Outside the box: Am I ambitious enough for myself, for the team and for internal audit?
How ambitious are you? Internal auditors are constantly being asked to do more – provide new areas of assurance, extend their scope and influence, respond faster, offer support on more projects. It’s a dizzying cycle of improvement and pressure – and the more you do successfully, the more you are asked to do.
Ambition, therefore, is essential, but ambitions must be focused, well-informed and practical. Without aspirations to improve, most people will stay still. And in business – and internal audit – standing still means declining in relation to other peoples’ performance. What, apart from ambition, would drive you and your colleagues to work harder, move out of your comfort zones, challenge accepted practices or take on new opportunities?
Ambition is a two-edged sword. Personal ambition when it means outcompeting others at any cost is, of course, undesirable in a team or when it encourages people to behave unethically. And, while ambition to excel is essential to great performance, no one benefits if it leads to burnout. Leaders must be ambitious for their teams, but they must also ensure that this motivates individuals rather than exhausting them.
Setting and managing ambition – for individuals and for a team – is therefore essential. This requires empathy and sensitivity to the way different people respond to pressure and up-to-date knowledge of what best looks like in other teams and organisations. Ambition needs to be inspired and then maintained when progress is delayed or achievements thwarted. It must then be rewarded in a way that renews and refreshes enthusiasm to embark on the next project.
Being ambitious is not the same as setting clear objectives or having a vision or mission statement (although these may include being ambitious). It is more open-ended and flexible than simply working your way through a tick list of achievements. You may succeed at a particular goal brilliantly, but that should not be the end of your ambition. Ambition is the driving force behind achievements, but also behind the hard slog involved in making changes or tackling intractable problems. It’s the energy that propels you on the journey, but won’t be extinguished by reaching any specific summit.
Set your sights
Ambition should be a constant, but it should be channelled into specific targets which must be re-appraised and updated regularly. There are many opportunities to do this – planning meetings, project workshops, training programmes, annual appraisals, etc – but it’s easier to fire individuals’ personal ambitions if they are involved in defining the goals and have an opportunity to challenge them. Leaders may start the conversation and define parameters, or they may throw the subject open and invite suggestions. Either way, asking all team members to talk about what ambition means to them in the context of their jobs may generate new ideas, share knowledge and help people to feel excited about change.
Team members need to know what best looks like so they can set informed targets. It may be worth mapping where you and your team source information and whether there are untapped resources that could be useful. Consider joining industry or sector forums (such as those run by the Chartered IIA), check out the guidance and reports on the Institute’s website, as well as those published by other relevant bodies, and ask team members to discuss ambitious projects – from implementing data analytics and artificial intelligence to improving internal audit methodology – with peers at conferences or on training courses.
Shout it out
Stating your ambitions sets a bar and establishes a challenge. Even if you do not quite achieve what you set out to do, you may end up further along the path than if you stroll along diffidently with no clearly defined objectives.
When you declare your ambitions formally, you invite challenges and questions. Will they stretch you or are they likely to be achieved anyway, simply because of changes in the external environment? Are they the right ambitions in the first place, or inherited from previous leaders to meet obsolete needs? Are they fresh and exciting or do they carry with them a sense of past failure and defeat?
Reward and recognise
Ambitious teams need to trust managers to recognise and reward ambitious behaviour – even when this does not result in a clearly defined “success”. Establishing the best rewards for behaviour (rather than results) is not easy. It requires managers to exercise judgment and understand what individuals have achieved or found difficult without micro-managing them.
Publicising team ambitions and inviting people to challenge ambitious targets can help to ensure that these are genuinely a force for improvement. It may also help people to spot unintended negative consequences or highlight if they risk favouring one person or group at the expense of others – the “dark side” of ambition is competition between those who should be allies.
Recognition and exposure can often be more effective than a financial incentive. Nominating a team or individual for one of the Audit & Risk Awards or for an internal prize can send a powerful message – even if they do not win. Inviting a junior internal auditor to present an outstanding piece of work directly to the audit committee, asking a colleague to run a workshop to share a new skill, or highlighting their contribution to the wider team is likely to be more powerful than simply recording success in an appraisal.
High-performing internal audit teams all say they aim for a culture of continuous improvement. This means different things in different organisations, but ambition is a necessary precursor to change at any level. As Oscar Wilde memorably wrote: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
This article was published in November 2023.