Soft skills, have been seen for many years as the less important skills to progress one’s career, compared to the technical (hard) skills. However over the last decades, with the increase of AI, and the increased need for humans to enhance their abilities to enhance collaboration, connection and co-creation, soft skills are in the spot light.

For more than 20 years I have been an IT and operations (non financial) internal auditor, and my focus what on processes effectiveness (hard controls). In the last decade I took an interest in organisational culture, and also in business coaching, and performed the two professions in parallel: auditing and coaching, which allowed me to see how powerful it is for internal auditors to learn some of the skills coaches get to master.

First let’s see what do coaching and auditing have in common?

On a very high level they both aim to help the client (stakeholder) get the best results and achieve their goals, while seizing opportunities and managing the risks/threats.

What are internal audit and IT Audit?

According to the Definition of Internal Auditing in The IIA’s International Professional Practices Framework (IPPF), internal auditing is an independent, objective assurance and consulting activity designed to add value and improve an organization’s operations.

ISACA defines IT Auditing as identifying risks and appropriate controls to mitigate those risks to an acceptable level.

What is coaching?

ICF (International Coaching Federation) defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity, and leadership.

In a coaching engagement the coach will support the coachee to reach his/her goals, by utilising the resources the coachee has in the best possible way and at times the coachee will be able to discover new perspectives and new ways of achieving results. A coach is an independent sound board, which will listen, observe, ask questions which trigger a new thinking process that leads to new perspectives and changes. It is not the coach task to give recommendations or advice, the solutions to coachee’s problems are mainly a result of the coachee’s new discovered perspectives.

In an audit engagement the auditors will evaluate the effectiveness of systems, processes and controls in place, and the results of the review will be several recommendations which aim to improve the mitigation of the identified risks.

Presenting the identified issues and related recommendations to the relevant stakeholders and getting their acceptance and agreement for implementation is often the most challenging part of an audit.  

While as a coach I never had a challenge with the coachee implementing the changes, as they were a result of the client’s thinking and change process, and their benefits were well understood; as an auditor at times getting stakeholders to accept the recommendations was more a reason for debate and negotiation; which made me wonder what would happen if auditors would adopt some of the coaching skills while delivering their audits.

Here are 5  coaching skills, that internal auditors can benefit of:

1. Active listening.

Active listening means fully concentrating on what is being said, and how is being said, paying attention to body language and tonality of voice, changes in skin colour and physiology of the speaker (e.g., breathing rhythm). This is considered a very important skill for coaching, as the words used, the tone of voice, and the body language are always giving additional insights into the message the talker wants to share, or maybe does not want to share at that point. I  auditing paying full attention to what is said during an interview, will allow auditors to pick up on the non verbal communication and this can be especially useful to deepen the conversation when maybe the root cause of an identified issue is a a cultural or behaviour systemic problem.  

2. Holding the space.

Holding the space refers to asking open questions and waiting for answers without filling in the moments of silence; it requires lots of patience and wisdom. No need to finish the other phrase, just wait and listen, take the time, they will get there to deliver their message in their own way; otherwise, you might never know what exactly they wanted to tell you.

The ability to actively listen and hold the space, would enable auditors to create better and more meaningful relationships with their stakeholders, and also build trust with their auditees by allowing them the space to share insightful information.

3. Curiosity and asking open questions.

Asking questions with an open end, like:

• “how do you think this issue should be handled….?”
• “what would be the best way to manage this risk in your view? “

Although auditors have best practice knowledge specialists, and overtime they build an overview of organisational wide issues, which allows them to give good recommendations and advice to improve processes and internal control inefficiencies, listening to the auditees’ view on issues’ remediations and risks mitigation, often gives additional insights into the best way forward for the specific scenario they audited as often there is no one size fits all in best practice.

4. Empathetic and emotionally intelligent/attuned means being (self)aware, understanding and acting in accordance with the emotional status of the other. This is an important skill, especially when performing audits on culture, fraud, investigations, etc and when dealing with difficult conversation during audits or during reporting phase.

5. Non-judgmental

Being able to ask open question, being curios, hold the space and listen; while suspending own judgments allows for a deeper understanding of the issue, possibly getting to the root cause quicker and therefore coming up with the right recommendations sooner. There is a thin line between being nonjudgmental as an individual and having a professional judgment; which auditors are always required to have; here the focus is on suspending your personal thoughts while listening and being fully present in the conversation, so you can practice the skills mentioned above as well. Once your mind engages in judging you stop listening and there is a risk that you jump to conclusions too soon.

These are just a few of the coaching skills, which can be put to play by internal auditors.

There is an increase pressure on internal auditors to provide added value to their organisations through their auditing work, and that can not be done only by sharpening the technical skills, it also require a good development of the “soft skills” so that they can build better relationships with all their stakeholders and enhance their collaboration with other assurance lines.

Considering a soft skills session for internal auditors? 

Reach out to us: ralu@er-nl.com

Article written by: Ralu Nistor-Lustermans