A good Risk Professional* is proactive, understands the business, understands the landscape i.e., the economic conditions, the market (think PESTLE!) and is a trusted business advisor.
A not-so-good Risk Professional is the one that often, says “No!”, and you only see them when you need to sign off your risk or contract assessment, or they need the Risk Register updated.
A sample of job roles highlighted the typical requirements of a Risk Professional:
- Communication, collaboration, innovation, leading, developing, and maintaining relationships with stakeholders to manage risks in their areas, advise and support teams, negotiate internally,
- Technical skills – ensuring compliance, alignment to business strategy, making recommendations on controls to enable delivery of business strategy, ensuring accurate reporting from Operational to Board; enabling tangible and visible risk reduction, implementing staff compliance training, building, and sustaining risk culture; ensure transparency of risk; provide guidance on governance, partner with the business to implement risk framework; etc
A typical recruitment question is “Do you hire for skill or attitude” and the “right” answer is usually attitude, but ask yourself if the person has been hired for skill or attitude? That varies. However, the argument is you can’t do this job well unless you have the soft skills.
Back to our “Good Risk Manager.” This person takes the time to build relationships, understand the business, and then can proactively enable the organisation to deliver the strategy, using his/her excellent technical skills. The delivery of technical skills requires those soft, relationship-building skills.
Try inviting colleagues to a meeting called: Update Customer Service Risk Register.
You’ll get more attendance and engagement from: Improve Customer Satisfaction
Yes, you can reframe the issue, but more importantly, reframe it from your business partner’s lens. What you call a control, they call a procedure. They are happy to update their procedure if it impacts their business area, their customer, their goals, and their objectives.
Be a good Risk Professional! Reach out if you want to know more, or swap stories!
*Risk Professional here refers to all Risk roles such as Risk Professionals, Compliance Professionals, Cybersecurity Professionals, Audit Professionals, etc