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Effective Communication and Customer Service Skills for Auditors

Your career and personal success depends on your ability to communicate as you work with people both inside and outside your organization.  To be truly successful as a communicator, a much larger skills set is needed, as well as flexibility, meaning the ability to quickly adapt your communication approach as the person, title and situation demands.  In this session, we will focus on influencing skills, a core competency of leadership.  You will learn:

1. The 3 most important ways people both communicate and influence others.
2. Dozens of strategies and examples to demonstrate how these components operate in different areas of your work.
3. Similar and different communication approaches of leaders and what this means to you.
4. Practice exercises on subtle influencing skills.

Effective Interviewing Skills for Auditors

This one-two day program focuses on the skills needed for a typical audit process; interviewing in situations of suspected fraud is not the focus here, though many of the skills covered are applicable to fraud interviewing as well.  The workshop lays out a step-by-step process for conducting an interview that focuses on several key principles.  It is especially helpful to those performing collaborative, risk-based and process focused audits, or for interviewing those in similar, technical types of professions.

The order of events and content may be changed dependent upon the needs of the group.  Role-plays are an important part of the training, and other exercises occur throughout the day.  (Please Contact Us for a full outline.)

Program topics include:

1. The Collaborative Approach to Interviewing
2. Where Interviewing and Interviewing Skills Fit Into the Overall Audit Process
3. Six Steps of the Collaborative Interviewing Process
4. Planning
5. The Initial Meeting (Opening the Interview)
6. Information Gathering
7. Information Clarification
8. How to Read Your Interviewee (discussed throughout the day)
9. Handling Resistant Individuals During Interviews
10. How to Prevent Conflict and Deliberately Build Collaboration
11. Ending the Interview
12. Documenting and Evaluating the Interview
13. Close and Action Plans

Managing Resistance and Changing Behavior in Yourself and Others

A change agent is one who uses his or her leadership position and expertise to assist others in making necessary changes to increase efficiency and effectiveness in a work function.   In our time together, you will learn:

1. A step-by-step approach to implementing change at the organizational level: what you must make sure to do right, and the pitfalls you must avoid,
2. The psychology of resistance in individuals, and possibly yourself, and how that must be handled in organizations,
3. An introduction to changing behavior at the individual level, and
4. Whistle blowing:  what works, what doesn't (and why), and what can be done about it.

Conflict Management and Negotiation Skills Training (1/2 day to 2-3 day seminar)

"Joan, if you haven’t yet received your speaker ratings for your “Conflict Management Skills” session from the IIA International Conference, I think you’ll be happy.  Not surprisingly, yours was one of the most popular sessions, with more than 300 attendees, and you received very high speaker evaluation ratings.  Great job as always."
Paul J. Sobel, Vice President, Internal Audit, Mirant Corporation

An excellent finance professional must have excellent conflict management and negotiation skills.  There are numerous situations in your profession where differences of opinions occur, ranging from how data should be collected to how it should be interpreted, to what and how it should be made known to others.  In this seminar, the following topics will be covered:

1. How conflict evolves and where negotiation fits in.
2. Your own conflict management and negotiation style, with its strengths and challenge areas.
3. Other negotiation styles, along with numerous conflict management and negotiation strategies for handling all types of situations you encounter.
4. How to know the difference between "unknowledgeable" people, "stubborn" people and "manipulative" people, and how to handle each.
5. Negotiation and conflict management skills with subordinates, peers and even your boss, or others at the highest levels of the organization.  
6. Ongoing applications to the challenges Finance executives and managers face today.
7. I'm So Stressed!  The final word on what really works to manage stress.   (2 hours to one day)
8. What causes stress- it's not all bad!
9. Your stress threshold and what triggers it
10. Everything you can do to build a powerful stress management program

Leadership Skills for Auditors

You pride yourself on your technical skills; however, you also have good ideas to share and feel you don't know how to really influence people and make change happen.  Welcome to the other side of your job,  the ability to lead and influence others by communication, collaboration, and performance management skills.  In this session, we will look at:

1. Differences in leadership styles between finance and non-finance professionals, and how to use this information to influence and increase "buy-in".
2. How to communicate information clearly, especially technical information and data, and what results you want to see happen.
3. Using leadership styles to learn how to give constructive feedback about performance issues and changes you want them to make and manage subordinates better in general.
4. How to use positive feedback as a means of influencing and motivating others.

Outstanding Presentation and Meeting Facilitation Skills for Internal Auditors (Click Here for full outline)

“Joan’s course was a big help, for me personally and my colleagues, when I was tasked with helping our audit group become proficient in facilitating workshops. I facilitated my first risk assessment workshop a month after taking the course, and it helped me go in well prepared and confident. A few years later, when I was the Director of Enterprise Risk, I brought Joan in to teach the course a second time. In addition to the obvious value for audit and risk workshops, the skills and principles that Joan teaches are very useful in a broader context. They help you be a better manager and a better communicator.”
Dave Eden, Site Infrastructure Manager, New Nuclear Project, Ontario Power Generation

Research indicates that presentation skills are critical to not only any job where presentations are given, but it also critical to career success as well.  If you run meetings or give formal presentations, you need this course.  Auditors especially need presentation skills due to the high visibility involved in opening, interim and closing conferences, as well as numerous special projects requiring formal presentations.

In this two-three day seminar, the focus is on understanding the different types of presentations one can give (depending on the results you want to achieve), how to get the type of presentation you want down on paper into an appropriate format, and then practicing in front of others.

A special segment on overcoming the fear of speaking can be built into the training or be given as a break out session at a conference.

Videotaping is possible in some situations; please ask for more information.

Improving Leadership Skills Across the Organization

You pride yourself on your technical skills; however, you also have good ideas to share and feel you don't know how to really influence people and make change happen.  Welcome to the other side of your job, the ability to lead and influence others by communication, collaboration, and performance management skills.  In this session, we will look at:

1. Differences in leadership styles between technical and non-technical professionals, and how to use this information to influence and increase "buy-in"
2. How to communicate clearly technical information and what results you want to see happen
3. Using leadership styles to learn how to give constructive feedback about performance issues and changes you want them to make and manage subordinates better in general
4. How to use positive feedback as a means of influencing and motivating others

Cultural Diversity and Cross-Cultural Communication

JPA will show you, with practical suggestions, how to better understand and communicate more effectively with those from different backgrounds.  The focus is on understanding people from other cultures and countries around the world, and you will leave the session better understanding:

1. A specific overview of differences- and similarities- between people from different cultures.
2. The four core components that make up our different cultures around the world
3. Unintentional positive and negative stereotyping, and how and why we ALL do it.
4. Some basic but powerful strategies for communicating better with those from different backgrounds.

Listening Skills:  The Auditor's Best Friend

Anyone who has to audit or conduct interviews or who manages others as part of their work knows how important listening skills are.  This is especially true in Western countries, where we are known to have the worst listening skills of all cultures.  Yet little time is spent actually learning what exactly to do in order to listen well!

In this breakout session or seminar, you will learn how to listen!  You will also learn that listening is actually a very active mental and physical process, and you will practice the single most important behavior that will guarantee your ability to listen will increase exponentially.  You will also learn how to break any and all bad habits related to poor listening: interrupting, daydreaming, poor rapport- building and many many more.  The session or seminar will be tailored to the specific roles and responsibilities of the participants.  Again, when you leave, you will know how to listen!

Gaining Buy-In for Audit Opinions

You can do all the phases of the audit correctly, from proper preparation to good fieldwork and validating controls for assurance, but what happens when the information you uncover through testing does not fit the information people may have given in interviews?  Or when information management gave you about how a process works does not fit with your findings?  This is where the "rubber hits the road," if you and they see it differently, what do you do?  The art of gaining "buy-in" is a very special type of selling-you are "selling" the others on your opinions and ideas.  What that involves exactly is what will be dissected here.  Items include:

1. Buy-In as "inclusion" of the audit opinion vs.  the "acceptance" of the audit opinion as correct:  the critical difference;
2. Steps to take at the opening conference with management and executive management to set the tone for buy-in;
3. Detecting possible disconnects during the business mapping and risk assessment phases and what to do right at the moment;
4. Gaining buy-in based on "positional power", meaning their position in your organization;
5. Other subtle and not-so-subtle influencing techniques that naturally increase the chances of buy-in from others

Communicating Excellently With Your Audit Committee

This session will be broken into two parts:

1.  First, you will learn the greatest communication challenges internal audit managers have with ACs.  We will focus on specific steps to take to prevent miscommunications, and ensure that you and your committee share mutual expectations regarding the roles and responsibilities of each other.

2.  Joan will also discuss what ACs should be doing to communicate effectively with you, with each other and how to run themselves as efficiently as possible.  This information will be taken from her article, co-authored with John Morrow, Senior Manager at PWC, “The Eight Habits of Highly Effective Audit Committees”, which won the Excellence  in Journalism Award in 2008 by the AICPA.

There will also be a chance to share best practices with each other within the session, so that we can all continue to influence our ACs to be even more effective as a powerful aid and ally to Internal Auditors.