How Julieanna Gorman combined experience with human skills to win the Chartered IIA’s Rising Star Award 2025
A background in psychology, followed by frontline banking, working in sales and customer service and then with SMEs, gave Julieanna Gorman a keen understanding of the human side of financial services. Now senior internal audit manager at Standard Life, part of the Phoenix Group, in a small internal audit team in Ireland, she has used her personal skills to influence and develop the function’s reputation. Her success won her the Chartered IIA’s Rising Star Award for 2025.
Gorman was first introduced to risk and controls when she began working on credit risk. An opportunity came up in internal audit and she took it, despite not having a clear idea about what internal audit did. “I studied psychology at college, but I didn’t want to become a therapist. I was interested in forensics, but needed to get a job so I applied for various graduate programmes,” she says.
At first, she felt out of place in function comprised largely of accountants, but she also realised that she could be good at the job and her experiences would prompt her to think differently from many of her colleagues. “I found I was more pragmatic than many of my peers and focused more on the risks and the value we could add,” she explains.
Five years later, she says she is seeing more internal auditors with non-accountancy backgrounds. She believes that a team that can view issues through more than one lens and can speak varied business “languages” is stronger and more flexible than one that is homogenous.
“I’ve worked with managers and dealt with customers, so I know how they see things,” she adds. “I’m very aware that going through an audit requires effort from managers, but knowing the customers’ viewpoint also helps me understand their point of view about the business.”
What did she do?
Gorman’s talents at getting the best from all parties came to the fore a couple of years ago, when she was asked to conduct a complex audit that prompted some pushback from management. She managed to step back from potential conflict and identify the issues that were triggering a negative response.
By working to resolve these and listening to all sides of the arguments, she managed to persuade everyone to work together to make improvements, focusing on the end goal for customers and the business benefits. The results were tangible successes that brought her and the value of the internal team to the fore.
Her nominator wrote of “her exceptional relationship management skills and her ability to drive innovation”.
“Julieanna’s exceptional relationship management earned her the trust of senior executives. As a result, she collaborated on the first coordinated assurance heatmap. Through her strong relationships and her innovative approach, she helped develop a coordinated heatmap that integrates the three lines of defence opinions across all risks. This harmonised approach has reshaped assurance activities, supports decision-making at the highest levels and was highly commended by senior management,” they said.
Further activities have included successfully campaigning for her colleagues in the internal audit function to gain promotion, in recognition of the managerial level of their responsibilities, and work to progress diversity and inclusion. A blog she wrote about her experiences of being autistic with ADHD sparked valuable conversations and led to changes across the business.
She has also helped to streamline and automate the internal audit function’s skills assessment processes. This improved efficiency – reducing reporting times by 75% – and generated insights into team strengths and skills gaps.
Eye on future skills
Where will these skills take her next? Gorman points out that internal audit teams are all looking for “superheroes”. Teams need people with both an understanding of technology and AI and superb human skills. “This is a tall order,” she says.
Realising that her strengths lay at one end of this scale, she applied for a place on an AI modelling programme for FS employees and won a scholarship. “I’m not a technology person, but if AI is going to take over the world, I’m going to understand it,” she says.
She believes that all internal auditors need to understand how they can use AI in their jobs – although they don’t all need to be programmers.
“I’m learning about it because I like understanding things and I want to take care of my future career,” she explains. “I need to know that I can audit AI.”
However, she also believes that the internal audit profession needs to develop better human skills and understand why others may fear audits. “I’ve seen examples where an audit felt like an interrogation, and that’s not good,” she says.
She believes that many internal auditors would be surprised if they understood the real fear people may feel about audit judgments, and the weight that audit findings have in the business. While it’s important for auditors’ views to be taken seriously by management, she sympathises with the plight of the person who is hauled up before their boss and grilled on a failing when they were never taught what the relevant control was or why it mattered.
“We need to do our job humanely. We may be talking to people who have worked in their role for 20 years and never had any feedback before we came along and criticised them,” she says.
While technology and human skills are both essential for internal audit to grow in the future, Gorman does not believe that everyone has to be good at both – we can’t expect everyone to be a “superhero” instantly.
But, she says, everyone can improve their human skills. “It’s not easy, but the key steps are straightforward. We must make time for other people, develop relationships and maintain those relationships. This can be harder than creating an initial good impression.”
Sharing governance expertise
Gorman says she needs variety at work and new challenges. “I would be less effective if I had to fight the same fight over and over again,” she says. “The conversation needs to keep changing.”
She plans to move in and out of operational roles and internal audit in her career to keep her fresh perspective. “I don’t feel I can properly judge how the business does things if I haven’t seen how others do it. You don’t know what you don’t know,” she points out. “Every time you move job, you take your past experiences with you.”
This is also useful for the internal audit profession, she adds. “Sending internal audit skills out into the business is a strong way to increase understanding of risk and control. We can be so useful in the first and second lines by injecting our knowledge of controls and governance, while still abiding by IIA principles.”
She starts a new role in January and believes that winning the Chartered IIA Award helped her to get it. “I also got lots of congratulations from across the business and we had a great night at the event,” she says. “It’s a fantastic celebration of the profession and I’d love to attend again in future.”