Credibility

“Mr. President, I have something to tell you and I need you to listen to me, because I know something about the subject.”

Credibility is tough to achieve, but more valuable than... dare I say it... an upward moving stock in today's market.

Nevertheless, in my experience there are a couple of keys to building credibility with senior leaders.

Information Organization
I've already talked about organizing your message into no more than five points (see post from November 25th – Presidents have Five Fingers.) The point here though is that you've got to demonstrate you understand the information well enough to make it simple. Just like it is tougher to give a five minute speech than an hour one, distilling the facts into digestible bites (not sound bites, that would be wrong) shows you know what you are talking about.

Anticipation
I almost titled this piece “Preparation,” but that doesn't really cover the subject. I'm talking about getting yourself elbows-deep in the data. So deep, that you can accurately anticipate tough questions. When I used to analyze budgets to present to the City of Aurora City Manager and City Council, I'd comb through the detail at an unbelievably fine level of detail. Any variation from one year to the next, I investigated.

Why? Because we had a rule.

If a meeting with these folks lasted more than 15 minutes, we'd failed. And in my time there, we never failed. We did this by having the answer to the tiniest and most insignificant variance question. Once a City Council member asks about a 1.5% change in a fairly trivial line-item and you have the answer, they won't ask another.

No Surprises
Contrary to what Hallmark may tell you, all important people hate surprises. Credibility and lack of surprise go hand-in-hand.

Avoiding surprises is, like most things, a structured process.

Tell people what you are going to do. In an audit context, that means sharing as many of the objectives, steps, information needs, and people agendas as you can before you invade their space. Have the process for these structured. Engagement letter six weeks ahead. Planning memorandum four weeks out. Pre-visit conference call, two weeks beforehand. Entrance meeting. Post-visit update conference call. Exit meeting. Preliminary drafts of the report.
Put all of this in a Service Level Agreement. Live the SLA, and report honestly when you don't.

Equally important, when you have tough news to share, get ahead of it unofficially. I mean that all leaders respond better when you stop by their office and share, without drama, that you're pretty sure you or your team have found something and you just want to give them a “heads-up.” You might learn something you didn't know and they get time to digest it before it gets in print -- even in preliminary print.

Occasionally, I've been burned by this (e.g. managers rushing out to do damage control or whatever). But, on balance, this technique has yielded far greater positive results than negative. And, you get the chance to make a friend. No auditor or analyst can have too many of those organizationally.

Obviously, with some kinds of news you can't do this. Clearly, you won't stop by to share info about the fraud you think you've just detected.

Relationships Happen First
This sounds simple, but it is the easiest mistake in the world to make and I've certainly made it. Talk to your clients regularly and *before* there is tough news. Human beings are universally horrible at building relationships while in the middle of conflict. If the first time you've really had a good conversation with a senior leader is after they've received a tough finding, the game is lost. The same is true of any kind of reporting or delivery of critical data.

Be Right
And with the above techniques and strategies, I've left out a critical point.

Be right.

Double-check your data. Then double-check your conclusions.


--Prescott Coleman, CIA, CISA