Go forth and hone your interpersonal skills. The future of internal audit depends on it.

By Arleen McGichen, President of the Chartered IIA

This month, I’m attending the IIA Global Assembly and the Global Conference in Singapore. It’s a great opportunity to meet internal auditors from around the world, share ideas, and grasp opportunities to move forward as a profession, so I’m hugely excited.

AI and global disruption are creating huge challenges and feature heavily on the Global Conference agenda. We need to seize every chance to meet peers and discuss internal audit responses and solutions to these. But more than that, such gatherings are a celebration of the value of interpersonal skills and experiences.

Collaboration and curiosity are vital skills that will ensure the future of our profession as AI becomes ever more ubiquitous. We must think about how we hone our curiosity and nurture a healthy scepticism. We all need to be able to listen constructively and learn from others to increase our own understanding. We must actively seek out different points of view and try to see the broadest picture.

At a huge networking session like the Global Conference, it’s not our technical skills that are valuable. It’s our interpersonal skills that help us connect with people and emerge with ideas and inspiration.

Being human – better

We often talk about the daily variety in internal audit roles. We constantly dip in and out of different environments – from a meeting with a CFO or an audit committee, to an audit interview in operations, to a site visit, to a team discussion, to a quiet period working on a report. Each of these requires numerous interpersonal skills and personas before we start to use our technical expertise. At any point in time, we might be a collaborator, facilitator, educator, negotiator, or supporter.

From the start of our careers, internal auditors learn to go with the ebb and flow, to adapt to encounters with numerous and varying stakeholders at every level, asking questions and assimilating multiple topics. We can use our broad knowledge and contacts to connect people, bringing together different teams and groups of stakeholders. 

We are a common link, bringing together people who can help each other and increasing everyone’s understanding of our business and the wider environment. Our impact can be considerably greater than the sum of our parts.

This is what makes our profession unique. AI can do amazing things, but it doesn’t understand people. It cannot introduce and influence a unique group of people who, through communication and pooled experiences, generate innovation, deepen understanding, and solve problems.

But, unlike AI, not all humans are born with equal interpersonal skills. Not everyone is equally good at listening, communicating, influencing, and connecting. 

This is why we need to focus on the skills that make us human. I don’t believe humans will be replaced by AI, but we need to work out how we leverage our innate skills to function best with AI.

One important part of this is addressing any misunderstanding that “third line” means “last” or “separate” from the others. Internal audit should be at the centre, not on the side lines. We connect with, and can help connect, others. We can be the brain at the centre of the organisational body, using AI to help create new neural pathways and constantly strengthening the pathways that work best.

Simultaneous truths and objectivity

The revised Global Standards require internal audit teams to have an internal audit strategy. To create a good strategy, we must think about our relationship with AI, how we can best use it, and the interpersonal skills we need to take our work forward.

We must ask what is core to internal audit? AI is better at correlation than at causation. It can spot red flags, but it doesn’t understand what drives human actions, why people behave atypically when under pressure or stress. This is why internal audit’s oversight of organisational culture is central to the profession’s future.

People are fallible. They can, at times, see what they expect to see, rather than what is actually there, and are influenced by their lived experiences and emotions. It makes us easy to be misled by our biases, and these biases can also confuse AI. We need auditors who understand human fallibility to explore root causes, be aware of bias and prejudice, and view problems objectively.

We must understand multiple perspectives and that many versions of the truth can co-exist simultaneously. We are good at identifying problems, but IIA Global’s Vision 2035 tells us that internal auditors are also vital to find ways to optimise success.

This brings us back to behaviour and culture. If you understand alternative truths, you recognise that people can tell you one thing but behave differently – without intending to deceive. I always remember my internal audit training which taught me there are three different versions of a process – the prescribed (what is written), the described (what is spoken) and the actual (what is done) processes.

Often, the real problem is hiding in plain sight, as the war in the Gulf has “exposed” Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz. We know it’s there, but no one sees it for what it is because our biases can sometimes lead us to see what we want to see.

AI is part of the solution, but unless we also understand human contradictions and work together, we will only gain a partial advantage. It is by putting AI insights together with human insight and understanding that we will take internal audit to a new, more powerful level.

Further information: hone your human skills

The Chartered IIA’s Internal Audit Conference and Internal Audit Awards provide excellent opportunities for networking, building a community, and learning from each other.

There are a wide variety of forums and special interest communities that can help you meet peers in every sector and part of the UK and Ireland to discuss common challenges from AI to glass ceilings and allyship.

The Chartered IIA also provides a wide variety of interpersonal skills training courses, in-person, virtual and online.