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The Audit Podcast
Ep 244: Retired CAE Summer Series – Part 2 w/ Dale Jeanes
00:41:18
This week on The Audit Podcast, we’re continuing our Retired CAE Summer Series with Dale Jeanes, former General Auditor (CAE) at , where he spent an impressive 34 years. Dale now leads , where he coaches internal audit, risk management, and finance...
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- [00:00]
A
You know, if the role of the. Of the leader is not to be, you know, the innovation driver, then who is? And so I always thought that this mind, this mindset of we have to always be better and we need to challenge ourselves to always be better and always trying to instill that in our teams. So every, you know, this forward thinking, we're not. I'm not just myopically focused on, you know, today or tomorrow or getting the audit plan done necessarily. I am very focused on even further out and driving us towards better.
- [00:45]
B
Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Audit Podcast. I'm your host, Trent Russell. Today on the show, we have retired CAE Dell Jeans. Dell was formerly the general auditor, or CAE, at Truist. He was there for 34 years, which is super impressive. He's currently the principal at Gene's Professional Development, where he coaches internal audit, risk management and finance professionals. So if you need a coach, you probably do. If you need a coach. Dell is a fantastic person to talk to. I know just in the conversations that we had kind of off the air, Dale asked me a couple of questions and distinctly remember one of them going or thinking, yeah, that's a coaching question. Because it kind of made me sweat a little bit, and I had to think about it. And so Dell's been fantastic. He was highly recommended from one of our former guests, Margie Bastola, when, when she found out we were doing, she said, you got to talk to Dell. He's fantastic. Dell also introduced me to a future guest that I'll mention during that person's episode, but who is also great. So we have this whole string of really, really good referrals, but of this retired CAE series, hoping to get maybe a little bit more transparency from the retired CAE since they aren't part of their organizations anymore. Not that. Not that we feel like we don't get that from the caes that we talk to now, but nonetheless, that that was really the goal, to really learn from them. I think anytime you can take a step back, take a break. I know whenever I take two weeks off every year, when I come back, it's like completely different. Mindset's different. There's more clarity. I have more of an understanding of what I actually want to do, goals, objectives, things like that. And so considering these. Most of these retired CAs have been like that for a couple of years, we thought it'd be really good to get their perspective. So with that, some of the things that we talked to Dell about as a retired CAE turned Coach, coach us up, give us some practical takeaways. We also want to know a pretty standard question we asked everyone was if a new CAE asked for a politics lesson that maybe you've never put on the record while you're on the job, what story would you tell them? I think politics is something we don't really hear enough about, the politics of being a cae, so we're trying to uncover that a little bit more. Help everybody understand what it really means to be a CAE from that perspective. And then lastly, we close with, if Dell was going to write a book about his career today, what would the first chapter be about? And then what would the last chapter be about? With that said, here we go. Hey, everybody. Before we go to the show, quick announcement. On September 24th and 25th, 2025, we'll be having the Audit analytics and AI Conference. So block your calendars. It's going to be between 9 and 4 Central. That's 9 and 4 Chicago time. So again, that's September 24th and 25th. If you're in your car right now, probably want to pull over, go ahead and put that in your calendar. Save the date. There more to come from us, but want to let you know, save the date. September 24, September 25, 9 to 4 Central. So what is in your either your Internet browsing history or your CHAT GPT history? Anything like that? Anything professional or personal? Just something to kind of let the audience kind of know who you are.
- [03:59]
A
Yeah, thanks. I. Well, first, thanks for having me today, Trent, as well, and really appreciate being with you. ChatGPT. I mean, I have really discovered this tool in the past, I don't know, six, eight months. And I've tried to be a active user because I feel like I have always felt my entire life trying new things and trying new technologies and all that, while not on the cutting edge, I think is important for people to do, keeps you fresh. So on. On ChatGPT, I have used it a lot actually for idea development for some of the coursework that I'm putting together. It helps me. It does. It does a really nice job with case studies when I need to write those. It's almost like it's a. I treat it like an intern or a personal assistant and I say, here's kind of what I need it to be. And then it does the first draft and then I certainly own it and edit it and make it my own. And so I, I find that to be very, very helpful. So there's a blend of kind of that that kind of research that I put in there, sometimes I'll just ask it questions like, what is something? And then often as well, I use it for travel itineraries. My wife and I are taking a trip here coming up, and I said, let's just see what it'll do. And I popped in, you know, screenshots of the five. Five hotels we're staying in over two weeks. And I said just to make me an attend itinerary, include distances between locations, include, you know, where I might. You might recommend I, you know, sightsee or dine or whatever. And came back with the most beautiful plan that you've ever seen. And, you know, again, it would not be my final plan, but it gets me started. And I think, you know, having been through a career of having, you know, large scenes and lots of people around you and working with you, and I was in constant edit and review mode. You know, it kind of puts me back in that edit and review mode, which is kind of fun.
- [06:03]
B
Yeah, definitely better than the have to do all the detail work mode. I like the. So you took the screenshots of the hotels and uploaded those. So I'm assuming it was obvious enough there was like naming on there or something like that as opposed to.
- [06:17]
A
Yeah. So screenshot of the hotel reservation. So, you know, hey, you just booked your reservation. Here's your conference confirmation code, here's your dates, here's what the hotel is. That's all it had on it. Right. Okay. And then I just. So do all. I uploaded all those in and then it came back with. And I didn't tell it anything about it. It came back with the itinerary based on that. And it knew the order because I told it what order we'd be going to, the differences. And yeah, sweet was sweet. It's cool. So, yeah.
- [06:47]
B
Did it come back and be like, hey, don't do this, just take a cruise?
- [06:51]
A
No, I. I do find the Chat GBT never really gives you any negative feedback. It's always pretty positive about whatever you say. And so. And so it was like, oh, great plan, Dale.
- [07:05]
B
Yeah. You know, there's actually a. Something I read today and it was titled like, chat GBT is acting weird or something like that. And it was. It was basically, they have made some change that it's too agreeable. And so there. There's tweaks going on, going on behind the scenes is what the. I think OpenAI said. Like, yeah, we recognize it, we're going to make a change or something like that. But it was almost too Agreeable, which I thought was interesting. Like to close this out. What's the, where are you going? Where's the trip?
- [07:32]
A
Oh, we're going out west.
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B
Okay.
- [07:35]
A
So, yeah, And I guess by the time this airs, we'll be back, but going out west for a couple of weeks. And yeah, we've never done some national parks out that way. So we're looking forward to all that and should be beautiful time of the year. And so, yeah, thanks for asking.
- [07:48]
B
Well, if you listen to this after you've gotten back, I hope you had a great trip.
- [07:51]
A
Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.
- [07:53]
B
Hey, everybody, we're going to take a quick break from our guests, and if you need to get analytics or AI actually working in your internal audit department, or if you already have some of it, you feel like you're not really getting exactly what you need out of it, you know, there's more you're not getting that. Go to the show Notes, look for the Green Skies analytics link. Click it on the website. There'll be other links that you can click that'll take you directly to a calendar to schedule time. It's literally three clicks to get the time scheduled to get it figured out. All right, back to the show. All right, so you are part of our retired CAE series, and you definitely haven't retired and then just traveled. You stayed active, you stayed working. You've turned into a coach. And so coach us up on a practical takeaway. Like what, what can. If you leveraged everything, you know, from your CAE days, plus what you've learned, sense and kind of honing your coaching skills, like, give us something that we can give us a coachable moment. I think that was a big, a big term years ago. I know they talked about it on, I think, SportsCenter a while. It's like, oh, we got these coachable. That's a coachable moment. It became kind of almost this meme within sports. But what's a coachable moment for us?
- [09:02]
A
Well, let me give you the coachable moment and then maybe a little bit of a backstory behind it. And, you know, if I, if I get, if I get too long, then, then stop me, certainly. But, you know, I, I, I think the coachable moment is eliminate the use of why questions when you are trying to evoke or elicit a reflective answer from somebody. Okay, so let that settle for a second. Eliminate why questions when you're trying to evoke a reflective answer from somebody.
- [09:39]
B
So rather than me following up saying, why should we do that? I'm going to Say, what should we do with that?
- [09:45]
A
Should we do or how did you come about that? You know, plan. So, and I'll get, I'll mix in a couple of examples. But, you know, so I went, went through coach training. I didn't just say, hey, I'm going to be a coach. I got trained. I mean, I'm an audit professional, right? I have to know the process. I have to know how these things work. And I want to do it well. You know, I want to do it right. So, so, so I got trained. But one of the things about the training was, you know, don't, don't ask why questions because they are not helpful. They elicit a need. Sometimes they elicit negativity from somebody because they feel like they're having to be defensive. You know, if you get asked why. Also sometimes you, if asked why you feel like you have to explain. It basically means please explain to me, right? You think about why. It means please explain. Well, that's not always helpful in a reflective kind of conversation. So, so those things are not, are not good from, from this reflection. From this reflection idea. So what is this reflection idea? This reflection idea means if you're trying to have somebody deep in their own awareness about themselves or think about a solution themselves or go about trying to discover for themselves a new answer or a new insight. People have so much within themselves that they don't even know they have. And a lot of times, you know, eliciting with a what or a how question is a much better way to go. And I wish I had known this. So you talk about. I wish I had known this 25 years ago. You know, I've always been a student of awareness and self awareness and learning and growth and development. But, you know, I wish I had kind of known this nugget. And, you know, a good example, I think is maybe, you know, let's just say audit auditor comes to you and says, hey, you know, getting ready to go talk to senior management. I'm not really feeling great about this. Little nervous. Instead of saying, hey, why are you nervous? Why don't you say what's driving the nervousness for you? And so you automatically are not in this defensive mode. You're more in a explanation in a, in a, you know, in a sense of trying to discover for yourself, hey, you know, what is driving that for me? And then when you have that answer, then you go on and talk about maybe solutions for that or ways to approach that. So it just disarms by not doing the why. And so to Me, that's extremely powerful.
- [12:41]
B
I think as you were talking through that, there a couple of things came to mind. One, my analytical brain, when someone asked me why, just starts to go into a panic a little bit. I mean, depending on, you know, the nature of the qu. Or what the question's about, you know, why'd you run the red light? I wasn't paying attention. Whatever, you know. But there's deeper questions where. If it's a why, my brain just immediately goes into anxiety motion. Just like, let me find the perfect answer. I don't exactly know why. And it ends up being probably doing more harm than good. And I know when from my public accounting days, we did this strength finders assessment. You familiar with that?
- [13:17]
A
Yeah. Okay.
- [13:18]
B
And it's free now, so if anyone's interested, you can just search for strength finders. There's some website. You can do it. It takes 20, 25 minutes. It's really interesting. The results are. And so anyway, from this, I think there was like 25 of us on the team. We all took it, and then we kind of compared what our top five strengths were. And it had to. I know every person in that room had analytical in their top five, and most had analytical as their number one. And obviously there is a strength to that. And the thing with having, you know, a strength is there's the. The downside of that. Typical. I'm a perfectionist. That's my strength. Which leads to. I don't get the work done because it has to be perfect example that a lot of people are familiar with. But so all that to say, I have to imagine there are a lot of. Especially auditors analytical, who when they get asked why, maybe there's some anxiety there. Maybe it is difficult to answer. And so if nothing else, I mean, we're. What?
- [14:13]
A
I don't know.
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B
A couple minutes into this and we already have a. This is like a practical. Write this down. Take a note. Stop asking why questions. Start asking more what now?
- [14:21]
A
And I think especially in the context of eliciting reflection from the other person.
- [14:27]
B
And that's. I want you to hit on that again, the reflection piece, because I know you did. You said reflective questioning or scenarios. And I went, well, okay, what does that mean? Can we get an example?
- [14:36]
A
Yeah, here's the way I think about it. Yeah. I think about, you know, if I'm a leader and. Or just the peer and you're interacting with somebody. I sort of think about if I'm helping the other person in some way. A lot of people ask questions and all right, this is not, you know, what you do on the weekend. This is how can I be better? What can I do? I've got a problem I'm trying to solve. You know, so many times somebody come, come. People come to us, especially as leaders and say, hey, I've got this problem, you know, and we want to jump right in and solve the problem for them or we want to maybe ask them a question. But a lot of times those questions start with why. So those are, you know, there's, there's, there's like a spectrum there that we can teach. We can choose to teach. Okay, well, I hear you. I hear you're struggling with public speaking. Let me tell you two or three things that might work or you might want to try. What have you tried? Whatever. So that's sort of teaching, mentoring, you know, what's worked, what hasn't worked for you. But the coach skill is. Let's elicit from them what might be. What might be behind that. So what obstacles are getting in your way? What might, you know, good look like for you? What could be a solution you haven't tried? What could be a better way, more helpful way of thinking about this for you? How could you. So what or how. How could you reframe this for yourself in a way that's more positive? So that is what I mean by reflection. It's getting the other person to think and, and say something reflective back. It's like seeing themselves in the mirror. What would they say to themselves?
- [16:18]
B
Okay. And I feel like again, if there's the over analytical person, they're going, well, I don't know when to use the what and the how. Even after hearing that, I don't want to use it in the. Just ask it.
- [16:27]
A
Just ask it.
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B
Figure out the situations where one's better than the other.
- [16:31]
A
This is so powerful. I would say just try it. You will be so surprised. And it was funny. Can I tell a quick story? Yeah, of course. I spoke about this somewhere recently and somebody from the audience came up to me the next day and said, you know what, I heard you on that whole five thing, Dale. And you know what? I went home yesterday and had the best conversation with my 11 year old that I've ever had. Yeah. Because they reframed it from why I. E. Defensive child. Right. To. To what? And then they. That engages, you know, and, and it's powerful.
- [17:08]
B
All right, my. We'll wrap this up with my 6 year old. We couldn't find his shoes the other day and so we just threw on Something else. He went to school. We looked all over the house. They were in the, the hamper, the laundry hamper. And so immediately we saw, and we're like, dude, why did you put them in there? And so I. Lesson learned. We will definitely rephrase that. The answer, the answer was he wasn't paying attention to what we said and just robot style, took his shoes when we said put them away and put them in the, the hamper. But anyway, okay, so one of the things, one of the goals of this retired CAE series is to try to get a peek behind the curtain to the extent that we can understanding still the sensitivity, potential sensitivity of the situation. And so the way we've been doing that is asking, asking guests if, if a new CAE asked you for a politics lesson that maybe you have or have not put on the record while you're on the job, what story would you tell them? And if you, if you can't have a specific one, that's totally fine. But just take that question. How, how you feel comfortable answering it.
- [18:10]
A
Yeah, as I, as I think about the word politics and over my career I've heard that word used and I think it often elicits negativity. You know, politic, politics is negative. I really honestly never had politics running through my brain as a word. And it was not a mindset that I had and it was not the way I processed honestly. So, you know, I, I tried to be very purpose driven and always remembering who the ultimate, you know, receiver of assurance information is and who has that need. And there are lots of, I mean, politics is influence. There are lots of influences as a chief auditor. And, you know, it's, it's fine to listen to those, it's important to listen to those influences. It's important to recognize those pressures. I think it's also important to question sometimes what's the motivating factor or what's behind. Let's use a what question. What's behind, you know, that particular politics or influence. But, but I, I think from an audit perspective, especially in the role, I hate to say rising above, but not engaging in that political banter or political back and forth is helpful because I don't believe that it really helps to achieve your ultimate purpose as the audit leader. And, you know, you can certainly deal with facts, help address people's concerns, help to listen, to give them the perspective that you might have. But I think remaining objective and remaining true to that, it's really, really important.
- [20:21]
B
Do you feel like that? Because you mentioned being objective, you know, we always talk about being objective. Do you feel like that's part of it? Part of the reasoning behind it is like we're almost raised to be objective.
- [20:34]
A
We as humans or we as auditors. Auditors.
- [20:38]
B
Independence, objectivity, you know, we always talk about that. So is it almost like you didn't think politics because of independence, objectivity or is it.
- [20:46]
A
Yeah, I think I, I think, I think that's spot on actually. You know, if I think about values, I talked about values a lot and think about values a lot and coach with values and, you know, I, I think one of my personal values is objectivity. Just trying to be as independently minded for myself as I can be and whatever the conversation and the fact that I found a career that sort of played into that was nice because when you have the, that, that value alignment, you get fulfillment. And so, yeah, I think, I think you're spot on with that idea, Trent, was that objectivity dropped, you know, politics, if you will.
- [21:25]
B
One of the things that you said that I thought was super interesting and I knew I was going to ask you about it immediately when you said it, when we were talking kind of off air, as you said that you were not literally so not if you go check out Dell's LinkedIn, it's not going to say Chief Innovation Officer on there. But you said, yes, I was the Chief Executive Officer, I was a cae and then I was also the Chief Innovation Officer and I kind of put that in quote, quotes. What did you mean by that? How did you become that? And is it just. And I'm sure it's not supposed to be a terrible question if you're just like, yeah, that's all is it it. But it's not just like, oh, we would, we just, we always had the best and latest tech look at us. We're innovating, right?
- [22:09]
A
No, no, no, no, no. So I would, I would never say that any audit shop that I led was on the cutting edge of technology. I would say we were a lot of times fast followers or we certainly wanted to keep our eyes towards better from a technology perspective. And we did a lot of structural things and tool things and training things to move us ahead from that regard. I'm really excited about what's happened in the last two or three years with that. But when I made that comment to you, I was thinking more about the, if, you know, if the role of the, of the leader is not to be, you know, the innovation driver, then who is. And so I always thought that this mind, this mindset of we have to always be better, and we need to challenge ourselves to always be better and always trying to instill that in our teams. So every, you know, this forward thinking, we're not. I'm not just myopically focused on, you know, today or tomorrow or getting the audit plan done necessarily. I am very focused on even further out and driving us towards better. And so that's what I meant when I, when I was, was, was talking about that. And I used to, used to do things like say, hey, I. I love. I have this vision for. Or this, this, this future idea that every auditor would have a bot. You know, we called it the bot for every auditor. I mean, wow. So what. And, and, you know, when I was. That was five years ago, you know, and here we are today, and perhaps that is where we are or where we're headed. But that was just a concept and a way of just getting people excited about change and doing things differently and thinking things different about the future differently. And we tried to work towards things like that, but it's more of a concept in a lot of ways. Also think that that innovation leader, you know, my job was not to say, here's the tool you need to use and here's how you need to use it. It was the help built into the systems and processes that we had permission to try. I think, you know, auditors are perfectionists. I look, everything I say about an auditor, Trent, I am one. I have been one my entire career. So I am included in everything I say. Okay. So I think auditors, we, you know, we want to process, we want to, we want to plan, we want to follow it, and we want to get 100 on the test at the end. You know, we're perfectionists, driven individuals, and that helps in a lot of ways. And it can get in your way sometimes. But so I think building into your processes the expectation of innovation and change and trying something different is really important. So having steps in the actual audit process to do that was, was, was important because I think that gives permission to test. To test and learn to try.
- [25:25]
B
That's what. How did you do that? That's what I was super interested in. And when you said always be better, I was curious about the process in general. I'm sure you led with that mindset. I was going to ask if it was part of your vision or mission statement. You mentioned you had this vision, so maybe that was included in there and like literally typed out or written out. But what was that process?
- [25:47]
A
It was literally written out. It was literally in the audit process that there was a step to consider the use of innovative ideas. You know, different, different types of testing. Advanced analytics, we would call it. You know, in that moment we had a center of excellence, as many people did. And I know it's more towards, you know, using. What is it called now, crowd crowdsourcing. Helping here, you know, putting the tools in the hands of the auditors ultimately is the better idea. That's what you do. It's what. That's the better idea. But in that moment we had a center of excellence. So it's intentionally engaging the centered excellence in the audit processes to help design and look for ways that we should look for better ways and should design tests and not what could be done find. That was always the thing too. Oh, we can do this. Yeah, but what should we do? And it's really important to say what is the best and highest use for analytics or advanced analytics in this particular case. So designing that in with consultation from the center of excellence was really important. The permission stuff was really important. And you know, I think, I think measurement was really important as well. We had a. We had an innovation council which included all of our senior leaders and some of the teams and representatives and measures for analytics scorecard kind of thing where in our, in our time, you know, in our time we had things like the percentage of advanced analytics done on engagement or the percentage in an audit plan, a percentage of findings that were driven by analytics in some way. Designing those in a way that's germane to your practice is really important. But having something I think is what's more important that you can hold people accountable to and that keeps people focused on what that ultimate goal is, is super, super important.
- [27:51]
B
I think if I put it in a. Like, put it throughout the process of an audit and like literally stuck it in the documentation. My statement would be, after hearing what you said would be, if you're bored at this point, do something different. Like do the thing differently. You know what I mean? Like, if you're tired of writing these memos or tired of writing these reports, find a way to do it differently. You have permission. Go try it and then let's see if it how it worked out. So that's where I feel like a lot of innovation comes from or changes, improvements and processes in my brain also is after I do something a handful of times, just like, this is boring. I've done it the same way so many times. I have to do something different here. And so maybe that would work for others. I think Bill Gates had some Quote about being like, the people who are bored are the most effective with innovation or creativity or something like that, assuming they actually execute on it.
- [28:44]
A
But yeah, if you see, if you see it as, you know, I need to do something different here because I'm bored, you know, then that's going to potentially bring about change. And thinking about it differently. Also think it's not always technology. It can be just thinking about a different way going about doing the work. You know, I think about that a lot in the governance and risk management space, where there's not a lot of data necessarily, but there's different ways to approach the. I used to call it the assurance problem. You know, what is the assurance problem we're trying to solve for here? And we can think about that in a different way. And often you do that by having collaborative brainstorming with your teams.
- [29:25]
B
You know, let's say looking back and I know you're not like retired, but you are retired from the CA side. If you're going to write a book about your career from whatever perspective you want to take it from, what would that first chapter be about?
- [29:41]
A
I think the first chapter would be recognizing from the beginning of my career the importance of leadership and leadership development. You know, so, so focused very early in my career and, and, you know, in an auditor's career on the technical skills. Super important. Don't take anything away from that. You have to have them. You have to be trained in audit processes and technologies. But there's so much focus on that and, you know, and true across a lot of disciplines and less focus on some of the, you know, call it softer, but just leadership development work that can take place and should take place early in a career and be built upon. Because I think honestly, we're all leaders at all levels. You know, if you influence, then you lead and we can begin to build relationships. And that's key part of leadership. We can focus on our communication skills. Key part of leadership. We can, you know, start thinking about how do we think strategically early in our careers to kind of see that future out there and what are some. But getting in the habit and the muscle memory of that earlier is important. And so I think there's a number of things that we collectively can, you know, can do to focus more on leadership. So I think that will be the first chapter. Just recognizing that early and being a student of leadership, I think early in their career is. Is important. We promote good auditors a lot of times, Trent, and with good auditors, great auditors with leadership potential, and then we Say good luck.
- [31:28]
B
Well, to that, I don't want to leave people with a good luck on like, okay, go do leadership training. All right, everybody, good luck. Because I feel like within leadership, there's a lot of aspects within that. And so probably some of the two overarching themes we've heard from CAEs, retired or otherwise, is relationships and communication, those two things. And so that you can take definitely communications training. But if you were to. And obviously this is not going to be perfect for everyone. Like, this is the path. Literally anybody can just kind of jump in that path, and that's going to be perfect for them. It would need to be kind of customized. But when you say leadership training, if someone was to search for, like, leadership training, is that what you're suggesting or is it. Understand more the aspects like how to build and maintain relationships? Okay, like, that's an aspect of leadership training. Start there. How to effectively communicate. Written, oral, otherwise public speaking. Maybe start there. Is there some kind of path? And again, knowing that it can't be that prescriptive of everyone. Do this. But maybe just go into a little bit more detail, even on what you mean by leadership training.
- [32:32]
A
Yeah, I think that. I think the leadership's. Let's just put it in two buckets, maybe. Trent, there's leadership, there's leadership. Know how skills, you know, strategic planning, you know, capacity plan. Just thinking about the sort of the, you know, how do I. How do I do leadership things? Got it. You know, that's kind of one category. And then the other category is how do I show up as a leader? And when I think about how I show up as a leader, it's my leadership style. It is, you know, what do I want to be, how do I need to align with that leadership style, and how do I grow into that leadership style and now and into the future? So if I want it to be a leader that is very consistent or that is highly collaborative or that champions, you know, causes for people, that is how I want to show up as a leader. And I think knowing how you want to show up as a leader early in your career, you can begin to put together and with. With your own awareness and talking to your leaders about this, the types of opportunities to help strengthen those skills for you and to strengthen that development for you. So it's not so much the, you know, what you might learn in MBA school or, you know, it's. It's more about how you want to show up as a leader and how you want to be as a leader and what kind of leader you want to be. Write that down, think about that, design it and align it to who you are as an individual, what your values are. And those values are your anchors for that leadership. And as you, but as you recognize that early on, then you can build on that over time and then you start being a, recognized for that, building your brand, if you will. You know, they're a great leader because, and people can see it in you. So does that, does that address your question?
- [34:32]
B
Yeah, I like that. And even the point or the maybe something to do with that is I'm the type of leader who, and like fill in the blank and then that's who, like that's what you want to be and so then that's what you work to become or I want to be seen as. And then cool. That's who I want to be seen as. That's who I'll start to work towards becoming that, that leader.
- [34:51]
A
Yeah, I, I, I often refer to it as your aspirational leadership style.
- [34:55]
B
Got it.
- [34:55]
A
You know, because we all, I think, are aspiring to that in some way and always, always have that in motion.
- [35:03]
B
Excellent. What about the last chapter in that book? What's it going to be about?
- [35:10]
A
Probably about integrity and, and just, especially in the audit role, but in any role, you know, never sacrifice your integrity. You know, it's the it and I'm not, I am talking about ethics and the ethical, but that to me is foundational. It's, it's, it's bedrock for that. But when I, when I think about this, I'm thinking about how you, how the integrity of your decisioning, the consistency of your decisioning, the respect you pay to other people, you know, the care you exhibit with other people. And I think all those things from an integrity perspective, do the people see you as a leader with integrity, dignity, respect, how you treat other people? I think all those things and when I say consistency, I'm really focused on kind of like fairness and application of, of a, of a rule or guidance or of a guideline, you know, don't, don't treat people different, you know, for the things that, that need to be held consistent. And I, I think because that gets leaders in a lot of trouble and it causes people to question your integrity, like why do they do that? You know, And I think, I think a lot of leaders miss that consistency piece.
- [36:37]
B
So if nothing else, I have asked what and how, never why. And even as we were talking, there was a, there at some point I forgot what the question was or what you said, but in my head I was like, okay, why though? And then as soon as I said it in my head, I was like, I can't, I gotta. And I kind of struggled. I was like, I don't know what the what and the how is on this. So unfortunately you did answer it, so I didn't have to embarrass myself with that. But I guess that apparently does take a little bit of practice. So anyway, I love that I've got that as a takeaway for me amongst a few other things. But is there any other takeaways? Anything else you want to leave the audience with?
- [37:11]
A
I'll think as I think about, you asked me about first chapter of the book and leadership. As I think about leadership, as I think about the work that I've been doing now since I retired, which is leadership development coaching work, I think a lot about the importance of self awareness. And so if I want to leave everybody with, with something, it is, you know, think about self awareness and, and use your own self awareness as a way to get better, grow yourself and, and, and become a better person, a better human, a better leader or a better professional, a better whatever. And so I, I think that self awareness is just, just truly important. I, you know, I do a lot of reading now and Harvard Business Review articles and books and yeah, LinkedIn is full of top 10 lists and it seems like the most in any top 10 list of leadership. Self awareness is always there and it's usually towards the top. And why is that? I think it's because self aware leaders are better leaders because they obviously know themselves, but they know their values, they know their strengths, they know their limitations, they know what's important to them, they know what they expect of others. They know how to set those expectations in a way that is helpful and productive and meaningful. So I think this self awareness idea is really important. So advice, you know, I would give you is into our audience is, you know, to be intentional about that, to, to go discover something new about yourself, you know, in whatever way it is, and whether it's a strength you can lean more into and leverage, you know, to a greater extent, whether it's a limitation or weakness, however you want to say it, it's something you could get better at. Whether it's something you have a belief about that's holding you back. Is there a way to reframe that belief in a way that's more helpful? And a belief, simply a belief, could be something as simple as I want to reframe how I view diet and exercise because to me, I don't think it's that important. How can I reframe that in a way that's more productive and can I use that as a motivational thing for me? So whole idea beliefs impact what you do and what the outcomes are. It's really, is really impactful. So examining those beliefs, especially the ones that I would call self limiting, are, are important. So just get better. But if you focus on self awareness, if you focus on that, you know, with a little bit of incremental improvements, you focus on the things that I've talked about here a little bit and go discover for yourself and be a student of yourself in that regard. It's just an easy, simple, cheap and highly, highly, highly effective way to focus on your own development. And if you need help, talk to somebody that can help you. Talk to a leader, talk to a friend, talk to a peer. If you want to talk to me, you can find me online. And I just think owning that is the best advice I could leave our audience today.
- [40:41]
B
Hey everyone, thank you very much for listening to this episode of the Audit Podcast. Whatever platform you're listening on right now, I'm sure there's a subscribe button somewhere, so please hit the subscribe button there. If you're listening through itunes or Spotify, feel free to go give us that five star rating. It only took me about 16 seconds to give myself a five star review and it really helps to get future guests to come on the show, so we'd really appreciate that. Lastly, be sure to check out the show notes and follow us on all our social media channels, on Instagram, on LinkedIn, and on TikTok. Also, if you're interested, please sign up for our weekly newsletter from the Audit Podcast. Thank you all. Have a great one.