking. Come on, go, go, go, go, go. Right.

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Jason Mefford: And is trying to beat it into submission to make it continue to go even though the horse doesn’t want to go.

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Jason Mefford: Now often it is that way in our life as well. Sometimes we’re, you know, figuratively beating the horse trying to move something forward that is not in our best interest. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: And, you know, we’re convinced that we have to move forward. We have to keep doing this. And so we keep beating and we keep trying and we keep going and we keep going.

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Jason Mefford: But the problem is, again, you know, there’s probably some reason why that horse is stopping and so we need to actually stop and think about that. And that’s, again, you know what I’m, what I’m talking about today. Somebody, somebody else’s week

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Jason Mefford: On a social media post called me a myth buster. And I thought that was great because I love that show. Myth Busters on TV.

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Jason Mefford: And that we need more Myth Busters out there because

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Jason Mefford: A lot of the things that we believe are that we think are not actually true. And so sometimes, you know, again, it’s not for me to be

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Jason Mefford: To be mean or anything like that because I love you. I mean, that’s what, that’s why I’m here. But what I’m trying to get you to do.

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Jason Mefford: Is just to think and think about what is going to be in your best interest. Okay. And so again, really, that’s what I’m trying to do not advocating violence not advocating beating horses.

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Jason Mefford: But thinking about, because there are some things that you are probably doing that are not very effective and you need to stop them. Or you could damage the reputation and relevance of internal audit and we don’t want that. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: So let’s go ahead and jump in. There’s a couple of bullet points that I kind of wanted to go through and talk to you today about

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Jason Mefford: And the first one is, you know, you might have heard me talking about this before, but the fact that a lot of times

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Jason Mefford: You know, in internal audit, we believe that independence and objectivity are the biggest things. That’s what we have to focus on

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Jason Mefford: And so what I find is so many people focusing on independence and objectivity. Instead of focusing on relationships or their belief that if I develop relationships with people in my organization. Then I somehow lose independence or objectivity. Now, I’m here to tell you that

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Jason Mefford: Just because you develop relationships with people, does not mean that you lose your independence or objectivity. Okay. It doesn’t mean that

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Jason Mefford: They are not mutually exclusive. You can have relationships with people and still be independent and objective.

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Jason Mefford: But the problem is, and again, this is the beating the dead horse. Part of it is when people refuse to develop relationships with people in their organization.

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Jason Mefford: Because they feel like they can’t do that. Okay, and standing up and saying, well, I’m sorry, I can’t have a relationship with you because I have to be objective.

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Jason Mefford: actually hurts your reputation as well. Okay, because it shows that you’re not a team player, and in organizations today. We have to be a team player. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: And like I said, it’s not just, you know, the relationships that you’re having with other stakeholders, but also the relationships with your staff and with yourself.

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Jason Mefford: And again, you’re going to hear me do this, say this over and over again is your relationships with yourself with your stakeholders and with your staff are important.

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Jason Mefford: And in fact, I think it is some of the most important things that you need to be focusing on at this time is actually learning how to develop and maintain those relationships.

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Jason Mefford: Now I’m sure some of you have seen as we’ve moved into a more virtual work environment that a lot of the relationships that you had before.

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Jason Mefford: Maybe are starting to get strained or they’re just not not being developed because you’re not seeing or doing things with people, as you did before.

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Jason Mefford: And that’s, that’s normal. It doesn’t mean that we we don’t do the relationships. It just means that we need to be more intentional.

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Jason Mefford: In what we are actually doing to develop and maintain those relationships. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that here in a little bit on one of the other bullet points as we go forward.

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Jason Mefford: Now the second one. Again, where a lot of people are really trying to beat a dead horse is they’re continuing to do traditional internal audit work.

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Jason Mefford: They’re worried about the standards, they’re worried about only doing assurance work, you know, and putting that ahead of what is really most important in your organization.

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Jason Mefford: So, you know, stop trying to push that traditional internal audit approach forward in your organization’s instead switch and become much more proactive and much more risk based in what you’re doing. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: And what that’s going to mean a lot of times it can it can look different for different people.

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Jason Mefford: But honestly, most of the executives in your organization don’t care about how many transactions you looked at

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Jason Mefford: They already know how many transactions are going on. They already realized that some things are not working. They’re focused more on the strategic higher level higher risk items. And that’s where we should be focusing more of our attention. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: Now I know a lot of people will come back to me and say, but I don’t know how to audit it or there’s not a process in place for me to be able to audit it

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Jason Mefford: Well, this is, again, is the question now between the mix of assurance and consulting or advisory work whatever term you want to use that you do.

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Jason Mefford: But here’s kind of the thought process that you should be going through what are the key initiatives, what are the key strategies. What are the key objectives for the organization.

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Jason Mefford: And what can I do to try to help make sure that those things are being met.

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Jason Mefford: Now what it might be is, again, you know, we go to an executive we find out what it is we start talking about the process and we realize

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Jason Mefford: There isn’t a process in place, which means we can’t actually audit a process that doesn’t exist now again under traditional audit we would say, Oh, we can’t audit that areas. So we’re going to ignore it. We’re going to put our head in the sand, we’re going to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

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Jason Mefford: Because we can’t audit it and right, the right approach is. Oh, there’s no process in place. Let’s help see what we can do to put a process in place that will give that executive

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Jason Mefford: Leader more comfort over that particular area. So do an assurance do do a consulting or advisory project in that area.

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Jason Mefford: And then later come back after the processes up and running and actually provide assurance on it. But again, don’t keep, you know, pushing and thinking that

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Jason Mefford: The way traditional internal auditing has been done is relevant in the future because it is not most of the standards. Most of the ways that that people are still auditing.

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Jason Mefford: Are a vestige leftover from how people audited 100 years ago. Okay, we shouldn’t be auditing like they did 100 years ago. That’s just no longer relevant in today’s environment. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: So start, you know, stop beating that traditional audit. I’ve got to follow the standards. I’ve got to get a QA IP. You know, I’ve got to do all these things. And that’s going to make you valuable to your organization.

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Jason Mefford: It is not your organization doesn’t care whether you’re following standards they care whether you’re actually helping and adding value.

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Jason Mefford: And a risk based proactive approach is going to get you to those value areas. Okay, that’s two that I’ve gone through right now. And don’t worry, on three. I’m not going to pull out the gun and shoot anybody

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Jason Mefford: In fact, I don’t even own a gun. So there we go. But little call back from the previous chug. Some of you will get it and think it’s funny. Others of you will think that I’m just crazy. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: Third one that I want to go through is is related to the audit plan. And I know that a lot of you may be going through or developing kind of an audit plan for this next year.

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Jason Mefford: And again, one of the areas where I see people kind of tripping up is not believing that you can take input from management.

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Jason Mefford: Now what do I mean because because, again, I’m sure you know most of you are probably asking, management, what are the highest risks what’s most important.

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Jason Mefford: But I find that most of the people that I talked to really ignore most of that information. They already pretty much have planned out what they think they need to audit.

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Jason Mefford: And again this goes back to our independence and objectivity issue is that some people feel like if management suggests an audit that we can’t do it.

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Jason Mefford: Right, because we’re independent we decide what’s on the audit plan. And so they don’t really take the advice from their executive or senior leaders.

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Jason Mefford: That’s a big mistake. Folks, because again, those things that your executive management your board your senior managers are concerned with

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Jason Mefford: Those are exactly the areas where we should be focusing our efforts and I’ll tell you, especially with all of the changes that have happened in the world. This last year.

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Jason Mefford: If your audit plan looks almost anything like it did from previous years you’re focusing on the wrong areas because there has been a lot that has changed in the world.

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Jason Mefford: And the risks. This year versus last year are completely different. For a lot of your organizations and so you really need to take more of that advice.

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Jason Mefford: From management because here’s another thing. It’s going to be more relevant work because it’s actually something that they are interested in

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Jason Mefford: And if you can help them with what they’re interested in or the challenges that they have, that’s when you’re going to be more relevant, that’s when you’re going to be adding more value to your organization as well.

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Jason Mefford: Okay, so that’s number three. Now, the fourth one is is one that may be a hard pill for many of you to swallow.

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Jason Mefford: But again, I see this over and over again. And I keep seeing people driving down this road, and this road will not lead to your success.

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Jason Mefford: And that is trying to believe that you that when there are problems, you need to work on others, instead of working on yourself. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: Now this can come up in different ways, right, like, you know, again, maybe you have a relationship issue with a particular executive

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Jason Mefford: And so, you think, well, I’m going to go fix this executive. I’m going to go convince them that they’re wrong. And we’re right

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Jason Mefford: That again is the wrong approach. The relationship with that with that stakeholder will not change until you change yourself.

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Jason Mefford: In fact, changing ourselves is really the only thing that we can control. But here’s the beautiful irony of the whole thing is, as you change yourself you change the world around you.

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Jason Mefford: And so again, whether it’s a stakeholder, maybe it’s maybe it’s somebody on your staff that you’re having some performance issues with

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Jason Mefford: Most of the people around us reflect back what we are doing. And when we identify those things in other people. We think we need to fix it.

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Jason Mefford: However, if we fix ourselves in that way. Usually the problem tends to go away. Okay. So as an example, right, maybe if you have somebody who

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Jason Mefford: You know is, is making snide comments, maybe they’re not being a team player. Maybe they’re trying to, you know, you know, just do what they want, instead of being a team player. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: Now our first inclination as a leader or as a manager is to try to get that person to become a team player.

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Jason Mefford: But instead of doing that, I want you to do a little timeout and I want you to think how good of a team player, am I being

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Jason Mefford: Because as I said most of the time the people around you are just mirroring what you are doing.

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Jason Mefford: And so if you work on yourself if you become a better team player. Usually the other person just falls right in line and becomes a team player as well. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: And again, as I said, this can relate to different stakeholder relationships you have it can relate to your staff. Heck, it can even relate to

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Jason Mefford: You know your your personal relationships in your life as well. And, but I know that a lot of times there is a hesitancy to actually admit that we are probably the biggest part of the problem.

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Jason Mefford: And that’s why, again, you hear me talking over and over again about lifelong learning about, you know, personal development and how important these things are

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Jason Mefford: But I’ll tell you from doing this for decades and for working with lots of executives and business owners over the years and helping to coach them.

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Jason Mefford: When you change yourself you change the world around you, and as I told you to begin with. I know sometimes this is a this is a bitter pill or a jagged little pill, if we bring in Alexis Morissette on on this from jagged little pill.

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Jason Mefford: Record, but

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Jason Mefford: It’s really true. And the problem is, you know, if you’re not trying to develop yourself if if you’re not trying to improve yourself every single day, it shows up.

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Jason Mefford: And and i know a lot of times we think, well, you know, I’ve gotten to this point, I know all my stuff.

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Jason Mefford: You know, in fact, one of the executives that I worked with. He was in charge of HR at an organization.

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Jason Mefford: And he used to tell me I don’t get any training because the, the company hired me with all of the knowledge that I needed to. And so

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Jason Mefford: I, I don’t want to go get training because that’ll that that would, you know, make make them think that I don’t already know how to do my job.

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Jason Mefford: And that’s just one of the silliest things that I ever heard of course he didn’t last in the organization very long with those kind of attitudes as well.

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Jason Mefford: But, you know, instead of trying to change. Others start trying to change yourself first. And so again, this can be for you personally but also even think about it from your team perspective.

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Jason Mefford: Okay, instead of trying to maybe change the perception of internal audit at other people with other people, by trying to educate them and show them how much value we have

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Jason Mefford: Think about maybe changing yourself so that you’re a little bit more relevant so that your team is more relevant to the organization.

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Jason Mefford: Instead of trying to educate or convince somebody else that we actually are.

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Jason Mefford: And that ends up going a long, long ways now but that’s going to mean is sometimes you’ve got to do some work and sometimes we’re just lazy and we don’t want to do it. You know, sometimes it means that we’re going to have to

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Jason Mefford: Invest in training or invest in programs or invest in a coach, but I will, I will promise you this

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Jason Mefford: For every dollar that you put into investing in things like this for yourself, you get back in 10 or if not 100 times that

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Jason Mefford: In future benefit. Okay, so, you know, again, start working on yourself, making sure that you’re working on yourself every day, every week.

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Jason Mefford: When these problems come up, or these challenges come up start to think about what is what. How may I actually be be partly be responsible for this as well.

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Jason Mefford: And what you can actually do a little bit different, as you go forward. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: So those are some of the myths that I kind of wanted to go through today, some of the areas where, again, I see that that people just continue

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Jason Mefford: To try to push forward, but I’m telling you the horses already dead. So quit trying to, you know, quit. Quit trying to do just traditional internal auditing.

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Jason Mefford: That horse is dead. It’s already dead. Quit beating on it. Let’s just move forward, be more proactive be more risk based in what you’re doing.

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Jason Mefford: You know, instead of standing up and trying to say I’m objective, you can’t tell me what to do. You know, I, I can’t have a relationship with you.

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Jason Mefford: Stop and think about where and how you can improve your relationships. And if you’re not sure how to do that because I’m telling you, it sometimes it’s kind of difficult

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Jason Mefford: There’s places for you to go in ways for you to actually learn how to do that. Right. In fact, you know, I’ve got a whole executive leadership program that walks through

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Jason Mefford: Have 52 different points of focus that you need to actually understand you need to practice and you actually need it to become second nature.

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Jason Mefford: If you want to become a relationship ninja. If you want to be able to have relationship with people. If you want to influence them if you want to be able to move them.

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Jason Mefford: You need to understand how to actually do this, but it means you’re going to have to invest in yourself, you’re going to have to invest some time, you’re going to have to invest some money.

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Jason Mefford: Because it’s just like, you know, if I wanted to start playing tennis today. I can’t just go read a book on it and think, in my mind, and all of a sudden I can play tennis.

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Jason Mefford: I’m going to have to go get some lessons. Right. I already understand some of the basics, but I’m probably going to have to go get some lessons. I’m going to have to get some training.

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Jason Mefford: I’m going to have to hire a coach or somebody to be able to help me to train and learn how to play tennis. Okay. But that’s not enough, either. I actually have to go out and practice as well. Okay. Because you have to put in the time every day, every week in order to be able to learn

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Jason Mefford: Fully and actually be able to develop those skills so that they become second nature. Okay. And that’s, again, this this leadership program that I’m talking about. That’s exactly what it does.

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Jason Mefford: Because I’m 30 minutes or less. A week you end up actually exercising and practicing these things as well, so that they start to become second nature.

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Jason Mefford: And when you do what you will start to notice is everything around you starts to change that executive

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Jason Mefford: That you were having a hard time dealing with that maybe was a pain in the ass. All of a sudden, things start changing in that relationship.

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Jason Mefford: You know, if you’ve got people on your staff that you’ve been again having, having difficulties with all of a sudden those relationships start to improve. But in order for that to happen. It has to start with you. Alright. So with that, my friends, I’m going to wrap up this week.

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Jason Mefford: Quit beating dead horses, you know, the horse doesn’t deserve it anymore and you don’t deserve or need to waste your energy or damage your reputation or relevance of internal audit in your organization anymore.

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Jason Mefford: I know the profession is out there still telling you to do a lot of these things.

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Jason Mefford: But it’s wrong. Okay. And the reason I’m becoming more and more vocal about this is, I love this profession. I love the people in the profession and I’m tired of seeing people

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Jason Mefford: get hurt by following some of that advice because it really is damaging the reputation and relevance that we have in many of our organizations, when you’re following some of that advice.

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Jason Mefford: So instead, my friends, I wish you the best. I want you to have success in your life and in your career, and I’m here to help you along the way.

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Jason Mefford: Keep on listening, you know, send me send me messages, again, even if you hate it and you think Jason. You’re full of shit. Send me a message, let me know that

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Jason Mefford: Because at least I know you’re listening and that’s what I’m trying to do. And again, like from today’s episode is, you know, not to not to try to beat you up because I love you.

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Jason Mefford: What I’m trying to do is just get you to think and start thinking about the ways that you can improve yourself so that you can have a better life and a better career. So with that, I will catch you on the next episode. Have a great rest of your week, my friend.

This is another special #jammingwithjason episode where you get to hear Jason Mefford interviewed for The Tour Report podcast with Rick Roybal. We discuss #internalaudit and where the profession is headed.

Listen in at: http://www.jasonmefford.com/jammingwithjason/

Make sure to check out The Tour Report with Rick (especially if you are in the oil and gas sector) at: https://www.vendoraudit.org/tourreport

#internalauditpodcast

Most of the advice and knowledge people present about #internalaudit is very theoretical. If you are like most auditors you are still asking “But how do I implement at my organization.”

In this #jammingwithjason #internalaudit podcast I talk with Toby DeRoch of InsightCPE on how we can become much more practical and just do things instead of talking about it. Two areas we dig into deeper are how to practically apply an Agile Auditing approach, and how to deal with a virtual audit environment, including how to develop relationships remotely.

Join Toby and Jason for the next cRisk Academy webinar “Why Do Auditors Ignore Fraud?” on Tuesday, October 20, 2020 · 9:00 AM PDT. Register at: https://www.bigmarker.com/crisk-academy/Why-Do-Auditors-Ignore-Fraud

Check out Toby’s list of upcoming webinars at: https://www.insightcpe.com/webinars
and his full list of courses available through the cRisk Academy on-demand learning platform at: https://www.insightcpe.com/on-demand

Transcript

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Jason Mefford: Hey everybody, I have a special, special, special, special treat today and I had to throw in for

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Jason Mefford: But I have my friend Toby de Roche with me and Toby heads up inside CP. And we’re just going to get in and start talking about some stuff that I know a lot of you.

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Jason Mefford: As we were talking beforehand, Toby and I get asked a lot of the same questions. So we’re going to try to answer some of those so Toby. Welcome, welcome aboard.

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Jason Mefford: You know, maybe, maybe spend just a minute or so and give a little background on yourself so people get to know you a little bit better, too.

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Toby DeRoche: Sure, yeah. So my background is all internal audit. I was an internal audit with Macy’s, that the corporate headquarters

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Toby DeRoche: As an audit manager for about four or five years before I went into consulting and I went into consulting with teammate through Wolters Kluwer

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Toby DeRoche: And was there for just over 10 years and recently went off on my own, so that way I can do things that are more applicable just to the industry in general, really wanted to focus on education.

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Toby DeRoche: And, you know, working with the entire audit profession, not just with people who are looking at software.

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Toby DeRoche: Because that’s kind of a nice piece of it, the whole thing, but I really wanted to be able to influence where all of my peers are going

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Toby DeRoche: Mostly because I keep hearing a lot of this, like you said, the same questions over and over again. And really just want to help them address all those same questions.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah, well. And so again, you know, what are some of the questions you’re hearing and then let’s just kind of dive in and actually give people some practical things that they can take away

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Toby DeRoche: Yeah, that’s really it. The questions that I’m hearing, no matter what the topic is is that’s great, but how do I do it.

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Toby DeRoche: You know, we talked about

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Toby DeRoche: How we need to make a transition to being an agile, a lot of department, how we need to start working with other lines of defense how we’re going to

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Toby DeRoche: You know, work within this new reality of. Not everybody can go in the office. I can’t travel. What am I going to do, how am I going to account inventory. If I can’t travel. We keep hearing the same questions over and over again and

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Toby DeRoche: When you look for guidance you usually get something very theoretical

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Toby DeRoche: If you pick up a book on agile auditing, it’s going to give you the history of agile processes.

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Toby DeRoche: Taking the software.

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Toby DeRoche: And it just shows a bunch of stuff on you that you’re not going to use and we need to be a lot more practical about the

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Toby DeRoche: Way that we’re going to use these things, you know, like for something like agile, we can follow a great method that’s going to get you there without having to take all these crazy paths down reporting, you’re probably not going to use

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Jason Mefford: Well, and I think that’s, that’s an important thing. I mean, I’ve talked a lot about kind of the whole learning process.

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Jason Mefford: And I think this is where because you and I are on the same page exactly on this of trying to help people.

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Jason Mefford: Get something that’s much more practical. Right. But we’ve been trained in training that we we acquire knowledge and skills. Yep, we do and we get that through training.

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Jason Mefford: But that’s just the first two of the four steps in the learning process. You have to figure out how to apply those knowledge and skills and then actually experience it for you to really learn it.

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Jason Mefford: And like you said, I think that’s where you know most people help provide knowledge, like you said, they’ll give you the theoretical knowledge, they’ll explain the history of agile.

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Jason Mefford: Big Whoop dee doo shit. Right. I mean, at the end of the day, you’re like, but how do I apply it to me. And there’s not really very many people

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Jason Mefford: That are actually helping people learn how to apply it right into what they’re doing.

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Jason Mefford: Right, because again it’s like you learn about agile. Okay, great. Well, what does that mean, well, I’m probably going to do things a little bit faster, right, always. I always hear people say that, well, I gotta do things faster, right. No, that’s not what I

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Jason Mefford: Mean

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Jason Mefford: No.

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Jason Mefford: No, that’s not what it is.

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Jason Mefford: So, so how do we how do we, I mean I you know I know you kind of left and started on your own to try to help people with that, how

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Jason Mefford: You know, maybe let’s let’s let’s talk about a couple of these things that people are are struggling with and come up with some practical solutions that people can walk away with

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Yeah.

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Toby DeRoche: The agile conversation is probably one of the ones that’s top of mind for most people.

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Toby DeRoche: You know, because

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Toby DeRoche: For every single person out there when we got to January through the audit plan away.

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Jason Mefford: And tried to figure out where to go. Yeah.

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Jason Mefford: So if it wasn’t January, at least by March you three was partially you did. Right.

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Toby DeRoche: Yeah, it was. And if you haven’t, please do it now.

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Jason Mefford: You know,

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Toby DeRoche: So it’s, um, it’s something that a lot of people were thinking about if I have to figure out how I can

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Toby DeRoche: Adjust my audit plan really quickly and focus on something that I had no idea what’s coming. Suddenly, I have to shift around and start thinking about logistics.

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Toby DeRoche: And I have to start thinking about just my business continuity plan include work from home. And then how do I come back. How do I get people back into the office. Do I get people back into the office.

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Toby DeRoche: Do we scrap everything and just go completely remote all the time and and audit has a conversation here like we’re part of this. We’re not just one of the, you know, corporate victims of whatever’s going to happen.

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Toby DeRoche: So we have to have a say in everything. And that’s going to get reflected in our audit plan.

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Toby DeRoche: So if we’re doing something like an agile plan. The whole idea would be, I’m only looking at the risks that are relevant. Right now, the ones that are the biggest, most important to leadership in the organization.

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Toby DeRoche: And all the stakeholders and so if I’m taking an actual strategic risk based approach.

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Toby DeRoche: I’m not looking at every single process in the entire organization.

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Toby DeRoche: I’m looking at the strategic risks and working my way down and then I’m going to carve out. Here’s what I actually can get done in the next three months.

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Toby DeRoche: And if I’m looking past three or six months. I’m looking too far because we just proved that within two or three months, the world can change.

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Toby DeRoche: So there’s really no point in going any further than that.

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Toby DeRoche: And then one of the things that I think is a really practical.

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Toby DeRoche: Approach to all of this is

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Toby DeRoche: You don’t start thinking about just, okay, how do I get stuff done faster. It’s how do I break it down into its component pieces.

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Toby DeRoche: And then make sure that each of those pieces are happening in a very timely fashion like within whatever parameters, I have to work with. Right. So if I’ve got six weeks to get an audit done

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Toby DeRoche: I can’t afford scope creep anymore. I can’t afford to these things to drag on forever. And I can’t wait until the very end to start reviewing and then take it right back to the beginning to deal with the issue. I found at the beginning of the audit, so we’re

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Toby DeRoche: Breaking the audit down to pieces.

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Toby DeRoche: And then getting through each of those pieces as a team.

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Toby DeRoche: And it’s a shift in the way that we typically think about how we would assign workout, right, because

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Toby DeRoche: Now it’s, I’m going to go look at

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Toby DeRoche: Xyz process break that down into a couple of sub

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Toby DeRoche: Processes and, you know,

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Toby DeRoche: You go take one I’m going to send somebody else on the next and then

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Toby DeRoche: I talked to you in two months, you know,

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Jason Mefford: That that’s not an agile approach.

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Toby DeRoche: Know,

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Toby DeRoche: And so now what we do is we say, so I’m breaking it down by risks. Now there’s three of us on this team, we’re all going to jump on risk number one.

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Toby DeRoche: And we’re gonna knock it out when that one’s done, remove the risk to we knock it out.

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Toby DeRoche: And we keep ourselves accountable that way because you might be doing the work. I might be helping you with some of the different procedures and testing things and then someone else is coming behind and doing the review right right on our heels.

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Toby DeRoche: To make sure everything is good.

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Toby DeRoche: Because let’s say I’ve got six

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Toby DeRoche: Weeks. By the end of week one or two I need to report out the door.

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Toby DeRoche: And the point of agile was supposed to be, you know, we go back to the history of agile.

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Toby DeRoche: It was supposed to be that you had to deliverable software at the end of a cycle.

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Toby DeRoche: And so now we’re

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Toby DeRoche: Basically saying my deliverable product is report.

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Toby DeRoche: And that report is done at the end of each cycle. So at the end of each week, I need to have a report out the door when I get done with that audit.

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Toby DeRoche: I’m done.

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Toby DeRoche: Because management seen the report since day one.

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Toby DeRoche: You know, I have nothing.

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Toby DeRoche: There’s nothing left for people to review. There’s nothing left for us to deal with.

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Toby DeRoche: And then that rolls up because that was the audit and then that rolls up to the quarter which rolls up to the plan.

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Toby DeRoche: And it’s keeping everything moving in this way where I’m looking at things on a three month horizon and I’m turning out work in a way that I know it staying on track and I’ve got my deliverable of the report coming out at the end of every week.

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Jason Mefford: Excuse me. Well, and I think that’s

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Jason Mefford: To me that’s what he here’s a, here’s a practical thing for you folks right is that

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Jason Mefford: But, but it’s seismic in in shift in our thinking because historically, you know, we go out, we work 2346 weeks on an audit we spend two weeks, preparing an audit report, boom, at the end of that time we issue our final report.

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Jason Mefford: And instead, you know, using an agile approach. You’re effectively writing your report or mini reports all along the way.

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Jason Mefford: Right now, that’s a big difference for a lot of people. Right. Which means, again, that goes back to how we’re scheduling people, it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, the, the whole other idea of

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Jason Mefford: Focusing on the biggest thing first.

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Jason Mefford: We don’t get distracted. We are. We’re focused on one key objective in each one of these Sprint’s

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Jason Mefford: And when we get that done, we move on to the next thing.

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Jason Mefford: And that actually because it you know reminds me of some different stories and other stuff around project management that you know really one of the reasons why we’re so inefficient is we usually have too many things on our list to do. Yeah.

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Jason Mefford: And we get scattered, we end up working a little bit on this thing. Then we switch gears, we move over to something else.

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Jason Mefford: And you’re much more effective and efficient when you just knock out that one thing right you knock it out. Then you move on to the next thing.

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Jason Mefford: And and at the, at the end of the day, that’s more like the true risk based approach. I’ve started trying to use that term.

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Jason Mefford: I don’t know if it’s going to catch on or not. But there’s a lot of people that are like oh yeah I’m doing risk based auditing until you ask them a couple of questions and then it’s like, oh, maybe I’m not

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Toby DeRoche: Right, you’re doing enemy base audit.

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Jason Mefford: You’re doing entity or process based out of the you’re not doing risk based on the right.

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Toby DeRoche: And so one of the things that

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Toby DeRoche: I think is another big shift in this whole thinking process, especially around Agile is

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Toby DeRoche: Standard never actually said you had to write a report.

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Jason Mefford: This is you have to communicate.

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Toby DeRoche: Is we have to communicate results. That’s it.

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Toby DeRoche: And so whenever you started

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Toby DeRoche: Looking at it as Leslie, let’s use the standards for what they say.

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Toby DeRoche: Let’s not add anything to it because we’re adding work to ourselves that was never there.

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Jason Mefford: We have a couple of examples.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah.

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Toby DeRoche: What we can actually take from an

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Toby DeRoche: agile process is this concept of a

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Retrospective

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Toby DeRoche: So,

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Toby DeRoche: The retrospective is what you’re doing. It’s supposed to be like an internal thing.

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Toby DeRoche: At the end of every one of these sprints where you basically say what worked and what didn’t.

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Toby DeRoche: What I’m really suggesting with this whole agile thing is we take that retrospective and we flip it and use it in place of a report.

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Toby DeRoche: And so what we can do is, you’re they’re very, very standardized processes where you’ve got four steps and you’re laying out here’s what we did.

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Toby DeRoche: Last week,

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Toby DeRoche: Here’s what we did this week. Here’s what went well. Here’s what didn’t you here’s what didn’t go well that’s the issue about

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Toby DeRoche: The point of the retrospective as you’re doing this with management. So you’ve got them in the room with you. This is you presenting to them at the end of the week. Forget the idea of having a written report, you don’t need it. You just communicated your results.

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Toby DeRoche: Of the audit right there in person and I want to get a response on the issues in this meeting.

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Toby DeRoche: And you put a time limit on it. We’ve got

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Toby DeRoche: 30 minutes

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Toby DeRoche: So here’s what we did. Here’s what well here’s where we you know we had problems that we found. What are you going to do about it. Let’s document it right now.

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Toby DeRoche: That’s documented on the board.

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Toby DeRoche: Let’s do this together.

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Toby DeRoche: I don’t know if you’ve ever used to hello

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Jason Mefford: I have. Yeah.

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Toby DeRoche: I love it. It keeps my entire life on track right now.

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Toby DeRoche: It’s like it was built for this, though, and

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Jason Mefford: You can actually it is prize for project management.

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Toby DeRoche: Project Management. A lot of people use it.

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Toby DeRoche: It’s free, which is wonderful. Like, you can go spend more money, you get something like JIRA and you might have that in your organization already but

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Toby DeRoche: Trellis free. Anybody can have an account you go sign up and you can show how you can actually take that little four step process projected on the wall in a meeting.

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Toby DeRoche: type out the answers with everybody watching and you’re done.

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Toby DeRoche: You didn’t need to have a report.

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Toby DeRoche: You didn’t have to wait to the end of the audit to start tracking things you’ve got

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Toby DeRoche: What they’re going to fix. You’ve got dates we all committed to things in that quick meeting release those things out for people started dealing with them.

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Be done with it.

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Toby DeRoche: And you basically then when you’re done with your audit, you know, at the end of that six weeks. Not only were we done with the work we’re done with talking about it because that last day we had the last meeting with management and we walked off, we were done.

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Toby DeRoche: And now they’re dealing with whatever follow up, they have to do

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Jason Mefford: Well, that’s why I think it’s great. You know, one of the webinars that you did a little while ago I think was titled no more audit reports.

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Jason Mefford: Yep. Right. And we have that course now and see risk Academy, you know, for people to go back and listen to, but I’m sure you know when a lot of people see

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Jason Mefford: Saw that saw that title, they’re like, what are you kidding. We have to write a report, because that’s what the standards, tell us we have to do. Right. And again, it’s like, All right, folks, you know, if you’re saying that to yourself, just do a timeout here.

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Jason Mefford: Because just like Toby said, Does the standards say nothing about having to write a report, it says that we have to communicate our findings are the results of our audit well community writing a report is only one way to communicate it, and so again you can

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Jason Mefford: Still be

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Jason Mefford: Don’t, don’t make the word communication mean audit report you can communicate and add value to your organization without even writing a report. In fact, I think, you know, most of the stats. I’ve seen 30 to 40% of audit time is wasted writing reports.

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Jason Mefford: Which is just stupid. You can get 30 to 40% more work done. If you just quit writing the damn report.

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Toby DeRoche: Like I was I was talking with a group down in Texas. A couple months back, and they were looking for a way to speed up some of their processes and their biggest problem. Their biggest time train was the report.

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Toby DeRoche: Because everyone in the entire organization gets hung up on the words.

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Toby DeRoche: You know, you have to in their case give this entire backstory of, well, here’s where the process started in 1930 all the way up until now. And, you know, everybody in their brother, and who touched it.

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Toby DeRoche: And why it looks like the way it does basically like

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Toby DeRoche: I don’t care, you know, nobody cares. And if we weren’t spending so much time trying to

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Toby DeRoche: You know tone down these things to the point that they’re meaningless and take all of this stuff out of it, just stick to the facts. Here’s what happened.

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Toby DeRoche: Follow the standards for this one, you know, it’s criteria condition cause effect write it out, be done with it. And then it’s very hard to argue with just normal facts spike, you know, current political

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Jason Mefford: Stuff. It’s fake news fake news.

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Toby DeRoche: Fake you pick out a report.

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Jason Mefford: That should be a title.

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Jason Mefford: We’ll see if you come up with it. First, or if I do, but yeah.

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Toby DeRoche: But yeah, it’s, it doesn’t need to be this long drawn out thing just here’s what we found. Now if we don’t put it in print.

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Toby DeRoche: If it’s not going into it into an otter report and which is actually dealing with what was bound. Does that actually make things better.

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Toby DeRoche: You know, because now, people aren’t getting hung up on but we can’t use that word because that’s going to bend, Betsy. Sue and we can’t use this word because legal is going to have a problem with it.

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Toby DeRoche: And you know we we can just get down to the point of here’s what we found, here’s what you’re going to do. Let’s go. Yeah.

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Jason Mefford: Well, and I think it’s that that’s the point to where we need to get to is you. You just have to start doing it right. You know a lot of people get hung up on the thinking

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Jason Mefford: They’ll read books and books and books and books and

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Jason Mefford: You know, go to different trainings, or whatever and agile, but you know as an example is just look here’s kind of the basics. Just try it.

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Jason Mefford: Right, just start implementing it. You probably going to make some mistakes. The first couple times you do it, but that’s part of the normal learning process but

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Jason Mefford: The quicker you can start implementing it. The quicker you can start doing it, then you can modify but yeah everybody that I’ve talked to, that’s actually gone through and and really taken true agile approach has loved it.

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Jason Mefford: And the people. The people in their organizations have loved it as well. And it takes way less time, you know, to do it, but you have to, you have to let go of some of those limiting beliefs and and things that you believe are true, that are

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Jason Mefford: Not about the standards or about what internal audit has to do. Yeah.

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Jason Mefford: Cuz honestly internal auditing, it’s

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Jason Mefford: 150 or 200 and we were joking before it might even be 6000 years old.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah, in, in the same same old, same old of what we’ve been doing it, it doesn’t work for most people anymore.

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Toby DeRoche: Yeah, and that’s the thing, like, as a group, we haven’t made a lot of changes.

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Toby DeRoche: We’ve were 30 years into trying to adopt data analytics.

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Toby DeRoche: And so if we don’t move fast. But this is something that we can take on, you know, it’s right now is the right time. And so what I’m doing, you know, I

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Toby DeRoche: I’ve written up a bunch of advice with examples and screenshots. A lot of things like trail low and put it into a book and put that on Amazon.

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Toby DeRoche: I’ve carved out some of it. I’m going to be putting it into some of the webinars that I have coming up. I’m actually doing one it’s going to be a full two hours on just how to transition from a tree in the traditional audit process into agile.

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Toby DeRoche: And the whole the whole goal with this one isn’t to say, well, you know, here’s what Agile is and really for my spend five minutes on that. But the point is, how do we transition

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Toby DeRoche: Because I guarantee you. No one cares about the history of agile.

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Toby DeRoche: And yet every single conversation. We start with Agile auditing started with the manifesto from MIT guys who did some stuff. And no one cares.

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Toby DeRoche: Yeah.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah. Quit wasting your breath on some of the stuff that doesn’t really matter. Just figure out well. And I think that’s why

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Jason Mefford: You know, people are asking these questions, but how do I do it right because the problem is when you only have something theoretical

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Jason Mefford: You can maybe kind of understand it theoretically or academically but unless you know how to actually implement or start actually doing some steps.

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Jason Mefford: Then you end up in this kind of mental loop, where we start asking questions. Why Why Why Why Why right and asking yourself.

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Jason Mefford: Why questions just makes you go crazy because for every answer you get to a why question, it comes up with another why question.

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Jason Mefford: So, you know, one of the practical things that I do when I’m coaching people is quit asking why questions start asking what and how right so what can I do

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Jason Mefford: To make my traditional approach more agile based. Okay, you’re going to get an answer, then go and try it. How can I improve this, how can I do this better.

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Jason Mefford: You’ll end up with some idea go implement it.

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Jason Mefford: Right and don’t overthink it. Because when you overthink it. Then you won’t take action.

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Toby DeRoche: And, you know, for the people that have seen who have tried this and it doesn’t work. It’s because they took that approach they they overthought the whole thing. They wouldn’t got a book on Project Management using Scrum.

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Toby DeRoche: And they started trying to apply every single thing that you would do in this it environment.

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Toby DeRoche: That includes things like

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Toby DeRoche: Well, I have to have burned down and I have to have all of these other things. And I have to show. And the moment you look at this, you should say, do I need this.

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Toby DeRoche: Like, that’s, that’s great for somebody, but as auditors. We don’t need this. And the beauty of this is we’re adopting this process we pick and choose whatever we want.

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Toby DeRoche: You know, it’s not like we’re going to get a loser audit certification if we

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Toby DeRoche: suddenly go off and do something slightly different from some other methodology that we’ve learned about us whatever of it works and just adopt it to yourselves, make it, make it

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Toby DeRoche: Make it something that helps us work better.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah, because if we get into that overthinking and believing that it’s going to be perfect the first time we do it right, we’re setting ourselves up for failure. Right. So realize that, you know, nothing’s going to be perfect the first time. So just start just try, like you said, just

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Jason Mefford: Just take a piece or two of it.

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Jason Mefford: Try it. Start incorporating it when you get that working well. Then you go and you grab the other thing, right.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah, like you said, so much of the time we end up thinking oh my gosh there’s 100 things I have to do. And then we feel like, well, I can’t accomplish all hundred things. So then we just don’t do anything.

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Toby DeRoche: Right.

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Jason Mefford: And instead, picking one or two. Okay, let’s let’s work on those until we get them. Good. Now let’s go get a couple more. And over time, you end up getting through all 100 of them right but you’ve got to actually take action with it.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah, so there’s there’s some practical stuff around, you know, agile, which a lot of people are talking about now.

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Jason Mefford: I know to one of the questions that I keep getting a lot is, is around the whole virtual or remote working and some of the stuff like that right and

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Jason Mefford: You know, you mentioned before about well, how, how can we do this if we’re, you know, how can we physically count inventory. If we can’t be there and it’s like

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Jason Mefford: Well, first off, folks, if you’re still physically counting inventory. That’s probably not one of the things you should be doing. In fact, that’s a carry over from an archaic audit standard for external auditors.

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Jason Mefford: That they must physically observed inventories a year in for financial statement audits. There’s no requirement for that for internal auditors and in fact most of your inventory processes are probably working well enough.

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Jason Mefford: With enough mitigating controls.

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Jason Mefford: That we shouldn’t be, you know, messing around with inventory anyway.

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Toby DeRoche: I can tell you after spending four years in retail on it. And every year you kind of go through, you know, a week long of

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Toby DeRoche: all nighters

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Jason Mefford: Oh yeah, I’ve been there.

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Toby DeRoche: Watching people count and even before that I spent eight years in retail

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Jason Mefford: Was actually doing the inventories yourself.

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Toby DeRoche: I was a store manager at a smaller retailer that’s now gone.

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Toby DeRoche: But yeah, it’s, you know, all night long. You spend counting all this stuff, piece by individual piece.

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Toby DeRoche: But in reality, people were doing things like psycho counts and spot checks and everything was would have been fine. Anyway, you know, check the things that are strange and outstanding look for exception reports, but outside of that it was a waste of time.

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Toby DeRoche: For, you know, thinking about like remote work.

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Toby DeRoche: One of the things that as a practical approach. I’ve been suggesting is that people make a decision tree. So let’s, let’s assume that at some point we’re going to be able to go back and have some travel

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Toby DeRoche: But first, you’re if you’re working for a company, they’re probably not going to be real big on the travel budgets that we used to have.

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Toby DeRoche: Because we just made it six months without it.

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Toby DeRoche: And so they’re not going to just suddenly open up their wallets and say, okay, goes back

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Toby DeRoche: And we don’t know what travel is going to look like, you know, if we start having airlines collapse price tickets might go up.

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Toby DeRoche: Alone. So we’re going to have to see how much we can even feasibly travel start making a decision tree of well, how, how big of a risk is this thing I’m looking at if it’s a high risk, let’s assume that it would be better if I were on site.

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Toby DeRoche: But maybe I don’t need to be on site for the whole thing before we would do is from day one. Today, you know, finished we were on site.

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Toby DeRoche: And we would spend every waking moment, you know, travel out on a Monday morning, come back on a Friday night and you spent every minute on site, you didn’t need to spend your planning time there.

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Toby DeRoche: You probably didn’t need to spend much time that first week or two, because people were still gathering evidence for you.

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Toby DeRoche: And they could drop that off somewhere in a shared drive and be done with it. You didn’t have to go and sit and wait

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Toby DeRoche: You can probably had a bunch of zoom conversations with people.

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Toby DeRoche: And done a lot of the due diligence before you ever ever set foot on site. And then if you had to go out there.

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Toby DeRoche: Then you go for what matters and you get that up. You get that part knocked out and go back home. You don’t need to be on site because it’s not just the travel is the flight but hotels, the disruption. They may not want you there.

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Toby DeRoche: Because now we’re introducing a new risk element to them by having outsiders walking around the building.

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Toby DeRoche: Your people may not want to go.

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Toby DeRoche: Now, you know, I personally would not want to go anywhere right now.

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Toby DeRoche: So it’s, it’s too much to ask people to start traveling

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Toby DeRoche: And we have to find a way to get around it. And so one of the things that we can start to look for as well. Do I have any local resources that I could adopt, you know, it’s not a new thing for us. We’ve been using internal subject matter experts forever.

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Toby DeRoche: And so if I’ve got somebody there that can do the work for me create they just got deputized now they’re in on it.

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Toby DeRoche: And using the go do some of the legwork for you. You know, you gotta go and do it and inventory observation. Yeah. Everybody’s got FaceTime on their phone.

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Toby DeRoche: Turn it on.

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Toby DeRoche: To put a walk around the building.

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Toby DeRoche: You know, if it’s something that’s not a high risk God

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Toby DeRoche: We probably never needed to go to begin with.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah.

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Toby DeRoche: In those high risk times though it might be an onsite. It might be adopted local resource or that’s where we start looking at things like can I outsource

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Toby DeRoche: And it doesn’t need to be a big contractual outsourcing engagement. We’re talking is can I freelance this thing out.

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Toby DeRoche: Can I grab some local resource who’s willing to go out and spend a couple days and do some legwork for me and you can grab these guys off the things like freelancer fiber.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah.

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Toby DeRoche: We’re thinking

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Jason Mefford: We have to change your way of thinking and even to kind of go back to the retail example that we were talking about before. Right.

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Jason Mefford: I mean when usually most large retailers. They don’t do their own inventory count.

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Jason Mefford: Right, that’s, that’s why I can’t remember the name, there’s like two big companies that do most of the stuff for the people in the US. Right.

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Jason Mefford: And and so you show up and you observe or watch these people doing it. Well, you know, again, if it’s

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Jason Mefford: One of the biggest companies in the in the world that are doing this, the processes are probably pretty good right so that it can be an example of where you could probably outsource it. Yeah, you might have to do a little bit of work to verify that they actually know what they’re doing.

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Jason Mefford: But not not physically be there right and I love your idea about the decision tree, you know, trying to come up with something and really starting to ask yourself the questions.

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Jason Mefford: Do I have to physically be on site for this because that’s what I’ve been talking about with a lot of people. There’s probably creative ways, like you said, FaceTime, I was joking with somebody that day about using drones.

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Jason Mefford: Uh huh. But heck we could use drones. Right. You know, FedEx FedEx a drone to somebody at the facility and say go set it out on the floor and

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Jason Mefford: Turn it on. And then we’re going to remote do it from whatever. Right. I mean, if the military can can fly drones all the way around the world from wherever they happen to be, then we could do things like that as well. Right.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah. Or, you know, get get back to the point to where. Hey, instead of being on site for two weeks, maybe we’re only there for one or two days.

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Jason Mefford: Maybe that’s really

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Jason Mefford: All we have to be on site because honestly, a lot of times on site work, you’re usually there’s a lot of downtime.

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Toby DeRoche: To sitting in an office.

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Jason Mefford: Sitting in your office, you’re waiting for somebody three people on the team are trying to talk to the same person at the same time. And so

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Jason Mefford: There’s a lot of

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Toby DeRoche: time figuring out watching dinner.

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Jason Mefford: Where we’re going to go to dinner.

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Jason Mefford: Exactly. No, I don’t want Mexican tonight we had that two nights ago, whatever.

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Jason Mefford: But

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Jason Mefford: You know, another one that kind of goes along with this, though, that I, I know I’ve had a lot of people asking questions about, well, but, but how do we how do we develop relationships.

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Jason Mefford: You know, we have that old term auditing by walking about

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Jason Mefford: You know, where you just kind of walking around, and yet you notice certain things or, you know, maybe you’re new to an organization, you don’t know somebody, how, how can we develop relationships with people remotely.

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Jason Mefford: You know, where before, maybe we bumped into him at the coffee station or, you know, it’s easier to maybe go have lunch with them or do something like that, you know, how do we transition. A lot of that stuff now to virtually

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Jason Mefford: And I know a lot of people are kind of scared about that and thinking, it can’t be done. So I’m kind of interested to see here, hear your take on that.

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Jason Mefford: As well.

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Toby DeRoche: It’s interesting. So I’ve actually worked from home for 10 years. So this last few months has been everybody I was doing the party because I’ve been doing this for a long time and it’s so funny to watch people struggle with these ideas.

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Toby DeRoche: Reality is, you just have to be more intentional about it, you know. So I have

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Toby DeRoche: A series of people that I’m working with, and I might have

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Toby DeRoche: In the course of a week two or three conversations with each one, but it’s cameras on face to face. It’s not like you lose all human contact when you go to work from home. You just have to change the way you think about it.

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Toby DeRoche: I have a friend who he and I get together at least every other day and it is literally just get on zoom. We have a cup of coffee together and Jeff.

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Toby DeRoche: And it’s just so that we can catch up and it’s usually half work half, you know, home life whatever’s going on, but it’s not

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Toby DeRoche: It’s not that hard to keep those relationships going and it would be the same thing. It may be a little awkward at first, especially these aren’t people you know that well.

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Toby DeRoche: But get, you know, you’re going to go out and we would have been doing an inventory. So we would have had lunch with the director of some facility in Jersey.

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Toby DeRoche: You don’t want to have a Skype, get him on a zoom have a conversation with them the block out 20 minutes. Don’t make it a big thing and just have the conversation just chat be human.

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Jason Mefford: Well i think it’s it’s funny, you know, because like I said, a lot of people are kind of freaking out about this, but at the end of the day, the medium has changed, but the principles of not right.

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Jason Mefford: Right, so like when you’re talking with your friend. You know there’s there’s some rapport.

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Jason Mefford: That you’re building you’re talking about work stuff, but you’re also talking about personal stuff. Why, because that’s part of developing a human relationship with people. Right. You can do that remotely, just like you can in person. I mean, right now we’re not together.

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Jason Mefford: You know, you’re, you’re halfway, or you’re pretty much the whole way across the country from

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Jason Mefford: Me, right. So we’re probably 2500 miles apart but camera on, we can still have a real human connection and I think

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Jason Mefford: Like you said, that actually

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Jason Mefford: The video options, you know, whether it’s

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Jason Mefford: Skype or zoom or team or whatever you’re using

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Jason Mefford: Is much better than just a phone call.

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Jason Mefford: Oh yeah, right. But in the past, folks. Right. You know, you think about. It’s like we wouldn’t have thought it weird to pick up the phone.

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Jason Mefford: And call somebody and talk to them over the phone, but actually video is a better medium anyway. So again, you’re doing the same things building rapport with them, you know, developing those relationships.

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Jason Mefford: You know, discussing what you need to getting this stuff done. I think I think more than anything actually virtual, like you said, You’ve got to be more intentional about doing it.

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Toby DeRoche: Mm hmm.

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Jason Mefford: But I think we can be much more efficient when it’s virtual as well. Yeah.

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Jason Mefford: Right, because now it’s, you know, you’ve scheduled a time with somebody, you’re not interrupting him in the middle of something else. People know they show up. You can be quick on and off, you know, kind of thing as well.

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Toby DeRoche: Yeah, a lot of the suggestions that I’ve been giving to people on this is think about the other person and yourself and think about the schedule. Right.

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Toby DeRoche: You don’t want to block out an hour for every single meeting, you’re ever going to do

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Toby DeRoche: You probably don’t even half an hour, either.

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Toby DeRoche: Because before it would have been, you might have schedule something you sat across from them at a desk took you notes and then what when you were done.

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Toby DeRoche: It’s not like you stayed the half hour just because you had a half hour block. And for some reason, we put things on the calendar and we do virtual. A lot of people get into this idea that I have to fill up the time

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Toby DeRoche: And it’s okay because you’ve got these phrases that well I’m going to give you five minutes. Back in your day.

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Toby DeRoche: And it’s when you’re done, you’re done. Just be done.

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Toby DeRoche: And when we’re being more intentional about it. You don’t schedule things for half an hour you schedule it for 20 minutes because they’ve got another meeting to get to, they might have back to back calls

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Toby DeRoche: You know, whatever it is that’s going on. And you might have the same thing. You don’t want these things running up against each other because now you didn’t have any time to actually think process go get that cup of coffee that you really needed

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Toby DeRoche: Whatever it might have been. So do you think that shorter blocks. If it was going to be an hour call 45 minutes and be done.

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Yeah.

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Toby DeRoche: And when you put things on someone’s counter like that, you know, the piece of it is setting expectations.

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Toby DeRoche: And tell them up front, even put it in the invitation. It’s 20 minutes to talk about this.

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Toby DeRoche: With cameras on

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Toby DeRoche: And let them know the cameras need to be on because

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Toby DeRoche: Part of this is still part of your audit right i mean it’s it’s the, the more informal part that we would have had from walking around.

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Toby DeRoche: But you need to see them, you need the body language, you need the eye contact. You need need to be able to see if they’re getting really square new you can start talking about something, because maybe they get something to hide.

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Jason Mefford: This are touching their forehead and run Windows or anything like 12

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Slides.

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Jason Mefford: Well, and I think that’s, you know, I’ve been, you know, similar to you. I’ve been working from home for a years

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Jason Mefford: Myself and it’s

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Jason Mefford: You know, the camera on is a big deal.

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Jason Mefford: You know, and even when

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Jason Mefford: Depending on the call.

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Jason Mefford: But I won’t really do a cop do certain calls unless people will turn on their camera. Yeah.

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Jason Mefford: And if and if they can’t get their camera on, then it’s like, Okay, well, we’re gonna have to reschedule. Yeah, right. Other other times where, you know, again, I might let them hide, but I never hide. I always have my camera turned on, except for one meeting.

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Jason Mefford: That I have with one of my clients because they don’t have it on. It’s quick meeting kind of thing, but

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Jason Mefford: You know, have your camera on, don’t, don’t try to hide and in most of the time people will be like, Oh, well you know i i look I look a mess today. And it’s like, well, so do I look at me right now. I don’t care.

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Jason Mefford: Because it, it gives you the better the better connection. And since only about 7% of the message is the words that are used.

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Jason Mefford: You need to see people

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Jason Mefford: See how they’re responding see their

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Jason Mefford: Their intonation their volume. Everything else as well, but their body language too so

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Toby DeRoche: This is, this is something that’s like a really personal thing for me. So I have a son who’s seven with autism.

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Toby DeRoche: Okay, and he’s verbal

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Toby DeRoche: He speaks just, you know, but his vocabulary is limited, his ability to have a conversation is limited and you learn really quick, that you can say a whole lot without opening your mouth.

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Jason Mefford: Yes, yes, he says.

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Jason Mefford: He says a whole bunch without opening his

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Jason Mefford: Mouth, doesn’t it.

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Toby DeRoche: Yes, all nonverbal communication even look at you and you know exactly what’s going on.

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Jason Mefford: Uh huh.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah, well, and so we need to incorporate that in into what we’re doing as well. Right, so

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Jason Mefford: And like usual. We kind of end up bumping up on time here so we

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Jason Mefford: Were gonna have to do a timeout and probably have you on later, too. But it’s, you know, hopefully for everybody that’s listening, you know. And as we’ve been talking

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Jason Mefford: There’s practical ways to start implementing some of these things, but you just got to get out of your way. Quit overthinking it try to take it in some small chunks, you know, and realize that

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Jason Mefford: You know everybody’s running around saying, oh, the world is so different today than it’s ever been. No, it’s not actually it’s not folks right

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Jason Mefford: We’ve gotten used to going to the store. Why because, for the last, I don’t know 60 or 80 years we’ve been programmed to go to the store. But how did people in the US, get their bread and their milk and their eggs 100 years ago home delivery.

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Jason Mefford: It was just done by horse and carriage. Right.

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Jason Mefford: Instead of Amazon trucks. So, you know, a lot of this stuff isn’t really that different

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Jason Mefford: And there’s there’s ways when you start thinking about it.

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Jason Mefford: That you can, you know, a lot of it’s just keep doing the same thing. It’s just with a different medium.

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Jason Mefford: So,

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Jason Mefford: Anyway, any final thoughts that you want to leave with people because like I said, I appreciate what you’re doing to and trying to help people become much more practical and actually do stuff. Yeah.

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Jason Mefford: Instead of getting hung up in the theoretical

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Toby DeRoche: Yeah, I’d say like the way that I’m trying to get the message out. I’m doing webinars.

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Toby DeRoche: I try to do them every third Thursday of the month. They’re very practical. I try to keep it all. You know, we don’t talk theory we’re really getting down to, how do we do things.

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Toby DeRoche: Those are all on demand on the risk Academy

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Toby DeRoche: Yep. And I’m also doing these where they do get to be a little more technical. I’m actually putting them into a book format that I’m putting on Amazon.

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Toby DeRoche: That way you can follow along with it if it’s something more like it really is a long drawn out process to go from

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Toby DeRoche: I need to move from traditional to agile, there’s some steps in the middle. And it really does work better. Sometimes if you’ve got those as a reference to go back to. And so I’m putting those in print, so people can have that as a takeaway as well.

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Jason Mefford: Which is great. Yeah. Because like you said you can’t get from that knowledge and skills area to the application or experience unless you have some kind of tools with that are, you know, eat it at a minimum questions to answer or kind of thought exercises to go through

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Jason Mefford: To be able to make that application.

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Jason Mefford: Over so

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Toby DeRoche: It’s really like we’ve been talking about, you have to change the way you’re thinking

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Toby DeRoche: And this is really to be a guide to get you from A to B, so that now that you’re looking at things differently and you’re trying to apply it.

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Toby DeRoche: Trying to be as explicit with it as possible of here’s how you do it, and you’re going to have your own take on it. But now that you’re thinking that way you can make that week.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah, well, and for everybody to just relax, too, because like we talked about a couple times in our discussion, your organization doesn’t have to do it the same way as

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Jason Mefford: Somebody else. In fact,

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Jason Mefford: You shouldn’t do it the same way as somebody else because your organization is different.

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Jason Mefford: And so, you know, there while you know everybody always likes to hop on the best. Well, it’s best practice to do this as best practice to do that quit worrying about best practice and do what’s most practical and valuable to your organization, regardless of what everybody else is doing.

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So,

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Jason Mefford: All right, well, Toby. Thank you.

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Jason Mefford: Like I said so. Yeah. You mentioned you know you doing webinars third Thursday of the month. Usually, and that’s inside CP. So how can people find find those webinars will try to put that in the show notes as well.

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Toby DeRoche: Yeah, it’s on inside CPA com slash webinars.

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Toby DeRoche: Okay.

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Toby DeRoche: We post them on LinkedIn as well.

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Toby DeRoche: And then all of our on demand. I have links to them on my page and they’re also they’re all on serious Academy

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Jason Mefford: Yeah, so on there and serious. You can even just search by Toby’s name and it’ll, it’ll filter out all of his courses as well.

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Jason Mefford: So that you can see it because, yeah, there’s some great ones out there like no more audit reports, one that you just recently did to us about. Was it something about the fraud triangle and getting we need a new fraud triangle.

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Toby DeRoche: Triangle. This

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Toby DeRoche: A lot of the ones that are doing. It’s really just taking some of these things like cross training has been around for 70 years. It’s really a different world out there that doesn’t work anymore.

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Jason Mefford: Well, in the whole reason it was created was for law enforcement.

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Jason Mefford: And then it’s just been kind of

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Jason Mefford: Kind of adopted by the fraud industry as well and the

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Toby DeRoche: Fraud industry, the way that it’s been taken, it’s purely financial

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Jason Mefford: Yeah.

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Toby DeRoche: It doesn’t consider things like, well, what about hacking and what, what about all. What about AI. Where does the I come into play. What happens if there was no motivation behind it, other than I wanted to see if I can do it. It’s not because

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Jason Mefford: The classic hacker

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Toby DeRoche: Hacker. Yeah. Yeah. Not because I was under some financial pressure, but I wanted to see if I can hack the VOD

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Jason Mefford: And I did. No, I didn’t. I did not. And so you’re

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Toby DeRoche: Not eating.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah. So anyway, so go check out, check out you know Toby’s webinars and like I said, if you can’t catch them live there.

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Jason Mefford: They’re on see risk afterwards for you to be able to go back to as well. So, Toby. Thanks, my brother. Let’s keep up the keep up the fight. Keep out them that profession and help everybody be more practical.

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Jason Mefford: So that we can move forward into the future.

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Jason Mefford: And not not just becomes some other compliance activity in the organization.

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Toby DeRoche: Absolutely. Thanks for having me on.

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Hey, thanks.

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Transcript

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Jason Mefford: Welcome to another episode of jamming with Jason and my friends. We’re back for a solo episode. Again, which means

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Jason Mefford: I just get to talk directly to you this week and I’m excited about this topic, you know, I’ve been coaching people for a long time.

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Jason Mefford: Executives chief audit executives business owners and, you know, almost every challenge that people have

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Jason Mefford: The root cause of it tends to be most of the time. Not all the time, but almost all of the time happens to come back to the same root cause.

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Jason Mefford: And we’re going to talk about that today as we get into our topic, but before we do that, of course, we have some things that we need to do I gotta do some shout outs to people that regularly, listen.

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Jason Mefford: So the first one. Allison rife Martin she actually wrote in and let me know. She said, I just started listening to your podcast and I love it.

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Jason Mefford: In the I am a CPA nerd who loves talking about and thinking about risks. Well, Allison. I’m a CPA nerd to of course, I’ve got a lot of other certifications. Besides that,

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Jason Mefford: But I love talking about this stuff too. And so I am glad that you are listening and thank you for reaching out another one that came in this week.

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Jason Mefford: Says, many business related podcasts are very dry. Believe me, I understand that. Right. But he goes on to say I like how you include humor to make it interesting.

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Jason Mefford: Also the solo podcasts that you sometimes use things like a book, the best of times, worst of times just listen to that one to teach the topic.

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Jason Mefford: One of my favorite guests, you have had on was Mike Jacka the two of you together were very entertaining. So that’s from john Hewitt john. Thank you.

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Jason Mefford: Do try to make it a little bit light here. If we can try to have some fun because my goodness, I, I totally hear you, brother.

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Jason Mefford: So too many of the business podcasts that are out there and too much of the business training in general is just dry and boring and wow, okay.

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Jason Mefford: So you’re not going to get that here on jamming with Jason So Allison and john thank you for sending those in. Now for everybody else who’s listening again I want to reach out to you reach out to me. If you’re not connected with me on LinkedIn already

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Jason Mefford: Send me a

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Jason Mefford: Customized request because honestly, I get random connection requests from people all over the world. I have no idea who the hell they are or why they would want to connect with me.

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Jason Mefford: So if you are a listener to the episodes. And if you’re following me. Make sure to include a personalized invite. So when you do when you do the Connect, make sure and do the add note to it as well.

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00:03:10.980 –> 00:03:18.630
Jason Mefford: So that I know who you are. The other thing is, once you’re connected or if you’re already connected to me, send me a little message.

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Jason Mefford: through LinkedIn and let me know what you are enjoying about the podcast and you may be featured in a future episode.

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Jason Mefford: Now to go along with that. That’s kind of the normal thing that I say

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Jason Mefford: But I’ve got an extra little incentive for all of you that are thinking, oh, should I send it in. Maybe, maybe not. Oh, I don’t know.

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Jason Mefford: Well here’s, here’s what I’m going to tell you folks, I’m going to be doing some interesting things going forward.

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Jason Mefford: And one of those things that I’m considering is actually recording a Live podcast, which means that some of you. I’m going to invite

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Jason Mefford: To be with me on the podcast and probably go around the room. Let each of you ask a question or do some things like that.

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Jason Mefford: So you can have an opportunity to actually participate and be a part of future episodes as well.

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Jason Mefford: Now how I’m going to invite people hey guess what folks is people that have connected with me and people who have sent me testimonials.

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Jason Mefford: About what they like about the podcast, so that I actually know that you’re listening. So again, go ahead and send those in, because I’m going to be looking at scheduling that here.

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Jason Mefford: In the next few weeks. So if you’ve already done that expect that you might get an email or a LinkedIn message from me asking if you would like to participate.

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Jason Mefford: Okay, so that’s enough of the housekeeping to begin with. Why don’t we jump in and start talking about today’s topic.

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Jason Mefford: Which from the title. You know, it’s all about relationships. Now, I’ve been saying this for a little while. In fact, I’ve had some videos going around social media, lots of people liking it. Lots of people

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Jason Mefford: You know, listening to it, commenting positively on it. But of course, there’s always those few people

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Jason Mefford: That say Jason, you just don’t really get it. Okay. So I thought, well, let me just record a podcast episode. Let’s talk about it in a little bit more depth than just a two or three minute video

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Jason Mefford: Can be okay because, as I told you that when we started off. I’ve been coaching people for a long time, high powered executives business owners chief audit executives.

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Jason Mefford: And almost invariably all of the challenges that they’re facing with have the same root cause and that root cause is this, there is a problem with a relationship in their life.

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Jason Mefford: Now that relationship problem could come from a problem with stakeholders. So example, like, you know, a relationship issue with your audit committee or board.

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Jason Mefford: Or other executives that are in the organization. It could come from a relationship issue with your staff.

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Jason Mefford: And so you’re having issues, maybe with some of your staff. It’s a relationship issue is the root cause, usually of whatever it is.

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Jason Mefford: And the third one that most people don’t actually think about is their relationship to self.

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Jason Mefford: Now I know that might sound a little funny, but let me, let me explain, just briefly, and then we’re going to dig into it more as we go through the podcast episode.

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Jason Mefford: I hear a lot of people that are complainer’s and we usually refer to them as victims, people who believe or are blaming or denying or making excuses.

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Jason Mefford: For why they can’t do certain things. And so typically, it will come up. And again, I’ve

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Jason Mefford: Heard this over and over again. And I’m not going to repeat all of it because it’s just really frustrating when people get on the victim wagon.

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Jason Mefford: Of where they’re blaming everybody else. The problem is not everybody else. It’s usually you. Now I know a lot of people you don’t want to hear that.

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Jason Mefford: But a lot of your own challenges are caused by your own doing because you are not managing yourself and we’re going to get into that a little bit more later.

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Jason Mefford: Okay, but like, as I said, you know, the root cause of all challenges is usually a relationship issue. Now I don’t want you to have a relationship issues.

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Jason Mefford: I want you to be a relationship ninja okay because ninjas are cool. And so I want to become a relationship ninja. And I’m going to go through and kind of talk a little bit about that today.

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Jason Mefford: To be able to provide you with some practical advice so you can get started right away because, you know, let’s get these challenges and other things out of the way.

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Jason Mefford: Now what we’re going to talk about today relates both to your professional relationships and your professional career, but it also has a huge impact.

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Jason Mefford: On your personal life as well. Now,

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Jason Mefford: You know, as I said, some people have actually kind of come back and said, oh, Jason. You’re full of crap. You know, you don’t really, you don’t really that that’s too simplistic, it can’t all be about relationships. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: So, my friends, just like everything else. I’m not, I’m not gonna ask you to just trust me. Okay, don’t just trust me on this, let’s actually talk about

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Jason Mefford: Something that has been going on for a long time. That is also saying the same thing. In fact, this has been some of the source of the inspiration.

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Jason Mefford: For me to kind of look at how I’m helping people differently. And it actually is from a study that comes from Harvard University.

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Jason Mefford: Okay. And it’s called the Harvard study of adult development. Okay, the Harvard study of adult development. Now this is a study that Harvard started in 1938

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Jason Mefford: You get that 1938 now. My dad was born in 33 and I know he’s 87 right so that means they have been doing. They have been studying

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Jason Mefford: The same subjects, since the sophomore class of 1938 so every year they meet with these people, they go through. They asked him some questions. They do other stuff like that.

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Jason Mefford: Because they were trying to figure out, you know how adults develop in really kind of study, what is the key to a long life. What is the key to happiness and to health.

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Jason Mefford: And like I said, they started in 1938 and there’s some interesting resources. Again, you can go out and fact check me on this because I’m not feeding any bullshit here.

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Jason Mefford: But if you want to go out and look up the Harvard study of adult development, you can get some information there.

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Jason Mefford: The other thing. There’s actually the, the, the person who is kind of leading up that part of Harvard right now. His name is Robert waldinger Robert waldinger

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Jason Mefford: And he actually did a TED talk on this a few years ago. That’s actually had over 13 million views. Okay, so you can actually go out, you can watch a TED talk. It’s not very long. I think it’s between 15 and 18 minutes, which is what most

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Jason Mefford: Ted Talks are and actually you can search the title of his TED Talk is what makes a good life lessons from the longest study on happiness. And again, his name is Robert waldinger

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Jason Mefford: And so, again, to get into this. Let me, let me just read a little bit kind of from from some things, some research that I’ve done about this right

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Jason Mefford: And this is this is a quote from Robert waldinger he says you know we gather together everything we knew about them. At age 50

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Jason Mefford: It wasn’t their middle aged cholesterol level that protected how they were going to grow old.

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Jason Mefford: It was how satisfied they were in their relationships, the people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50

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Jason Mefford: Where the healthiest at age 80. Okay. And again, like I said, it’s, it’s, they’ve they’ve done a lot of research on this. And the one thing that has the biggest impact on people’s health and happiness long term.

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Jason Mefford: Is good relationships. In fact, the flip side of that loneliness being alone being by yourself actually has as big of a negative health impact as smoking or alcoholism does

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Jason Mefford: Did you get that. So the opposite side. If you don’t have good relationships. If you feel alone or are lonely. He says loneliness kills quote it has as powerful, it’s as powerful as smoking or alcoholism.

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Jason Mefford: So again, I came across this study a little while ago. I’ve been following it for a while and just find it interesting. And again, as I pondered about this.

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Jason Mefford: For the last few months, really, you know, drives home the fact that almost every challenge or problem that people ask me to help them with.

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Jason Mefford: Comes down to a relationship problem. And so that’s, again, I told you I’ve been thinking about this for a while. And that’s one of the reasons

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Jason Mefford: Why, I’ve actually developed a whole executive leadership program to help people be able to better understand how to manage the relationships with themselves with their stakeholders and with their staff.

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Jason Mefford: Now why am I bringing that to you again from an internal audit perspective again, as I’ve as I’ve told you over and over again.

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Jason Mefford: It is, it is not following the standards, it is not following best practices. It is not your technical skills that actually will make you effective

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Jason Mefford: In fact, focusing too much on some of those areas can actually negatively impact your relationships and negatively impact your career.

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Jason Mefford: Now I know when I say that I get people who, who, again, they try to beat the drum of the AIA and say, oh, the I. The IPF has everything that we need to do. And of course relationships are a part of that. But here’s the problem. Folks, everybody who’s following them.

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Jason Mefford: Still has challenges. Right. And in fact, a lot of times, as I’ve seen and told you in some previous episodes.

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Jason Mefford: About certain individuals, of course anonymized not to embarrass them or anything else. But a lot of times, the people who focus on just that and do not do what they need to to develop relationships.

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Jason Mefford: They end up banging their head against the wall, they end up finding themselves in very precarious situations in their career.

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Jason Mefford: And, and, again, a lot of people say, well, no, if we just follow all these everything will be okay.

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Jason Mefford: But I’ll tell you if you’ve got strong relationships, some of those other things. If you don’t do very good, it’s still okay right

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Jason Mefford: In fact, you can write a really shitty audit report, but if you have great relationships with the people in your organization. They’re not going to care as much. Okay. Because you’re still going to be communicating the results to them. And so again,

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Jason Mefford: Relationships are the things that really matter to your long term health, happiness in both your personal and in your professional life.

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Jason Mefford: Okay, that’s enough soapbox for today. Right, let’s actually get in and talk a little bit about what some of these things actually look like.

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Jason Mefford: And as I told you it you know I’ve developed an executive leadership program that’s called the chief audit executive briefing or CA briefing.

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Jason Mefford: That goes through each of these areas in more detail. In fact, for just 30 minutes a week.

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Jason Mefford: You can actually go through watch a video actually have some some exercises that you can practice and things to focus on during that week.

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Jason Mefford: As your as you’re doing both your professional and your personal life. And then as little as 30 minutes a week, you can actually start developing and becoming a relationship ninja.

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Jason Mefford: And actually watch the quality of your relationships, improve every single week. Okay. And even though this was developed.

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Jason Mefford: For chief executives, it’s actually applicable to everybody. So even though the title says chief executive. If you’re not, you can still get in the program. Anyway, okay, if you want to

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Jason Mefford: Because it will help you as well. Whether or not you have you know a goal of becoming a chief audit executive someday or not.

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Jason Mefford: Whatever you do, and wherever you are adding your career, improving relationships with those people that you work with, with your staff with your stakeholders and with yourself will improve the health

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Jason Mefford: And quality of your professional and personal life. Okay. And your happiness as well.

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Jason Mefford: So let’s dig in and talk a little bit about these because again this is based on a leadership model that’s actually called the LP model.

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Jason Mefford: And in that model. You know, I know this is coming to your auditory over AUDIO So you’re just going to have to kind of close your eyes and picture, along with me here.

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Jason Mefford: But again, there’s really those three major areas. So think of them like three concentric circles or a Venn diagram.

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Jason Mefford: And everything that I’m going to talk about relates to one of those three areas. Okay, so let’s just go through, like I said, I’m going to give you a little bit more of the detail right now so you can get an idea.

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Jason Mefford: Of some of the the areas that you should be working on trying to think about. And again, you know, when you’re ready to actually become that relationship ninja get in the program because it helps kick your butt in gear. Right. You know, it’s just like

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Jason Mefford: If I’ve if I’ve actually admitted this over the air but you know I’ve gained some weight in the last year or so.

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Jason Mefford: And I know what I’m supposed to do to lose weight. Right. I know, but a lot of times it’s hard to kick myself in the butt and do it when I’m trying to just do it by myself.

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Jason Mefford: And so actually you know getting in a program having an exercise routine.

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Jason Mefford: You know, belonging to a gym hiring an exercise coach doing different things like that actually kicks you in the butt and get you to actually do the work.

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Jason Mefford: That you have to do every single week you know before I’ve told you, you know, when I think when we’re talking about

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Jason Mefford: Professional Development, I can’t eat for you. I can’t do your training for you. I can’t do your push ups for you either

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Jason Mefford: You know, if I hire a coach or a trainer my trainer can’t do my push ups for me either. I’m the one that has to do the work.

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Jason Mefford: I have to do the work every day, every week in order to be able to actually see the benefits. So let’s jump in and talk about some of these different areas. So when you think about managing yourself.

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Jason Mefford: There’s really kind of four topics and of course it goes deeper than this, but I don’t have three hours to talk to you today on the podcast. So I’m going to be brief and just touch on four of the areas for each of these three. So we’re going to kind of go through 12 different topics.

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Jason Mefford: For you to be thinking about. Now, the first one under self I call mindset. Okay. And again, that goes back to, I think I told you before, a little bit about you know people that end up getting into victim mentality.

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Jason Mefford: They’re blaming they’re making excuses, they’re denying that certain things are happening.

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Jason Mefford: And there’s a lot of stuff around mindset and making sure that we are in the right headspace

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Jason Mefford: For us to be able to, you know, have have a relationship, not only with ourselves, but with our staff and with our stakeholders as well.

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Jason Mefford: If you don’t start with mindset and really know some of the hacks to go along with that. It’s really hard to do any of the other stuff.

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Jason Mefford: Now the second one you know that relates to self is habits and I know that might seem a little strange for all of you.

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Jason Mefford: But again 95% of what we do every single day is a is a brain habit based activity.

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Jason Mefford: Because what ends up happening is the subconscious part of our brain is actually having us or we’re, we’re, we’re following and doing those habits.

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Jason Mefford: That we have developed both the good habits and the bad habits. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: And, you know, one of the quotes that I’ve that I’ve heard one of my mentors say that I really like is he says you know you don’t get what you want in life, you get your habits.

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Jason Mefford: And so, you know, a lot of times, again, if you’re not getting those things in life that you want most likely it’s caused because of some habit that you have that’s holding you back from getting what you want.

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Jason Mefford: So, understanding how to develop habits you know how to how to reprogram some of your, your brain based habits is important.

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Jason Mefford: So that, because again, that is such a big driver in what you are actually doing every single day. And again, I don’t have time to get into all the research, but trust me, just like everything else that I tell you there’s actually scientific research to back that up.

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Jason Mefford: Now the third one under self relates to emotional intelligence. And that’s a buzzword that a lot of people have been throwing out there.

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Jason Mefford: But it’s important for you to understand emotions understand how emotions work how thoughts lead to feelings that lead to actions.

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Jason Mefford: And how you can actually not only identify but manage your relationships and identify and help to to manage or respond to other people’s emotions as well. So again, that’s the third thing under self.

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Jason Mefford: The last one relates to resilience now resilience is a term that you know throughout life. We kind of have some ups and we have some downs.

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Jason Mefford: That’s normal part of life sometimes we’re very happy. Sometimes we go through some pretty challenging times

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Jason Mefford: Now what resilience is, is the ability to bounce back to your normal state quicker. After some sort of a setback.

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Jason Mefford: And so again, you know, we don’t go through life always feel unhappy and everything’s do do to do to do good all the time, right.

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Jason Mefford: Every so often you go through some pretty tough stuff. And when you go through that you have to learn how to raise yourself out of that and get back to your normal state.

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Jason Mefford: And so that’s why resiliency is so important because the quicker that you can get out of some of those down troughs, that the more productive. You’ll be the happier you will be as well.

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Jason Mefford: So those are the four areas under self again it’s mindset habits emotional intelligence and resilience

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Jason Mefford: So now let’s move on to the stakeholder area right because there’s certain things that you need to do to be able to develop and have good relationships with your stakeholders and the next we’re going to talk about staff.

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Jason Mefford: Now, especially since so many of you now are dealing in a virtual world these relationships and and actually being conscious about trying to develop and maintain these relationships is even more important.

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Jason Mefford: Because you are physically distanced from people. And so what that means is it’s going to take a little bit more work on your part.

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Jason Mefford: In order to develop and maintain these relationships and that’s why if you don’t understand how to do this and what you need to be doing each day or each week or each month.

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Jason Mefford: A lot of these relationships that you’ve developed and thought were okay before the pandemic and the virtual environment, those relationships are crumbling and going away because the problem with relationships.

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Jason Mefford: Is you have to constantly be nurturing them. And if you are not nurturing those relationships they slowly die. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: So under stakeholders. What are some of the things that you need to be, you know, considering or thinking about from a relationship standpoint.

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Jason Mefford: Well, the first one is really to kind of think about your strategy in and again this is talking kind of from a chief audit executive standpoint is

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Jason Mefford: What’s the strategy that you’re going to have for your internal audit department, you know, what are you going to do, what are you not going to do, how do you want to be seen in the organization because understanding and having a clear picture of that strategy.

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Jason Mefford: Is going to help you as you are dealing with those people either as peers across the organization or as you go up in the organization to the other executives, the audit committee and the board. So the first one is strategy.

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Jason Mefford: The second one that you need to understand is rapport now rapport is a funny sounding word, but what it really means is you know, again, that’s one of the ways of developing

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Jason Mefford: rapport with other people how to actually do that because there’s some, there’s some psychological tricks and how you do it as well.

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Jason Mefford: And and it’s it’s complicated, it’s a little complicated and how you kind of lead and follow and lead and follow and some of the things that go along with that. But again, it’s important for you to understand how to develop and use rapport with your stakeholders.

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Jason Mefford: Now, the next one is is around relevance when it comes to stakeholders and and again here with the stakeholders.

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Jason Mefford: You know, one of the best ways that I’ve that I’ve, I’ve seen where it really describes what relevancy is

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Jason Mefford: Is thinking about what the other person wants to talk about and what you want to talk about where those two overlap is what’s relevant for you to talk about. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: So to kind of paint, paint a picture for this on, you know, if, let’s say that you’re at a, at a neighborhood barbecue or you’re at a family gathering

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Jason Mefford: And you know Uncle Joe comes up and Uncle Joe loves, He has some hobby or some passion that you could care less about you don’t want to hear about it.

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Jason Mefford: If Uncle Joe comes up and if that’s all that he wants to talk about the conversation really isn’t relevant for the two of you and you’re going to find a way pretty quick to get away from Uncle Joe Okay.

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Jason Mefford: However, if you find some common ground. Some area that both that is relevant to both of you, you’re going to have a much better conversation.

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Jason Mefford: And actually develop a better relationship. And so a lot of times, again, that’s why through rapport building

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Jason Mefford: You’re trying to understand where some of the commonalities are so that you can move into that relevance and and and be able to know how to talk

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Jason Mefford: To that person and understand what it is that they need and what they want.

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Jason Mefford: Okay, so that’s three out of four for stakeholders. The fourth one is influence and you’ve heard me talk about this, and a lot of different avenues.

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Jason Mefford: But I will tell you, my friends, understanding the principles of influence is one of the biggest things that you can learn as an executive

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Jason Mefford: Because, you know, and again, this comes from work done by by Robert Cialdini from Arizona State, he wrote a book. Many years ago called influence

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Jason Mefford: Where he went back and actually scientifically kind of looked at what are the six things that need to be in place for you to be able to influence other people

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Jason Mefford: And if you don’t know what those six are if you don’t know how to use those six, then you’re probably significantly disadvantage in your relationships.

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Jason Mefford: And that’s probably one of the reasons why you’re struggling and maybe can’t get people to listen to you or can’t get things like budget because you haven’t really established influence in your relationship with other people.

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Jason Mefford: So under stakeholders, the four areas again strategy rapport relevance and influence. Okay, so let’s move on now to our last section which is around managing relationships with your staff.

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Jason Mefford: Now in this area again i can i can tell you from my own personal experience of having managed people for a long time.

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Jason Mefford: You know some of the the most

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Jason Mefford: Fun and satisfying parts of my career have been in managing and working in developing with my staff.

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Jason Mefford: Some of the most painful difficult things that I’ve had to go through in my career have also related to staff. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: So you know if it’s going good. It’s us. It’s often going really good if it’s not, sometimes it can be one of the most painful areas for us to actually deal with

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Jason Mefford: And, you know, especially in our profession we don’t get taught a lot about how to actually manage your lead people

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Jason Mefford: Almost all of our training is about, you know, the technical stuff. How to Follow standards, how to be ethical how to take a statistical sample, how to write a report.

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Jason Mefford: None of those things actually really help you in managing your staff or your stakeholders. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: Now understaffed. Some of the areas that you need to get that you need to understand that you got that you got to work on and that you really have to be proficient in

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Jason Mefford: The first one is on culture now culture in this area is very similar to swat strategy was under the stakeholder area.

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Jason Mefford: You need to think about the type of culture that you want to have within your team.

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Jason Mefford: If you don’t have that as a starting place, it’s going to be difficult for you to know exactly what to do to develop motivate and manage people in your staff. Okay. So, you first have to kind of start with that culture.

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Jason Mefford: The next area is on delegation. Now, again, a lot of us because our of our personalities. And the reason that we’re

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Jason Mefford: We’re often drawn to this field is where we’re kind of control freaks. Okay, just to say it clearly. Right. And we usually like to control. We like to be perfect.

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Jason Mefford: You know, because we like perfection as well. Now that is usually the enemy to a leader into managers, because you must be able to delegate and delegate effectively and efficiently.

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Jason Mefford: Or else you’re doing all the work still. And so again, as I’ve said, you know, often I’ll talk to people in there. You know, I’m so burned out. I’m so tired.

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Jason Mefford: You know, I’ve I’m staying late I’m working the weekends. I’m doing all these kind of things. And when we dig into it a little bit deeper find out that they could probably delegate 20 hours of work that they’re doing.

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Jason Mefford: Themselves. So you know it, but it’s a matter of understanding how to do it the best ways to do it, how to how to go along with that and kind of

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Jason Mefford: You know, help get some of the stuff off of your plate as well. So delegation important

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Jason Mefford: The next one is around coaching and training and these are kind of put together because they’re similar, but they’re not completely similar

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Jason Mefford: But, you know, how do you coach and develop and get the training for your people now maybe one of the reasons why you haven’t been delegating is because you don’t feel like that person.

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Jason Mefford: Maybe is competent yet to take that over for you. Well, you’re never going to delegate it unless you actually coach and train them how to do it.

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Jason Mefford: And so it’s important to know how to do that and and there are some subtle nuances to coaching as well.

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Jason Mefford: That you know in this area really kind of go through and and talk to, because it’s to coach, somebody is not just to tell them what to do. It’s, it’s, it’s a lot different. And it actually takes some persuasion and take some understanding of psychology as well.

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Jason Mefford: But to be a really effective leader you you have to understand how to coach people as well, and not just not just dictate orders had them. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: The last one in this area is motivation. And again, you know, this is brought in, because, you know, a lot of times

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Jason Mefford: We might think hey you know where they are. People have a job. They should just be motivated anyway. Right. You know, I don’t need to motivate them.

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Jason Mefford: You know if they don’t do their job. They’re not going to get their paycheck and I’ve literally heard lots of managers talking about that.

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Jason Mefford: But I’ll tell you that’s that’s actually a manager making an excuse and playing a victim and it’s a chicken shit excuse. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: You need to understand how to motivate people. And here’s the issue, not everyone is motivated by the same thing.

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Jason Mefford: And so you actually have to understand more about the people on your staff understand what actually motivates them because this same thing will not motivate everyone, and that’s why you can see in companies that have very good you know performance.

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Jason Mefford: HR functions they use a combination of different types of motivation, different types of bonuses, different types of rewards. Because everybody

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Jason Mefford: Is motivated slightly different. Now for me, I could care less if I am ever employee of the month. Okay, I don’t care to see my big

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Jason Mefford: smiling face on a plaque in in the lunch room, but to some people being Employee of the Month is very, very important to them. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: And so again, that’s why motivation is one of those areas where you really need to be able to get in.

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Jason Mefford: And understand because again, once you’ve delegated things you’ve got to motivate coach train your people to be able to get the most performance out of them.

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Jason Mefford: Now, if you’re actually a really good leader, you shouldn’t be having to work very much in fact you know some of the some of the best chief audit executives. I know.

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Jason Mefford: They kind of asked me sometimes, they’re like, should I be doing something different because

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Jason Mefford: I don’t really feel like I’m all that busy. You know, it’s like everything is just working right. Well, it’s because they’re doing all of these things that we’ve been talking about.

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Jason Mefford: There shouldn’t be a whole lot of work for them left to do, right, because everybody else is doing it. Everything else is getting done. They’re just worried about managing themselves, their stakeholders and their staff relationships as it goes through

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Jason Mefford: So, okay, I hope that has been helpful. And again, you know, as we, kind of, you know, come back to the beginning again, you know, what did we learn from Harvard University studying

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Jason Mefford: You know, soft these men as they’ve grown up since 1938, you know, we learned that the key thing or the the main driver.

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Jason Mefford: Of their health and their happiness and the ability for them to live a long and happy life gets back to their relationships.

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Jason Mefford: And so again, that’s why. At the beginning, I’ve told you I i’ve read the I’ve seen this study for quite a while now.

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Jason Mefford: I’ve kind of watched the development of it and it keeps coming out with the same information. And as I’ve gone back as I’ve looked at a lot of the people that I’ve coached over the years.

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Jason Mefford: The challenges that people have the root cause of almost every challenge that people have

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Jason Mefford: Is an is a challenge with one of the relationships that they have either with themselves with their stakeholders, or with their staff.

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Jason Mefford: And so again, you’re going to hear me talking a lot more about this. Like I said, that’s why I put through this put together this whole executive leadership program.

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Jason Mefford: For people to go through. So, you know, if you’re the kind of person that wants to become

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Jason Mefford: A relationship ninja and actually be able to learn how to do all these things, how to incorporate these into your life, how to practice them so that they just become second nature.

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Jason Mefford: And, you know, if you’re the kind of person that wants to improve the quality of your relationships, both professionally and personally, then this is really the information that you need. So what I’m going to do is, I know I think I told you before, and even though it’s called the CIA briefing.

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Jason Mefford: Because it’s it’s designed for chief audit executives, but I realized, because actually one of the one of the people that I know responded on one of my posts and said,

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Jason Mefford: Well, Jason. Isn’t this really information that’s relevant to all of us. And I thought, you know what, you’re absolutely right.

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Jason Mefford: This is information that relates to everybody. And so I’m not limiting it to only chief out of executives.

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Jason Mefford: You know, if, if you’re that kind of person that wants to become a relationship ninja then get in the program. And, you know, as we talked about before. It’s like me. I gained a little bit away. Well, guess what folks I’m getting off the couch. I’m getting back into my, into my exercise routine.

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Jason Mefford: And you can do the same thing when it comes to relationships because really, at the end of the day, it all comes down to relationships.

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Jason Mefford: So with that, my friends, I’m wrapping this week and I’ll catch you on the next episode of jammin with Jason. Have a great rest of your week

Ever feel like a “deer in the headlights” when you get thrown into a #fraud investigation? If you are like most people, at that point you start wishing you had guidance from a mentor or retired colleague. If your colleague was here now, what gems of experience and tricks of the trade would your colleague give you?

In this #jammingwithjason #internalauditpodcast you get that. The experience and advice of someone, who while not retired, has seen his share of fraud investigations in his career. So much so that he wrote a book on it to share the wisdom with others.

Craig Bristow is the author of “Practical Insights for Fraud Professionals: Lifting the veil on the dark art” and a Chief Audit Executive.

“Practical Insights for Fraud Professionals” reads like on-the-job training and provides sound practical guidelines on how to conduct all elements associated with fraud investigation. Both new and seasoned fraud investigators will find value in these applied techniques from Craig’s book and from his discussion on this podcast.

You can get a copy of Craig’s book at: https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Insights-Fraud-Professionals-Lifting/dp/1485120306/

Heading

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Jason Mefford: Hey everybody, I am excited to have Craig Bristow with me today and Craig is actually the author of get this. It’s a great title.

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Jason Mefford: Practical insights for fraud professionals lifting the veil on the dark arts

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Jason Mefford: So today we’re going to talk about fraud and some other stuff and probably share some war stories. So, so, Craig. Welcome. Why don’t you take just a minute and kind of introduce yourself to everybody. So they kind of get a background for

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Jason Mefford: For who you are and why you’ve got so many war stories over talk about today.

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Craig Bristow: Fantastic. Well, thank you, first of all for having me. Jason’s great pleasure to be here.

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Craig Bristow: So I initially started off from an internal auditing background and then as the need grew. I went into it auditing deviled in that for a while. I like to

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Craig Bristow: Say that I’m a recovering it auditor and then again as the need grew when frauds popped up, you know, internal audit was just a logical choice to go investigate those

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Craig Bristow: And so I started getting into fraud and I’ve been in numerous industries. I’ve been in life insurance medical insurance retail pharmaceutical distribution construction and now I’m in the shipping industry so

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Craig Bristow: You know it’s been a while. Travel

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Jason Mefford: Well, it is. And it’s kind of interesting because, as you said, you know, you started off an internal audit you go to it out at you do some fraud stuff. It’s like those of it you know that have been around long enough. I’ve got more gray hair than you do.

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Jason Mefford: I’ve got less hair.

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Jason Mefford: But, you know, we tend to

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Jason Mefford: Pick up different things throughout our career right based on the need of what comes up. And so, yeah, a lot of times if there’s no separate fraud or security group within an organization internal audit is usually the one that ends up doing the investigations.

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Jason Mefford: And even though you know it might not be the biggest risk in your organization if frauds happen. My experience has been, they usually blame audit for letting it happen. Right, even though it’s not our, our fault.

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Jason Mefford: So we need to we need to be aware of and kind of know about fraud and if you’re in the situation where you’re actually the one investigating it to actually know how to do it as well. Right, which I

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Jason Mefford: Which I think is one of the reasons why.

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Jason Mefford: Why you wrote the book and kind of why you share some of this stuff that you do so. So maybe let’s just kind of jump in and, you know, what are some things that people need to know and and kind of do to be able to have some of these practical insights when it comes to fraud.

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Craig Bristow: Yes. Well, certainly my own landing into fraud was was a bit of a baptism by fire, and it was exactly, you know, as you mentioned,

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Craig Bristow: A fraud is has has occurred and management is looking for quick and decisive retribution and, you know, then they come down to internal audit and, you know, please go and sort this out and in my own case I had had not had much fraud experience I had

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Craig Bristow: assisted in getting evidence for two previous fraud cases. And you know, I was like a deer in headlights. I didn’t know what to do. And initially made use of consultants and started picking things up and

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Craig Bristow: I remember sitting across the table. In fact, after had written certain

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Craig Bristow: Certifications I was sitting across the table from somebody that I needed to interview and I just remember thinking to myself, I have no clue how to start

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Craig Bristow: And it’s really that when I as I used the professional firms and I sat and watched them and it was really on the job that I had my best learning

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Craig Bristow: And and and that is part of probably the main motivating reason of why I wrote the book.

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Craig Bristow: And and and the book also is I like to say it’s, there’s no theory in the book and it’s written in a very conversational style, it’s very

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Craig Bristow: Easy to read and it’s written in the same way as I would do on the job training and the the the metaphor that I like to use. In fact, I use it in the introduction of the book as well is

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Craig Bristow: If you were a young graduate and you fresh out of university and you are at the retirement party of someone with 3040 years experience and at that party you they took you one side they put their arm around you and they said, Hey, Jason.

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Craig Bristow: You know, I just like to give you a few tips. Yes, some do’s and don’ts. Here’s some templates that are built up over time. What would those gems of wisdom practical wisdom be that’s really going to help you.

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Craig Bristow: You know, to get going and and and that was the idea of the book that that’s that’s what I want to do.

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Jason Mefford: Well, I think that’s great because so much of the time in our, in our profession and even kind of you know in the in the tangent ones around like risk management and compliance. Yeah.

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Jason Mefford: So much of the time people want to talk theoretical

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Jason Mefford: And, you know, the theory is great, but how do I still do my job.

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Jason Mefford: Right and and a lot of times it’s very pie in the sky.

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Jason Mefford: Theory, that’s hard to put into practice because like you said, you know, you sit down in front of the other person that you’re supposed to interview if

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Jason Mefford: You’re feeling like a deer in the headlights like oh crap, I’m supposed to be the expert, but how

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Jason Mefford: Do I actually do this right

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Craig Bristow: Yes, and trying to keep a straight face that that I notice that you’re

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Doing

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Jason Mefford: I bet you

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Craig Bristow: It makes me. It makes me think of another example. When I was using a professional firm and

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Craig Bristow: And and i was just sort of taking minutes on the side and sitting to one side of the main interview happening and

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Craig Bristow: I was sort of chomping at the bit and saying, Well, why don’t you ask the obvious question and

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Craig Bristow: You know, and the interview eventually unraveled and they managed to corner. This person and then they they got an admission.

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Craig Bristow: And at the end of the interview once everybody left the room and I said to this guy who was really my main mentor that I had

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Craig Bristow: I said to him, but, you know, why didn’t you just asked the question, and he said, But great I couldn’t ask the question, because if I’d asked a question. He said, No.

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Craig Bristow: I didn’t do it. And then I was stuck. So what he did was he slowly dream and he put certain blocks in place and then dreaming and got him to a point way.

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Craig Bristow: And it’s that kind of. And I remember being so impressed with it and I’ve used that technique so many times. So it’s, it’s, those are the things that we need to share to help each other out. And that was really also

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Craig Bristow: A very strong secondary motivator for writing the book is that I find that

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Craig Bristow: That we like to talk about the cases, the big successful cases that we had, but we don’t really share those techniques. Some of it may be our own insecurities.

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Craig Bristow: And you know, we need to be less territorial, we need to help each other out and so that we can combat this, the scourge of fraud, which seems to be rife in the world.

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Jason Mefford: Well, and that’s, you know, maybe one of the, one of the things that we can go down as a little bit is you know as auditors we’re taught how to interview people right because we interview, lots of people to understand processes to gather evidence, things like that. Right.

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Jason Mefford: But there is there is a big difference between

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Jason Mefford: How we normally would interview someone to understand a process versus if it’s a fraud interview or an interview, as part of a fraud investigation.

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Jason Mefford: But even still, more so if it’s if it’s kind of termed an interrogation, right, which is, which again is is a different kind of thing. So maybe, maybe if you can help everybody understand

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Jason Mefford: A little bit of what are some of the differences, then between you know what what maybe you’ve been taught to do from an interview perspective versus

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Jason Mefford: If you’re doing it in the fraud space or if you’re going kind of the interrogation route which it sounds like that one that you were listening to is more of an interrogation because they were trying to get admission of guilt.

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Jason Mefford: As part of it. They weren’t just collecting information and those you run a

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Jason Mefford: Completely different. Right.

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Craig Bristow: Yeah, yeah. I think the biggest problem is that most of our frames of reference that we have with regards to interview is what we’ve seen in Hollywood.

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Craig Bristow: And quite frankly, the Hollywood miss it is exactly the opposite of what you’re supposed

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Craig Bristow: To be doing, you know, there’s typically some rather muscular guy that’s bursting out of his t shirt and he’s being highly threatening to do the subject of the interview and and in fact

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Craig Bristow: It’s quite the opposite, you need to build rapport with the person you need to separate them from the wrongdoing, because nobody even guilty people don’t like to be associated with wrongdoing. So somehow, even

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Craig Bristow: If, if, and I’ve had to deal with some, some people, which are really not the nicest people and where there’s been other quite sorted things which have gone with it and you have to

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Craig Bristow: You know, sort of put that on one side and say, I’m here to do a job. I’m here to try and get an admission or to get to the facts.

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Craig Bristow: And you know you need to build that rapport with them and say to them, look, I understand it must have been difficult for you and you know you

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Craig Bristow: You in difficult circumstances management’s putting undue pressure on you can completely relate to this, you know, somehow distance them from the wrongdoing and then get them to to open up to you.

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Craig Bristow: So it’s it’s those sort of things which which really help us.

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Craig Bristow: Well,

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Jason Mefford: Yeah.

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Craig Bristow: Yes, sorry. You made reference to to interrogation and i i also like to talk about three levels of of interviewing and the first level is just typically

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Craig Bristow: You know, the normal conversation because it’s it’s information seeking, you know, then the second level is a little bit more up tempo.

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Craig Bristow: And, you know, the questions are coming a little bit quicker and you know you you you contradicting the testing the person and contradicting what they’ve said to what I said before. And then the third level is a little bit close to the Hollywood.

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Craig Bristow: You still have, I want to emphasize, you never raising your voice. You never been disrespectful to the person and maybe the tempo is quicker.

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Craig Bristow: But the respect is always there for the person and and and you still being professional in your in your mannerisms so never

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Craig Bristow: Never. Are you doing the, the, the real Hollywood style interrogations. And in fact, in my career, I can only think of two circumstances we have done.

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Craig Bristow: A level three interview. It was done with management’s consent. I said to them, look, this could go horribly patient

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Craig Bristow: We need to have a plan B if they stole matter here, etc. We need to have a contingency. What are we going to do. Are you find if I do this. Yes. And luckily in both circumstances, it went like clockwork, but it could have also gone wrong.

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Craig Bristow: Yeah, but it’s very, I would say it’s very rare.

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Craig Bristow: That you do that. And in fact, the more skillful interview would not need to go there, but sometimes you need to, you know, sort of destabilized them.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah, because there is there is some of that destabilization. That has to be in there and and that’s why you know like you said when you were watching that other man do the interview, you’re like, why are you

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Jason Mefford: Not asking the question, because he was

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Jason Mefford: Trying to go in such a way so that he could destabilize the person kind of relaxes reduces you know releases and then all of a sudden things come out right because that’s, that’s usually again, typically what it what will end up happening is if you’ve

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Jason Mefford: If you’ve done it right, a lot of times, people just open up and confessed everything and tell you exactly what it is. And it’s interesting you know because you bring up the Hollywood thing because I’m here in LA.

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Jason Mefford: Area right but you know movies and TV are great.

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Jason Mefford: for entertainment purposes, but like you said, what, what you see in movies and TV shows is not in fact what you actually do you know from the people that I know that work for, you know, places like the FBI other other

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Jason Mefford: Law enforcement. You know, you sit and listen to some of them. And it’s exactly what you’re talking about, you know, if you’re negotiating with with a terrorist. Let’s say you know one of the guys that I know is a is a is a negotiator.

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Jason Mefford: For the FBI again, never disrespectful. Never in your face. It’s always about rapport building about

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Jason Mefford: You know, in fact, he actually instead of getting people to agree with you, or say yes with you. He gets people to say no and allow them to say no to him on purpose to kind of develop and do some of the things like that so

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Jason Mefford: And like you said, you know, if you if you get to that that Hollywood style things can go terribly wrong. Yeah, we’re not. We’re not done properly.

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Jason Mefford: So I guess you know when you kind of got thrown in this. I know you. I know you wrote the book kind of to be able to help

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Jason Mefford: Give people like a little mentor in the background. Right. Yeah, you know. But how did, how did you kind of learn and what are some of the big

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Jason Mefford: You know takeaways. I mean, people need to go out and get the book because they can’t they can’t get everything

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Jason Mefford: In a few minutes of us talking, but what are, what are kind of some big, big things to to, you know, kind of help people with along along their journey in this if they get thrown into this, just like you did.

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Craig Bristow: I think, well, the, the, the book is written, really, it can be read into end or it can be used as a reference manual

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Craig Bristow: And it’s like I said it’s I tried to be very practical in it. So, for example, even the examples are, you know,

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Craig Bristow: If you’ve got a procurement based fraud, you can go to the examples procurement based fraud and you can get a description of what it entails and and steps of of likely investigation techniques etc that you can use.

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Craig Bristow: So there’s a lot of real plane nuts and bolts in the book real practical steps. This is how you structure investigation. Here are some templates for interviewing

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Craig Bristow: You know, you can use yes some inspiration. You don’t have to use it verbatim, but just inspiration. A lot of real practical things which you don’t necessarily get when you studying the, the theory.

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Craig Bristow: But there’s also another element, which I’m trying to introduce as well is that I’m trying to get more to the strategic and the structural side of of fraud.

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Craig Bristow: And part of that is in the the planning and and strategic fraud risk management and, you know, part of that is just

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Craig Bristow: I think sometimes as as for investigators we’re our own worst enemy.

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Craig Bristow: But if you look at the at the, the media all the big frauds are perpetrated by the financial director, you know, we can we can name all the high profile fraud cases, it’s not the

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Craig Bristow: 10 gallons of fuel which was stolen from the state or the pole fridge, which is happening in this retail chain. It’s the big things. So we often, I would say.

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Craig Bristow: More than often we spend 80% of our time with 20% of the problem. And a lot of that lies with like I said with a structure. So if you’re not doing proper strategic fraud risk assessment at the time.

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Craig Bristow: To start off, you’re going to be going off in the wrong direction. If you are sitting at a process level and saying, well, you know, cash as an inherent high risk. So, therefore, that must have the highest fraud risk.

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Craig Bristow: If we if you if you starting at that level, you’re already dead in the water. But if you’re saying to yourself, right, what industry. Am I in

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Craig Bristow: What are the revenue drivers in this organization.

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Craig Bristow: What are the current strategic and structural things that are happening. Okay, there’s an acquisition happening here. Or there’s a sale of a business here or

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Craig Bristow: You know, how is our senior leadership incentivized how they driven. What is the, what are the pressures that they are under what is the current state of the economy.

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Craig Bristow: You know what is what is in the circumstances that we’re living in now. What is going to be the expectation of the shareholders to still be able to

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Craig Bristow: show a profit or at least not show significant losses in with restricted trainee trading conditions.

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Craig Bristow: You know, what are those potential fraud drivers start there and, you know, then develop into the lower level and you need to include the history of incidents, you need to include the traditional

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Craig Bristow: Fraud risks as well, but start with the structural and strategic drivers and then get yourself and I give quite a few examples of how to do that in the first chapter of the book.

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Jason Mefford: Oh, it’s great because I think, again, you know,

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Jason Mefford: Moving internal audit to the strategic level and whatever we’re doing too much of the time we start at the bottom and try to work our way up and like you said you’re dead. You’re dead at the beginning.

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Jason Mefford: At that point, we’ve got to go from the top and go down and you know like, like you said, I mean, it’s a lot of those questions that you asked our

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Jason Mefford: I don’t know if we’re afraid to ask some of those questions because we don’t want to hear the answer.

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Jason Mefford: But, you know, again, when you look at some of the largest frauds that have been perpetrated right big, big magnitude things

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Jason Mefford: There were there were some pretty common things going on, you know, publicly traded company significant incentive comp to the executives to the point that you know if you know

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Jason Mefford: as sad as it sounds, right, if, if, if somebody could get earn $20 million from their bonus

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Jason Mefford: They’re very incentivized to do whatever it takes to get that $20 million at the end of the year. And, you know, it led to

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Jason Mefford: You know price fixing on contracts to, you know, bribery and corruption to financial statement fraud to prop up the price so that stock options.

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Jason Mefford: You know, had value at the end of each quarter, you know, all of these things that that really have the biggest impact.

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Jason Mefford: You know, like you said, but but how much of the time are we worried about the person stealing a tool out of the store room or walking home with a case of product.

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Jason Mefford: Right. Those are the people that we punish and go after when the biggest impact is going to be higher up in the organization probably

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Craig Bristow: If you, if you asked.

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Craig Bristow: Most fraud functions and you say to them, what is the kind of proactive fraud, the work that you’re doing.

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Craig Bristow: And they’re gonna say, oh, we do for training with the fraud awareness. And he said, Well, tell me about your fraud awareness. Now we invite all the staff to the canteen. And we have a presentation and

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Craig Bristow: Okay, so, and the staff members that you invite you, who are either the data is clocks. The, the, the stock controllers. It’s okay. Guess what you starting off too low.

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Craig Bristow: But the but the reality is you know those people that are so highly driven that are so highly incentivized they’re equally driven, if not more driven to keep you out.

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Craig Bristow: And to avoid being detected and to do to ensure that they can carry on with these schemes and but

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Craig Bristow: We shouldn’t also be unrealistic. You know, I don’t think that tomorrow, any of your listeners should go and knock on the door and say, Hey, I’m yet to interview you. I own financial director. I’m here to

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Craig Bristow: You know, look at what you do as a job because I need to look for fraud risks. That’s also not going to help. So, you know, we need to we need to be. We need to build relationships of trust. We need to show the value

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Craig Bristow: Form good relationships with your committee chair.

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Craig Bristow: You know, start to bring out a lot of examples and and and and come with tangible and and and value adding advice of how you can do this and start small.

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Craig Bristow: And and and build your confidence the confidence with management and then they’ll let you in. And it’s not something which is going to happen in a month or two months, it’s going to take you two to three years. I would say that normally about three years when you start to mature.

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Craig Bristow: It’s not something which is just going to happen. The people that sit at the senior levels. They are normally hand picked

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Craig Bristow: There are people with a lot of industry knowledge that trusted people that we put at at an executive level.

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Craig Bristow: And and you walking in and coming in. They with guns blazing they just going to look at you and says, So this guy’s a hothead

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Craig Bristow: I’m not going to give him the time. But if you take the time and you invest in the relationship. Then you’re going to heal the results and also if you if you seem to be helping and not threatening.

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Craig Bristow: Or being a stumbling block to management, then you’re going to get their buy in.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, like you said, it takes time to develop these relationships. Right. And again, you know, while while guns blazing rushing in is great for a movie or a TV show that’s not

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Jason Mefford: That’s not how you do it in your company.

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Jason Mefford: Either right

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Craig Bristow: In fact, that’s also I when you were talking about the interviewing. That’s another point that I neglected to to comment on is that

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Craig Bristow: What you don’t see in Hollywood is, you know, it’s typically it’s 30 minutes they, you know, they get an admission and then they get the goal and I drive off in a Italian suit in any other it, you know, it’s just, it’s not it’s not realistic.

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Craig Bristow: The, the, the, the two things that they don’t tell you when you start fraud investigations, is that it’s detailed detailed detailed work.

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Craig Bristow: And the second thing is you’re going to be dealing typically with people that you would not ordinarily choose to associate with

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Craig Bristow: So the level of planning and detail if you speak to your FBI counterparts. When that guy walks in to interview a terrorist. He knows everything about that person.

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Craig Bristow: You know I I typically have a defense file which is built up which supports me

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Craig Bristow: And I can navigate because the interview doesn’t always go in the sequence that you wanted to go so I can jump around. I have the confidence to move between that file to ask the questions as the interview goes

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Craig Bristow: So I’m normally highly prepared by the time I get in this is obviously times when I have to wing it as well.

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Craig Bristow: But the best interviews are the ones which are the most planned where I have analyzed all the all the invoices i’ve you know done everything that I need to do and and I lead that person to the point we get them to the question that I actually want to ask them.

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Jason Mefford: I think that’s, that’s an important distinction to because like you said, there’s so much work that goes into it beforehand. Right. I mean, one thing I was always taught is

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Jason Mefford: You should already know the answers to all the questions you’re going to ask before you go in right because, because again, and that’s why

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Jason Mefford: You know, you know, in that kind of level one just gathering information interview. Okay, it’s probably not that important. But when you get to the second one.

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Jason Mefford: You know, then it’s important because then you can ask the question, you know, like so, you know, Craig, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you say no. And you’re like,

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Jason Mefford: Well, that’s funny, because I on this invoice right here. I thought this is right and so you already have things prepared because you already know what the answers are

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Jason Mefford: Right. And so, like you said when you go into it, you have a whole stack you know exactly

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Jason Mefford: You know what it is. I mean, one, one of the examples that I had because maybe we get you to share a war story or two as well but

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Jason Mefford: But one that I remember. You know, it was we worked on this thing for probably a month beforehand. Right. It was a person that was doing some things on their expense report, we knew

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Jason Mefford: Got all the information together work with local law enforcement had this whole operation where he just showed up. He thought he was going to a meeting that was called by somebody in this conference room.

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Jason Mefford: He gets up there and the detectives are their home or like hi so and so. Detective so and so would like to talk to you right

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Jason Mefford: And again, they had a whole stack of papers that we briefed him on and they went in and you know 30 minutes later they come out with a signed confession

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Jason Mefford: But it was a lot of work. It wasn’t just to show up DO THE HALF HOUR Hollywood interview and Boom, you’re done right that there is a lot of detail.

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Jason Mefford: That kind of goes into it as well. A lot of preparation.

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Craig Bristow: And those are the good ones, and those are the ones that you can prepare but but also often enough. We have to recognize that life happens and you know you

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Craig Bristow: You holding interviews, you don’t know who you interviewing. That’s the problem. So one of the opening statements that are making my chapter on interviewing is

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Craig Bristow: You should treat every conversation as an interview because you don’t know who you’re dealing with. You don’t know what their loyalties are you don’t know what, even if they’re not involved.

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Craig Bristow: They may be

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Craig Bristow: As management, it may not be in the best interest for this fraud to come out or you know they didn’t really want you to spend all those dollars on investigation they they they’ve got other pressures or something.

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Craig Bristow: So treat every conversation as an interview and then you will be surprised the kind of results that you get

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Craig Bristow: So it’s kind of a discipline. So when I start off, I introduce myself and I always introduce myself in a very, I don’t read off my credentials and I typically try not to use titles.

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Craig Bristow: I will just say, and I typically also play the, the, the, the card that I don’t understand that. Can you just help me out and I

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Craig Bristow: Say hi.

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Craig Bristow: Vague and

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Craig Bristow: Just like you to perhaps and and and and a lot of the seats. The, the, the lowest level of the seat is avoidance. So that will try and keep you away and you know plays and persistence.

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Craig Bristow: You, you, you get the interview you sit down and then I like to start with non threatening questions so

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Craig Bristow: You know, Jason I you the, the financial manager of this business unit. You know, I haven’t been to this business units before. Can you perhaps tell me a little bit, just for my own understanding.

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Craig Bristow: Can you perhaps tell me a little bit about your roles and responsibilities and then this general because that’s not threatening and quite frankly, a lot of people like talking about what they do.

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Craig Bristow: And then also, okay, really, you know, approving of of procurement and invoices and okay, that’s fantastic. Can you tell me a little bit more about that. I don’t have work here.

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Craig Bristow: And now you’ve actually demonstrated to me that you have knowledge of the rule and you have knowledge of the procedure, you can’t actually later on, say, I didn’t know

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Craig Bristow: And then I put that invoice on the table I Stephen. That’s fantastic. Thank you for explaining this process to me as an example. Can you perhaps explain this invoice to me and then I look at the invoice in the face drops

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Jason Mefford: Because it’s one that you’d already prepared and it’s in your

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Craig Bristow: The one I’ve already prepared and, you know, then you say to them, Well, why don’t you start at the beginning you lower your tone of your voice.

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Craig Bristow: And you sort of look at them in a more compassionate way and you say, why don’t you start at the beginning. Why don’t you tell me. When it first happened.

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Craig Bristow: And then you see the face turn and then you know you’ve got them and then you slowly reel them in. And an even after they have they have admitted to it. You say, Thank you very much.

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Craig Bristow: You know, this is serious. I unfortunately I’m gonna have to take this further.

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Craig Bristow: However, you know, it’s two to cooperate using your best interest. And, you know, we’ll, we’ll see how we can handle this best

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Craig Bristow: So keep that respect gang because you you most times you will have to interview them a couple of times. So that first interview or the second interview may not be the final interview.

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Jason Mefford: Well, I think that respect part is is so important, too, because I know that, you know, I don’t know if it’s been your experience too but

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Jason Mefford: In mind, most, most of the people that were committing some sort of fraud.

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Jason Mefford: Are good people that just made some bad choices. And in fact, it usually is eating them up on the inside. They can’t, you know, there’s like this big relief.

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Jason Mefford: When it finally comes out.

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Jason Mefford: I mean, unless you’re dealing with a psychopath, which is, you know, two to 5% of the population and just absolutely does not know right from wrong and I mean you’re smiling.

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Craig Bristow: Some of those

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Jason Mefford: We’ve all come across some of those, but

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Craig Bristow: The profile of a lot of the white collar criminal

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Jason Mefford: It is usually

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Usually

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Jason Mefford: But yeah, there’s, there’s so much of the time that

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Jason Mefford: That it really is.

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Jason Mefford: They’re not bad people they’ve just done some bad things, and obviously things have to be taken care of. But, you know, to keep that respect going and realize that

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Jason Mefford: You know, just like most of the people that you come across in corporate fraud are not going to be the Hollywood villain, you know, just that evil dark character and sometimes they are

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Jason Mefford: Not in your head, like maybe a lot of me.

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Jason Mefford: But to remember that it is still a human being on the other side.

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Craig Bristow: Is as well. I, you, you, you make me think about something else about the book, I have an interesting chapter which I call the rules, the visual chapter and it’s it’s not something you would find

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Craig Bristow: In a textbook, but there were certain things that were taught to me and and what I do is when I’m entering my staff is I repeat those sort of mantras and I will say to them.

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Craig Bristow: People do and say things for a reason. That’s one of probably the rule that I repeat, the most most often. And I say to them, why did they say that what was the psychology behind what they said.

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Craig Bristow: So I have these rules that I repeat, and reinforce them and and it’s actually so pleasing to me when my staff use my own rules against me and tell it to me as if you know they thought about it, and it’s actually great.

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Craig Bristow: But one of the rules that I have, which not certainly not one of the most important ones is that

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Craig Bristow: It said there’s two of them that are related, Robin Hood is of course a fairy tale.

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Craig Bristow: I’ve actually never met Robin Hood in in my career and I’ve never met somebody who was stolen. Because to have a sick child when alien grandmother

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Craig Bristow: And my mentor taught me that it’s always about sex gambling or drugs.

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Craig Bristow: SO MAD some advice.

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Craig Bristow: Some advice that they have

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Craig Bristow: Or combination of those and you know the the the

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Craig Bristow: The legitimate money is taken up in the lifestyle because people often say to me, Oh, well, the economy’s dance. I suppose fraud will go up and I say yes, but not for the reason you suggesting

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Craig Bristow: It, it will increase because the economy’s bad and I don’t have enough money to spend on my vice so I’m spending it on food on the table and school fees and utility bills.

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Craig Bristow: But I don’t have enough to go gambling. So now I need to start stealing money in order to gamble.

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Craig Bristow: And and and and certainly when we profiling people and and and we know that money’s gone missing. But we don’t know there’s 10 people in the office. Who could it be who’s most likely

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Craig Bristow: Then we start to look for those lifestyle indicators, you know, who’s the person who has the lavish lifestyle. That’s always going on vacations.

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Craig Bristow: That’s always seems to be having jewelry was was was talking about the, the great winnings at the head at the at the races. They never talked about the losses they would look at the winnings.

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Craig Bristow: You know, you start to pick up these lifestyle indicators and that often leads you to the most likely people and that combined with your other investigative techniques can often identify the perpetrators.

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Jason Mefford: Yeah. Well, like you said, you know, most of the time it is, it’s not an ailing grandmother. It’s some addictive behavior. It’s some reason.

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Jason Mefford: You know, and again. Yeah, like you said in economic times like this because this is one of the things that I tell people is whenever economic times get hard, which we’re entering into that now.

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Jason Mefford: The, the, the frequency of fraud will probably go up and some of it is because you know people are living outside of their means in general because they’ve got an addictive behavior, let’s say. And a lot of times people will they’ll, they’ll pre

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Jason Mefford: Pre spend their next raise or their next bonus as an example. Right. And so when those things get cut back

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Jason Mefford: All of a sudden it’s like, oh, I’ve already spent the money for whatever. Right. Yeah. And now, Guido is going to come break my legs because I can’t pay back my gambling debt that I thought I was going to be able to pay because of my quarterly bonus

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Jason Mefford: But now that I don’t have my quarterly bonus or if I got furloughed for a few weeks, and now I’m behind

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Jason Mefford: On everything else, then there’s this need a real need and sometimes it is Guido wanting to break your legs.

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Jason Mefford: For people to do some of these things and find a way to try to make up for what they rationalize was theirs. To begin with, or that they should have had to

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Jason Mefford: So we will probably see more of this, to which is all the reasons why I wanted to talk is right and like i said i mean the the book. You know, everybody can use a mentor. Not everybody has one, so it’s nice that there’s an option like this that people can go to

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Jason Mefford: To be able to get some advice and when their way through it when they’re that deer in the headlight like Oh no. What am I gonna do now. Right. I wish I would have had that book when I started out

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Craig Bristow: Yeah I it’s received very good reviews the people that use it. I’ve had a couple of people phoned me up and say, Look, it’s so easy to read and, you know, like you said, I just wished that had somebody tell them, those things.

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Craig Bristow: So, yeah.

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Craig Bristow: But when you said that we’re coming to break the nice it reminded me of another war story and and the duty changing the topic a little bit, but the duty that we have to protect witnesses.

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Craig Bristow: I had a matter where whistleblower had contacted me and told me about a kickback scheme that was happening with this person that was signing off on the, the, the use of subcontractors was demanding his cuts from the subcontractors.

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Craig Bristow: And the, the company wasn’t overpaying. It wasn’t that they were loading the price, but the subcontractor was suffering because they had to stand off say $5 of the right to to to this person.

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Craig Bristow: And

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Craig Bristow: I I jumped on a plane and and and went off to the place and, you know, meet with the whistleblower, and the second time when I went back

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Craig Bristow: The whistleblower disappeared and couldn’t contact the whistleblower and

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Craig Bristow: We eventually dismissed the person concern. In fact, we we exercise the easy option we didn’t renew the contract and and we got rid of them.

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Craig Bristow: In in that manner, but what I found out afterwards that happened was that they had somehow got a sniff that this person was the whistleblower, and they’d physically heading beaten up or thugs.

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Craig Bristow: And he had fled to a to a neighboring town and it still haunts me and I still go through that in my mind, and I think to myself, hi wasn’t my fault.

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Craig Bristow: Did I slip up was too casual and I didn’t mention the person’s name, but somehow when I went there. Did I managed to, you know, put them at risk.

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Craig Bristow: And and and this is a very real thing that we have to do. And sometimes it’s an early consideration as soon as a Ford becomes a way we need to say to ourselves, right, what is the immediate steps that we need to take

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Craig Bristow: Easy somebody we need to protect someone we need to inform and and and and then decide before we start diving into the investigation. Yeah.

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Jason Mefford: Now that’s a very real thing and something we could spend a whole nother episode on because

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Jason Mefford: Yeah, almost every time that I’ve done an investigation to its

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Jason Mefford: People want to know who said something. It’s almost like it’s it’s a curiosity.

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Jason Mefford: Sometimes it’s a little more than a curiosity, but everybody kind of wants to know. And just to remind people, it doesn’t matter who the whistleblower is

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Jason Mefford: What only matters is what they said is true or not. And that’s what we’re going to try to figure out, but like you said there’s there’s

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Jason Mefford: There’s usually some sort of retaliation. That makes it back to the people who have the courage to stand up and so everything and anything we can do to try to protect them is a big part of our job. I think as well because like you said, I’ve, I’ve seen

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Jason Mefford: And spent significantly more effort trying to protect people

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Jason Mefford: That were in a sense than actually doing the investigation sometimes

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Craig Bristow: It. Yes.

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Craig Bristow: But, but also, a lot of times when people want to know, they, it’s very much at the early stage and

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Craig Bristow: Of course, we can’t always say who it is, but if manager wants to know that. Oh, no. That’s just Joe he’s he’s he’s disgruntled but I’ve got some of my best information from disgruntled people and and and from spouses that have been cheated on

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Jason Mefford: You know you

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Craig Bristow: You do need to understand where the information comes from

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Craig Bristow: They could definitely be credibility concerns with the information but you you use that as your entry point and then you build on that and you get your, your, your evidence which supports that.

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Craig Bristow: So you don’t dismiss it. Just because Joe is a disgruntled employee and himself and effect the particular subcontractor in that war story that I told you.

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Craig Bristow: Who phoned me up. He was basically made himself guilty of being in a corrupt relationship.

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Craig Bristow: You know, and I didn’t, I didn’t tell him that I just said thank you for the information, but as it turned out there was no criminal liability on him. In the end, but it could have been incriminated himself.

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Craig Bristow: You know, so it, you, you, you can’t dismiss the information just because they the sources, perhaps not as credible as you would like. You use as your entry point and then you decide based on the facts. If it’s credible or not credible. Yeah.

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Jason Mefford: Lot to this.

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Jason Mefford: Which again is why we can’t cover everything today. I wish we could, but the Craig thing. THANKS FOR COMING ON AND TALKING ABOUT THIS, YOU KNOW, I know it’s

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Jason Mefford: You know, like you said you you felt like the deer in the headlights at one point in your career. I felt the same way. I’m sure other people that are out there listening are feeling the same way. Because sometimes

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Jason Mefford: You know we just get into some of these situations and investigations in particular.

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Jason Mefford: There’s always twists and turns

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Jason Mefford: It and you have no idea when you get into some of these things where it’s going to lead.

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Jason Mefford: And because of that, you know, it’s new is different. You’ve probably never experienced it before. So this is where having mentors, you know, bringing in people that have done it before, to help train you getting things like your book.

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Jason Mefford: Because the more prepared, we can be. You never really learn it. And so you go through it.

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Jason Mefford: But at least the more prepared you are before you experience it.

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Jason Mefford: Usually, the better results will end up having so

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Craig Bristow: Absolutely, absolutely. And and and I just want to encourage people to share as much as they can because

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Craig Bristow: You know, perhaps, I come from an auditing background someone else comes from an accounting background and someone else comes from an engineering background or whatever.

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Craig Bristow: It’s not possible for us all to be experts on everything. But if we share and we and we support each other. That’s the best chance that we have and and and that’s what I want to encourage people, you know, make it, make it

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Craig Bristow: Comfortable environment for us to taste and to learn and even to fail to some degree, you know, don’t be scared to ask the question of your colleagues, because that’s going to be some of your best learnings that

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Jason Mefford: We all need to share more and you know help each other so that we can make it through. Stop. Stop. Some of this stuff from happening. But yeah, nobody likes to be the deer in the headlights, so

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Jason Mefford: Reach out to people learn what you can beforehand.

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Jason Mefford: Because chances are, you know, you may end up in some of these situations because both Greg and I have ended up in those same situations, and I’m sure a lot of people listening have have been there, or will be there potentially in your career as well. So Craig. Thank you.

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Craig Bristow: Might have to absolutely patient

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Jason Mefford: Might have to do another one on a deeper topic because there were a couple of tangents. We could have gone down to, but then we would have been here for over an hour so

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Craig Bristow: Sounds good.

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Jason Mefford: Alright, well thanks

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Craig Bristow: Perfect. Thank you very much.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of time, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness. These words from Charles Dickens “The Tale of Two Cities” is the inspiration for this week’s episode.

Two auditors start out graduating from similar universities, get similar starting positions, but in 10 years those two auditors are in very different places.

One is still a junior or senior auditor and the other is a director or chief audit executive earning 3-5 times the salary of the first auditor.

Do you know the difference between these two auditors?

Find out in this week’s #jammingwithjason #internalauditpodcast. Listen in at: http://www.jasonmefford.com/jammingwithjason/

When you are ready to take your career as a #chiefauditexecutive to the next level, join the CAE Briefing executive leadership program mentioned in this episode at: https://jasonmefford.mykajabi.com/caebriefing

Join thousands of lifelong learners in internal audit, risk and compliance at: With hundreds of learning options, you are sure to find exactly what you need: https://ondemand.criskacademy.com/?affcode=105582_jpp6czlf

Transcript

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Jason Mefford: Welcome to another episode of jamming with Jason. Hey, my friends, is good to be back in a solo episode again with you. I know.

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Jason Mefford: The last month or so it’s been pretty much interview session. And that’s because I’ve been busy doing some other things.

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Jason Mefford: And haven’t had the time to record some solo episode. So I’ll give you a little bit more information about that in just a little bit as far as what I’ve been up to.

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Jason Mefford: But to start off with. I wanted to do some shout outs to people who listen to the podcast regularly. This is something that I love to do. I love hearing

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Jason Mefford: When people are actually listening to the podcast. So if you’re a regular listener, do me a favor.

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Jason Mefford: Send me an email or connect with me on LinkedIn and send me a direct message on there and do me a favor if you collect connecting on LinkedIn, let me know that you’re a podcast listener by doing, you know, a

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Jason Mefford: Little introduction, you know, don’t just don’t just click on connect, but actually send me a little message.

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Jason Mefford: Because I get. I get so many messages are so many connection requests from people random people that most of them. I just ignore and I

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Jason Mefford: Don’t want to ignore yours if you’re a regular listener. So let me know that you’re a listener. Let me know what you like about the podcast, so I can keep doing that.

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Jason Mefford: And I, because one. One of the benefits. I just randomly kind of select people that send into me and give a shout out to people on the podcast, so

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Jason Mefford: Let’s do the first one. This is from Risa bear Amiga, I hope I said that right

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Jason Mefford: It says Hi sir, I listened to your podcast. Just recently, and it helped me a lot understand risk based audit.

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Jason Mefford: It was easy to understand, especially for me as a new auditor that has been tasked in championing to transform our internal audit to risk based

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Jason Mefford: Will be looking forward to your every episode so Risa glad you’re listening and thank you for sending that in

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Jason Mefford: Let’s maybe do one more and then we’ll just jump in. This one’s from Mike Shand and Mike says your delivery was very refreshing a no BS approach.

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Jason Mefford: Where often many internal audit presenters are very stiff. Well, thank you, Mike, I try to do a no bullshit approach.

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Jason Mefford: There’s no sugarcoating on a lot of this stuff that I say so I appreciate that, that you appreciate that, as well. And I try not to be stiff, there’s only a few times when I want to be stiff.

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Jason Mefford: What’s your mind go where you want to on that. But when I’m talking to you when I’m when I’m teaching

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Jason Mefford: I don’t want to be stiff and I want to be no no bullshit, either because you know again.

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Jason Mefford: We’re all busy and we don’t have time for that. So let’s just cut to the chase. Let’s talk about what we really need to talk about

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Jason Mefford: And and not try to sugarcoat and tiptoe around things that we shouldn’t be tiptoeing around

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Jason Mefford: So thanks again for those for those that feedback, everybody. And again, if you are a regular listener please connect with me, send me a little testimonial like that and you can also be featured on a future episode of jamming with Jason

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Jason Mefford: Now I told you at the beginning, you know, I’ve been kind of really, really busy behind the scenes, creating a lot of new content.

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Jason Mefford: There’s several different topics that I’ve been working on. And so I’ve really kind of immersed myself in

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Jason Mefford: Creating a lot of new content that will be released shortly. And one of those things is the chief audit executive briefing executive leadership program.

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Jason Mefford: Now for about a year and a half or two years I’ve kind of been sending out weekly emails to people that I know are chief audit executives just trying to give them a little encouragement.

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Jason Mefford: And a little, you know, little information that would help them in their job as a chief audit executive

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Jason Mefford: And, you know, the more I got to thinking about it, the more I’ve been coaching, you know, other executives, as well as chief out of executives.

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Jason Mefford: You know, really realize that most challenges that executives have really come down to three things. Okay. And these three things tend to be the root cause.

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Jason Mefford: Of almost every challenge that an executive deals with and those three things are your ability and proficiency in managing relationships with yourself.

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Jason Mefford: With your stakeholders and with your staff. And so what I’ve what I’ve been doing is actually pulling together a complete executive leadership program.

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Jason Mefford: Specifically designed for chief audit executives that uses the LP model for leadership and it’s really the the same information that I’ve been sharing

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Jason Mefford: With top executives that I’ve been coaching one on one with for years and want to bring this to cheap out of executives as well so

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Jason Mefford: That’s getting them very, very close to launching so if you’re a chief audit executive, I’ll put a link to that down below.

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Jason Mefford: Because I’m sure as you go through the information you can look at this and go holy crap. This is exactly what I need to help take my career to the next level.

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Jason Mefford: It helps you from, you know, putting out some of those fires that it seems like you’re fighting all the time, and it really does give you more confidence.

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Jason Mefford: And help you move into that executive presence that you have to have as an executive or you end up getting beat up.

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Jason Mefford: In your organization, usually. So that’s one of the things I’ve been working on also been doing a lot with, you know, coming up with Angie and trying to find some new instructors for see risk Academy. And so I know you know in this time. Most all

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Jason Mefford: I would say all of the live training has been canceled pretty much for the rest of the year. And, you know, I’ve been working for four years to create the largest online.

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Jason Mefford: Learning Platform for internal auditors and I’m proud to say we’ve done that we’ve got close to 300 courses up there with between 10 and 15 I can’t keep track of the count recently but 10 to 15 of the best world class instructors in internal audit risk and compliance, so

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Jason Mefford: Again, I know many of you are probably starting to scramble now that you’re realizing it’s September and in so see risk Academy is there, we’re here.

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Jason Mefford: To help you with your learning development needs. And so again, check it out. Because if it’s been a little while since you’ve been there.

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Jason Mefford: There’s a whole bunch of new courses that you haven’t seen yet. So that’s a couple of things that I’ve, I’ve been working on a little bit

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Jason Mefford: So now let’s kind of transition into our discussion today and the title is a tale of two careers.

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Jason Mefford: And so, you know, again, some of you may be looking at that and thinking, well, Jason That’s, that’s kind of a weird topic or weird title. Well, I like to come up with weird titles and in I usually find

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Jason Mefford: Inspiration for some of the things that I want to talk about from so other areas outside of internal audit and this happens to be one of those

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Jason Mefford: And it comes from, or the inspiration behind this actually comes from the Charles Dickens book A Tale of Two Cities.

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Jason Mefford: There. And so I’m going to actually go through and read a little bit from that but but the the reason for that. Let me get what let me kind of back up a little bit right is

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Jason Mefford: You know, I used to travel the world a lot. I’d be gone. Probably 30 to 40 weeks a year teaching people around the world. And so I’ve gotten to go to London a few times.

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Jason Mefford: And and one of the last times that I was there, I took a few days and actually played tourist which is which is great because London is a fabulous, fabulous city. It’s one of my favorite cities in the world.

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Jason Mefford: So of course you know when you’re in London. You got to, if you’re going to play the tourist route, you know, you’ve got to go to the Tower of London, you know, see the bridge, you know, go go to all these different

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Jason Mefford: Buckingham Palace, go see Westminster Abbey and big band, but because I’m a little different, too. I’m a writer as well.

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Jason Mefford: One of the stops on my little tourist excursion was the apartment of Charles Dickens. So it was an apartment that he lived there in London.

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Jason Mefford: For a while. And so I went to that got to tour through kind of see see his they tried to kind of recreate pretty much what what the the flat.

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Jason Mefford: Or apartment looked like when he lived there back in the 1800s.

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Jason Mefford: And you know, I remember standing in his office and they had some period, furniture, which means that it’s it’s furniture that is is appropriate for the time period, but did not belong to him and they also had some furniture that was actually his and

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Jason Mefford: In his study was a desk and I remember standing there in the study looking at this desk and wondering which books. Did he write in that apartment.

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Jason Mefford: On that particular desk that I’ve actually read and so afterwards. I went back, did some research. It was actually, I think the time period, if I remember right

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Jason Mefford: You know one of those that he wrote was A Christmas Carol was on that and I believe also this book A Tale of Two Cities.

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Jason Mefford: Was one that he also wrote on that desk and I’m even getting shivers just kind of thinking about this, because as I said it was it was a really surreal moment.

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Jason Mefford: To be there and think about the work that he did because Charles Dickens is is really regarded as one of the greatest

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Jason Mefford: English writers, authors of all time. In fact, the book A Tale of Two Cities is one of the top selling and most printed books in the English language as well so

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Jason Mefford: I got to thinking about that, again, you know, a little bit ago and pulled out the book and kind of re flipped through it and

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Jason Mefford: If you’re familiar with the book. It has very classic way of starting out this book that that you’ll that you’ll remember, so I want to go through. First off, and just kind of read

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Jason Mefford: Read a little bit out of the book because like I said, this is the inspiration for what I wanted to talk about today in a tale of two careers comes from a tale of two cities.

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Jason Mefford: So it starts off. It was the best of times it was the worst of times. It was an age of wisdom. It was the age of foolishness.

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Jason Mefford: It was the Epic of belief. It was the epoch of incredulity. It was the season of light. It was the season of darkness. It was the spring of hope.

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Jason Mefford: It was the winter of despair. We had everything before us. We had nothing before us. We were all going direct to heaven.

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Jason Mefford: We were all going direct the other way. In short, the period was so far, like the present and you know those words from that it really, really paints a picture of

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Jason Mefford: These two polar opposites. Okay. It was the best of times it was the worst of times. And we see polarity and everything in life.

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Jason Mefford: You know, when you think about the yin and yang symbol, the yin and yang symbol actually represents that polarity, the light and the dark the masculine and the feminine. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: And as I’ve thought about, you know, people’s careers. In fact, I wrote an email about this a little while ago. And I’ll, I’ll tell you one of the responses that I got back

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Jason Mefford: But, you know, the, the idea is, is, as I’ve thought about people’s careers. There’s a lot of people that are not happy with where they are currently in their career.

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Jason Mefford: To them, it’s the worst of times. They’re not in a job that they like

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Jason Mefford: Maybe not working for a company that they like maybe they’re, they want to get promoted, but they don’t know how. And so for them. It may be the worst of times.

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Jason Mefford: And for others, their career is just going great. Right. They’re just moving up you know getting promoted every few years they’re making more and more money each year.

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Jason Mefford: And as I sit back in and kind of think about that, right, is what’s the difference between those two different auditors.

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Jason Mefford: And so imagine, again, you know, two auditors start out they graduate from the same university.

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Jason Mefford: They get similar starting positions but 10 years later, those two auditors are usually in completely different places. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: One is still a junior or senior auditor, but the other has moved up to manager director or might even be a chief audit executive at some organization.

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Jason Mefford: Earning three to five times the salary of the first auditor. So again, you stand back and you think, Okay, well, what’s the difference between

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Jason Mefford: Those two auditors because it really has nothing to do with luck. Okay. And the more that I have, you know, helped and watched and trained people over the years. I mean, in fact, there’s probably been thousands of auditors that I have seen generations of auditors kind of go through

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Jason Mefford: And I’m really clear on what the differences between the two auditors and I thought you would like to know.

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Jason Mefford: It because, you know, again, some of you may have aspirations, you want to move up in your career and you’re sitting there thinking, what is it that it actually takes

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Jason Mefford: Well, the difference between the two auditors. One of them is comfortable doing the same job every day, every week and every month.

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Jason Mefford: Okay, that person, you know, might take a few courses, they’re checking the boxes on their CP requirements.

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Jason Mefford: But their position never changes because they don’t change themselves. Okay, they’re comfortable where they are. They stay exactly where they are, because they’re not willing to invest

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Jason Mefford: The time and money in themselves to change themselves, right, because until they change themselves, their situation will not change. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: The other auditor is active in their career development regularly invest both time and money in their individual learning and career.

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Jason Mefford: They’re growing they’re developing every day, every week, every month. And at the end of 10 years they are a completely different person.

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Jason Mefford: Than they were from when they graduated college 10 years before. So it’s really no wonder that if you’ve got one person who is actively investing time and money in their career.

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Jason Mefford: And then they’re learning and really have that lifelong learning approach.

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Jason Mefford: It’s, it’s no wonder at all that they get further ahead in their career than the person who just kind of does enough just to get by. And it’s just kind of checking the boxes.

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Jason Mefford: Because what i’ll tell you is training is not the same as learning. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: Now again, I’ve done a lot of training, but really what I’ve what I’ve tried to do and what I’m doing with see risk Academy is creating a learning platform, not a training company.

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Jason Mefford: Okay training companies just come in, they give you the training they go away. That’s it.

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Jason Mefford: They’re telling you a little bit of knowledge and skills, but there’s, there’s no way really for you to apply and then actually exercise or put that into practice.

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Jason Mefford: And you really have to have all four of those areas in order to really learn

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Jason Mefford: And I know I’ve, I can’t remember which of the episodes, it was, but I’ve talked about that before in earlier episodes. So if you’ve got questions about it, go back, find that other episode.

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Jason Mefford: In take a listen to that. Okay. But that’s really, you know, so again, as we go back to our this to our discussion, you know, it was the best of times it was the worst of times.

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Jason Mefford: Well, for the person that’s actively learning actively growing in their career. It’s probably the best of times, the person who’s not, it may just be the worst part.

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Jason Mefford: The worst times right again that polarity between the two. Now, before I get going too much further, I want to, I want to just kind of put a pause here.

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Jason Mefford: Because I know that when I when I’ve talked about this before. Some people have gotten offended. Okay. In fact, I had somebody

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Jason Mefford: Who actually sent me a message and said, comments, you know the comments that you’re making are insulting.

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Jason Mefford: To an auditor, who does not aspire to be a chief audit executive in his content as a junior or senior auditor.

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Jason Mefford: Now let me just kind of pause there and actually give you some very valuable coaching. I did not offend that person, that person chose to be offended by what I said.

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Jason Mefford: Okay. Did you get that I did not offend that person they chose to be offended by what I said. And the reason they chose to be offended is because they weren’t actually listening.

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Jason Mefford: To what I was saying, if you’re happy being a junior, senior auditor. Good luck to you, that’s fine. I don’t have a problem with that.

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Jason Mefford: What I have a problem with is when I find people that that are complaining, they want more in their career and they’re not willing to do more. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: Now why am I bringing this up to you again, as I said, to begin with, you know, I, I care for you for you and for your career. And I know that there are some of you.

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Jason Mefford: That are out there that want to move forward in your career. And so I want to give you the guidance and be able to help you move forward.

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Jason Mefford: If that’s what you want to do. Okay. If you’re not understanding that fine I have absolutely no problem with that. I still respect and love you as a person.

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Jason Mefford: But if you’re serious. I want to help give you what you need to move forward. But I don’t want you to just take my

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Jason Mefford: My words for it. Okay, if you go back and for any of you that have listened for a long time to the podcast.

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Jason Mefford: I’ve done a lot of episodes on lessons from a chief audit executive. Okay. And so if you go back and if you listen to almost any of those episodes.

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Jason Mefford: One of the things that we talked about is how did that person get to that point in their career.

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Jason Mefford: And there is a common theme that you see with people who move up and get promoted in their career and that common theme is their ability and their

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Jason Mefford: Their drive to invest both time and money into their individual learning and into their career.

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Jason Mefford: They take it seriously. In fact, one of the CEOs. Remember, he called it, you’ve got to be the CEO of your career, and that is a great way of thinking about it.

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Jason Mefford: Now the other reason why I bring this up sometimes, you know, some of you may be sitting there thinking, well, I really am kind of happy with where I’m at. So I’m just going to kind of do what I need to to get by.

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Jason Mefford: Here’s the problem with that is you know i’m sure you realize that we we live in the information age right and the information age. Yes, while it includes

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Jason Mefford: Information Technology and so a lot of people think of the Information Age equaling, you know, technology hardware, software, things like that.

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Jason Mefford: The information age is much more than that. In fact, it is the information that you have and that you have learned is what makes you valuable and relevant in today’s business marketplace. Okay, which means I want you to think about

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Jason Mefford: I don’t know if you ever played this game.

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Jason Mefford: As I did when I was a teenager, you know, we used to go to the mall into some other places like that that had escalators

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Jason Mefford: And, you know, escalators are kind of a moving staircase. Right. You walk on to it and and the motor just kind of takes you up to the next level.

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Jason Mefford: And it’s great. Right. You don’t have to climb stairs. It’s much easier to do.

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Jason Mefford: Well, we used to play a game where we would try to run up the down escalator. So we check and make sure that nobody

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Jason Mefford: Was on trying to come up and then we would try to run really quick to get up to the top of the down escalator.

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Jason Mefford: Now, the only way to get to the top of the down escalator is you have to run faster than the escalator is moving so that you can move upwards. Right. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: Now I want you to think about that and realize that in today’s economy, we are trying to go up a down escalator.

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Jason Mefford: The amount of information and knowledge and data that is being created every single day is amazing. Okay, and you we almost have to, you know,

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Jason Mefford: Run up the escalator in our personal development and in our career development in order to just stay, even with where we would have been before.

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Jason Mefford: And so again, I want you to think about that is if you’re just kind of sitting back thinking, well, I’m just going to coast.

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Jason Mefford: The reality is, before you know it you’re going to be at the bottom of that escalator. And your job might be outsourced your job might go away because again value in the information age comes from the information that we have IE, which comes through learning and through experience right

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Jason Mefford: And those jobs that don’t require that that information and that knowledge are being outsourced to things like computers. OK. So again,

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Jason Mefford: You know, for a few of you. I might be juggling. Juggling you a little bit. Again, I’m not trying to offend you. I’m just trying to be kind.

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Jason Mefford: And let you know that the world is different now than it was 20 years ago and unless we become lifelong learners unless we invest both time and money into our individual learning and into our career.

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Jason Mefford: The writing may be on the wall. And that’s why, you know, I tell people, you know, look, I know that a lot of certifications and other things tell you, you need to have 40 hours of CP every year.

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Jason Mefford: Well, my friends. I’m here to tell you. You don’t need 40 hours of CP a year you need 400 hours of CP a year.

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Jason Mefford: And some of you may be going, what, how could I ever do that well there’s 365 days in a year, if you, you know, an average of one hour a day, you’re getting pretty close to 400

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Jason Mefford: Now, in that 400 hours. I’m not necessarily talking about just taking formal training courses. I’m talking about spending time doing things like reading books, listening to podcasts, you know, taking

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Jason Mefford: You know, technical training, but also soft skills training as well, you know, going through things like the chief audit executive briefing executive leadership program.

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Jason Mefford: Something to where you’re learning and you’re trying to do something and develop yourself every single day.

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Jason Mefford: And that learning and that development is not necessarily have to be technical. You know, I’m a very diverse person and colorful person in lots of different ways.

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Jason Mefford: And as an example. One thing I like to do is paint. So sometimes I pick up the paintbrush and paint and try to learn how to improve

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Jason Mefford: My ability to paint right or I pick up the guitar and I play. Those are all still learning and development opportunities.

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Jason Mefford: That help make us a much more well rounded person, which also makes us more valuable to our organizations as well because we have diverse experience we’re able to think better and and solve problems better as well as we end up you know just learning more information right

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Jason Mefford: As an aside, one of my favorite things to do is just sit and read through Trivial Pursuit cards. If you’re familiar with that game anyway. So what again. What I’m trying to say is to kind of wrap it up and bring it bring it around the corner here for this week’s episode is

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Jason Mefford: You know, if, if you want to move forward in your career, there’s really a tale of two careers and and you can choose to do what it is that you want to do, right.

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Jason Mefford: And again, if you want to move forward in your career start looking for different learning opportunities where you’re improving yourself every day, every week and every month.

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Jason Mefford: And here’s, here’s another reason for that. Why, why I say every day, every week and every month is imagine you know again if I want to get fit if I want to. If I want to strengthen my body.

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Jason Mefford: One thing that I that I do is push ups. Okay. The exercise push ups where you get down on the ground and you, you go down and you put yourself back up. It strengthens your arms. Okay.

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Jason Mefford: If I chose to only do push ups, a couple of times a year. How strong, am I going to get. Now, even if those couple of times a year, I sit down and I do 200 push ups.

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Jason Mefford: I’m going to get some benefit from it, but you get much more benefit by doing a few push ups every day, every week and every month.

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Jason Mefford: That’s the same thing. I’m telling you, or encouraging you to do with your brain as well because those little things that we do every day, every week and every month.

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Jason Mefford: ends up working and developing our brain just like those pushups do

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Jason Mefford: So again, if you’re serious about about your career. If you want to move forward and and if you want to learn new things start looking for some of those learning opportunities right

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Jason Mefford: Because, you know, again, if we kind of go back to where we were talking about to begin with, you know, from a tale of two cities. Right. I hope that every other line here.

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Jason Mefford: ends up getting deleted from your life. And so instead of saying it was the best of times it was the worst of times, we can just say it was the best of times it was the age of wisdom.

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Jason Mefford: It was the epoch of belief. It was the season of light. It was the spring of hope. We had everything before us and we are going direct to heaven. Okay, take those negative things out, focus on the positive get the things in life that you need.

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Jason Mefford: Because that’s really what I want for you. That’s what I’m trying to do for myself every single day as well. So with that, my friends, I’m going to wrap up for this week.

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Jason Mefford: Go out make life what you want it to be choose what you want and actually go after it and don’t get into some of the blame excuse and denial that I’ve talked about in other podcasts as well with my friend, Marty.

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Jason Mefford: So go out. Have a great rest of your week, and I will catch you on the next episode of jamming with Jason. See ya.