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The Audit Podcast
Ep 256: Soft Skills = Power Skills w/ Geoff Kovesdy & Jimena Escamilla
00:40:16
This week on The Audit Podcast, we’re joined by Geoff Kovesdy, who leads Digital Controls AI and Automation, and Jimena Escamilla, Senior Manager in Advisory group. They share their favorite ChatGPT and Copilot prompts, talk about the one...
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- [00:00]
A
I know the world that we operate in pushed us away from interacting with human beings in the same way that we used to. So I think we need to be much more intentional. This is the kind of stuff that I'm super passionate about from a cultural perspective, is upskilling people in this way and actually giving them tools, trainings, techniques to hone those skills in a much more intentional way.
- [00:30]
B
Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Audit Podcast. I'm your host, Trent Russell. Today on the show we have two folks from Deloitte joining us. So we have Jeff Covesdi. He's the digital controls, AI and automation market offering leader at Deloitte. And we're also joined by Jimena Escamilla, senior manager in Deloitte's advisory service line. As always, we talk about what our guests. So Jeff and Jimena's favorite chatgpt or copilot or whatever prompt is. Jeff had a pretty interesting one that is new and novel to the show. On the personal side, we hadn't heard this one before, so I thought that was great. We also talk about if you could grab every auditor by the shoulders and just shake them and say, just do this one thing, get the perspective on that. And then we go through Jeff's hypothesis on screwing up innovation and AI and within internal audit. That's pretty interesting thought there, some thoughts there. And then we hit on empathetic leadership. And if I summarize it, Jeff put it really nicely when he says soft skills equals power, power skills. So we go into more details on that. So if you enjoyed hearing from Jeff, he's also going to be speaking at the audit analytics and AI conference on September 24th and 25th. This is 2025 virtual conference recordings are available so no matter where you're listening to this around the world, you can have access to it. Jeff is specifically talking about Gen AI, the truth of the matter and impact on risks and controls. We'll have a link to the show notes if you want to register for the conference. And until then, here we go. Hey everybody. Just wanted to make a quick announcement. September 24th and 25th of 2025 is the Audit analytics and AI Conference. It's the only conference dedicated to internal auditors strictly around data analytics and AI from the audit perspective. The goal when we have speakers come on. Is to have them show you how to do a lot of this stuff and talk about how they've been able to accomplish the things that they're going to show tactically. So it's not just this is why you should do it. It's a lot of how you should do it. It's all virtual. So if you're in a time zone halfway across the world, no problem at all. You can absolutely check out the recordings. This year you can get 14 CPEs and then two additional free CPEs. You have to come to the conference to check that part out. We have another fantastic lineup. Highly recommend. Go to the show notes, go to the website, check out the lineup, check out the topics that we have for you. Year again, September 24, 25th, 2025. Depending on when you're listening this, that means it's either 14 days away, eight days away, seven days away, one day away, or it's the day of. So go to the website, check it out, register, and hope to see you guys there.
- [03:18]
A
All right.
- [03:22]
B
So just to let the audience kind of know you guys a little bit more, can you give me either like what's in your Internet browsing history as of late or what you like a chat GPT prompt that you've been using lately or Claude or meta or like whatever it is that you use as a LLM. Something on kind of the personal side, not too personal, and then something more like on the professional side as well, especially on the prompt side if there's something you're like, I've been using it for, you know, X, Y, Z, whatever that is. So I'll throw that out there.
- [03:53]
C
Maybe I'll start Personal humanity. You can kind of go from there and then we'll kind of see where we end up. I. So I got asked this question the other day and I was thinking like, oh, I should have some interesting canned response that I use every single time that's going to blow people's minds and be really fascinating and interesting and away from all the typical stuff. And I never came up with anything. So I'm just going to be honest. And the honest piece of it is I'm in the market for a couple of new jackets and suits. And you know, I live in New York City and going shopping for or finding a tailor for jackets can be a little overwhelming. So I kind of went into kind of one of the LLMs. Like I am in the market for new suits and new jackets. I put in my kind of age. I said, look, I'm. I'm in the consulting industry. I'm conservative, but I also consider myself to try to be fashion forward. Other people may not agree with that and also kind of just said, hey, I'm looking for a tailor that I could build a Relationship with who will advise and guide. I live in the West Village. Can you kind of provide some suggestions? Came back with a couple of suggestions. I asked some clarifying follow up questions and it narrowed it down to three tailors that I'm going to go visit, meet with, see kind of what their deal is and how they work with their clients. And it was, it was an incredible experience.
- [05:24]
B
That's definitely a new one. But I like that, I like how you went into the detail on your almost like your fashion sense so that.
- [05:32]
C
It might be my, my view and my fashion sense might be some might be different if I had someone write the prompt for me. But you know, we're all evolving.
- [05:39]
B
Perfect.
- [05:40]
A
I love it.
- [05:40]
B
Emeno, what about yourself?
- [05:42]
A
Yeah, mine, mine. I mean, I kind of nerd out on the same topics whether I'm in my personal life or my professional life. Communication, everything to do with communication is what kind of intrigues me. So if you look at my Internet browsing history, it's a bunch of articles, speakers around communication, effective communication. The way I've used the LLMs recently, I've noticed in my kind of go, go, go, I tend to be very go, go, go in my day to day, I'll manage things through text, email, multiple communication threads. And recently I had a miscommunication with my dog sitters who take care of both of my very large handful of dogs. I have a German shepherd and a Rottweiler and I noticed something I had asked them to do. I thought very clearly multiple times was not done when I came home from a trip. So I kind of brain dumped the text I wanted to send into the LLM and I asked it for feedback on a couple things. One was, is my ask clear? Because I've said it multiple times and I feel like I'm saying the same words over and over. And two, is my tone clear on the fact that I don't want to fire them, but I am not happy? So it turned into a little bit of a communication coaching conversation. Um, but ultimately I'm also very kind of human. I'm a human person. I love people. I love how people communicate, the intricacies and the imperfections of it all. So even though I kind of use the LLM to coach me through that messaging, my last step was to reach out to my sister and say, okay, marketing person, you know me as a human being. How does this read? And she gave me a couple more notes just to say, okay, you want to be clear, you want to be human, you got a little too aie there right at the end.
- [07:33]
B
So, yeah, still the. The human in the loop piece of it was still a part of it. I like that. I know when I worked in public accounting, I forget the situation, but, like, we needed some evidence or something and just like, could not get it or they. I don't know. I forget the situation. But my email was very direct and I read it and I went, that's probably not going to go over very well. Uh, but we had someone on the team who I would say was. Was better at writing kinder emails, maybe less direct than mine, and that's what I had to do. A couple times I would go, I know this sounds ridiculous. Can you review this email, though, and like, tweak it and make it not. I was like, please don't add emojis or like, too many exclamation points. Cause that might be overkill, but, like, you know, like, soften it up a little bit for me. So I should probably use your use case also. So, Ximena, if you could grab every auditor in the world by the shoulders and just shake them and say, just do this one thing, what would that be?
- [08:29]
A
I think I would say you have to be curious about what's in front of you and not shut your eyes to it. I think a lot of us get scared about change and about what's coming, what we don't see. And we tend to kind of shut our eyes to that and go back to our plan, and then we get stuck. So, yeah, you got to kind of keep your eyes open and be curious.
- [08:52]
B
I think curiosity is one of the most commonly said traits of what makes a good internal auditor. A lot of times we hear curiosity as the answer. Thanks, Jeff. What do you got?
- [09:05]
C
I would say lean in. I'm doing an EQA right now for a very large branded Fortune 100 company. We all see their product services all over the world. And one of the things that I heard consistently as I was doing the executive interviews is we want more from internal audit, and we think that they can provide more and we want them to lean in, like, get out of the audit plan a little bit. It's okay to bring advice and guidance. It's okay to ask questions that may not align exactly to the audit objectives. Bring us a point of view. I think just leaning in to the privilege that being an internal auditor provides us in people caring what we have to say and lean in.
- [09:55]
B
Hey, everybody, we're gonna 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. So now we're talking about innovation at a high level. But Jeff, you have this hypothesis on screwing up innovation. Those are your words, not mine. So I'll just throw that to you because we didn't even really go into a ton of detail on this when we were talking about it earlier. So educate myself and the audience on this hypothesis of yours.
- [10:46]
C
And this is just a Jeff hypothesis. But, you know, I believe that we, we, the big W, Capital W as a profession, have kind of lost our way as relates to innovation within. Within the profession, within internal audit, within risk management. I think for a long time we were all focused on really kind of agile ways of working in analytics, automation and AI. And those are really important opportunities for us as a profession. But that's not the end all, be all of innovation. I would say agile ways of working, how we deliver our services, using technology. And we could spend a whole hour talking about what Genai is doing to the profession these days. But I think that's more of an imperative. That's not necessarily kind of innovation anymore. And even two weeks ago I went on one of the LLMs and I just said, hey, what are the top things around innovation within internal audit? Four of the eight responses all had data analytics, AI, machine learning or whatnot within it. And I think that we have an opportunity as a profession to redefine innovation. We have an opportunity as a profession to engage our teams in a different differentiated sort of way as it relates to innovation. And I think there's a lot that we are all doing that we could take credit for and talk about it from the innovation lens. So kind of that's my hypothesis. I think we have an opportunity to do more, to do better, and to redefine. But Amanda, you've heard me say that a couple of times. What do, what do you think?
- [12:33]
A
Yeah, no, I mean, I completely agree with you. I think part of. We do this to ourselves, we take these words, right? Innovation, gen AI, whatever it is, right, Whatever the hot topic is, and we say, what is that exactly? How Do I do that thing right and give me the roadmap, give me the steps, make it so super tactical. And we can do that because we've seen it done so many times and we, we reinvent it and evolve it all the time. Whether we're talking about how you operate, what you operate with, et cetera, how you communicate. But if you get so stuck on tell me what to do, you completely lose the connection to why you're doing it, why it matters not just to you, but to the people that you're impacting every day. Whether it's management, stakeholders, audit committee, your team. Right. Like we, as, as leaders in the profession, and I use that word, not title based, Right. But as people that lead change. Right. Whether you're fixing issues that you found and you're trying to help the business adapt or you're thinking ahead, when you focus on just how, what do I do? Just tell me what to do, you really kind of lose sight and you overcomplicate things. Right. To Jeff's point, innovation can be as simple as going from a 50 page auto report to something that makes a lot more sense for the reader, right? Three to five pages, something a little more amenable. So yeah, I mean, I think we just, we overcomplicate things all the time. And innovation to be quick and useful needs to be simple. It should just make sense.
- [14:15]
B
Innovation could be a small thing. It doesn't have to be this huge, like front page of the paper. Look at what this team did. It's super innovative. Jeff, you said that we lost it. Like we've lost innovate. Do you feel like there was a time where we had it? I feel like 2020 was where a lot of, like maybe the end of. I know that's if we looked back and did like internal audit and innovation and we did like a Google search, you know, you could see the trends. I feel like 2020 was where I heard the word innovation a ton because of what was going on obviously with the pandemic. And so a lot of people went agile, obviously. Remote work changed a lot of things for a lot of people. And so I felt like that was. That forced us to be somewhat innovative. Innovative. And then maybe since then, yeah, just kind of, we're like, well, we're good to go. The pandemic's over. Like, here's the new, I hate saying the new normal, but like here it is and we're just going to kind of ride it out. And to your point, now we have AI. So the fact that we're just using AI a couple times a week now. We're being innovative, and I don't really think that's the case at all. But do you feel like there was a time where we had it and now we've lost it?
- [15:17]
C
Yeah. I appreciate you picking on the word lost, because I think it's a really good point. You look, internal has evolved a lot in the last five, eight years. I mean, if you go back, you know, we did a global chief audit executive survey kind of back in the early, I don't know, let's say like eight years ago. We did our first one and we just saw, you know, some significant feedback around chief audit executives who aren't feeling like they're making an impact, having a significant impact and influence on their organizations. And when we did the next survey after that, we did see the percentage of CAEs who feel like they're making a significant impact and influence evolve kind of from survey one, survey two, if you go back, like, I don't know what the years are anymore, but if you go back, like, let's just say 10 years, like, literally, I could have taken the same red pencil that someone was doing an internal audit in 1985 and use that same red pencil in their year, probably like 20, 2010, 2014. And if you think about the way the world has evolved, business has evolved, the way we do business has evolved, internal audit was not keeping up with that pace of change. And I do think, again, capital W, the profession does deserve a lot of credit for how it has evolved. And even if you think about, like, a tech company, I can't show up at a tech company or an internal audit, I can't show up at the tech company with all the engineers and engage with the engineers again using that same red pencil. So there has been evolution. And, you know, I love that you brought up 2020. I mean, if you think about how, as a profession, again, we flexed almost overnight to remote ways of working, remote audits. A lot of clients I've spoken to, they didn't miss a beat in their audit plan. I mean, that is absolutely incredible. Now, that innovation was sort of forced, that changed our evolution or reexamine our ways of working, that was forced upon us. I think. You know, Trent, going back to your question, we have the opportunity to not kind of have it be forced on us to evolve our ways of working, but how do we be. How does it be a part of just how we continue to always evolve? And we could talk about that a little bit more, but I don't know, Amanda, what do you. What are you. What do you think? If we're going back to 2020, really agree with that.
- [17:46]
A
I mean, the external. It's just like anything else in your personal. In your personal life, right? Maybe you've always known that you should drink more water or something really simple, right? But then something happens and your dehydration lands you at the hospital, okay? Now tomorrow, it's much easier to drink the water that you've always known that you had to drink, right? And you just kind of change your ways. But if you don't have that internal driving force, and that's where I think culture comes into play and leadership comes into play. And how you show up every day as human beings, right, as people, makes the biggest difference, right? So if you wait for that external force, it's going to be painful, way more painful every single time. Change hurts no matter what, right? Whether you're the one instilling it upon yourself or it's coming in from the outside. But I think that's what Jeff and I and our teams and the work that each of us does every day try to bring to the table is regardless of what's going on out there, what are we doing, right? How are we evolving, how are we improving, how are we thinking about the way we work, how we impact people every single day? And it makes work a little harder, right? Because we're asking people to think a little bit more broadly and be more complex, right, in how we approach our day to day, in a sense. But it makes those kind of times of change where you're forced to think differently a bit easier. So it kind of, you know, settles the storm in that way, brings a little bit of calm to the chaos.
- [19:21]
C
If I could add on to that a couple of things, One is, and Jimena, you said it right? In 2020, it was a leadership mandate, like, we have to still execute our audit plan. Leadership was engaged and driving and supporting an evolution in the way that we are working. I mean, that was paramount to the success that a lot of teams had those times because of that leadership involvement. Number two is a lot of teams kind of sat there and said, okay, we need to work remotely. Now, what is stopping us from working remotely? And they examine their ways of working. They examine their orthodoxies. They say, well, we always do an audit in person. That was the orthodoxy. Well, let's challenge that orthodoxy and say, well, what must go right, in order for us to be able to do this audit remotely? And I think, Jimena, you kind of Said it kind of earlier on, like, everybody wants the innovation list. Everyone wants the innovation topics. Innovation isn't about, like, here's a list. Work off of this list and check some things off as you go about it. Cool. Did we do integrated assurance? Check. Did we change our report ratings? Check. Did we train our people on soft skills? Check, check, check, check, check, check. No, it's really. Why don't we examine our orthodoxies? Why don't we examine our ways of working and those become the inflection points for our teams to evolve. And so we just talked about kind of the leadership commitment. But this is where it also matters that we get our teams engaged. Our teams know the way we work, they know the pain points and they know the opportunities. The question becomes, do we create a culture where our teams can speak up and do we create the opportunity where if our people speak up, they think it's worth their time? Because if they speak up and they come up with some great ideas, but we never action any of it, our.
- [21:23]
A
Teams are going to kind of shut down.
- [21:25]
C
So it has to be a leadership mandate. We have to engage our teams, but we have to kind of show success and that we're taking these ideas and we're bringing them forward because then our teams will continue to be engaged going forward as well.
- [21:39]
B
The innovation topic, how can people be innovative then? Like, what's a. If there's not like a checklist to follow, this is innovative. What would be like a checklist to follow of. This is how you become innovative.
- [21:55]
A
I mean, if I take what Jeff just said, right, when we say bring in your team, ask, ask them, what would you change about the process you follow today and tell me why you would change that.
- [22:08]
B
Literally any part of it. It doesn't have to be a huge change like we've talked about and just.
- [22:12]
A
Have a couple conversations. And at the end of the, when you inevitably will have a team meeting, whether it's end of the week and whenever it is, you have your team meeting, share what you heard and facilitate a conversation among the team, get them energized about. Oh, you didn't just talk to me about that. You talked to everybody else about it and you heard some common themes. Why don't we do that? Right? And then all of a sudden you have a change that maybe in your old process would have taken a team member to tell their senior, to tell their manager, to tell their senior manager, and then it, you know, it kind of gets lost. So, yeah, you gotta just talk to your team about this stuff. Ask Questions Be curious. Back to our first point.
- [22:53]
C
I also think there's like, how do we learn from industry? How do we, you know, I, I, I don't know who quoted it. It might have been Henry Ford, I'm not sure. But you know, he said if I asked the people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. Right. And you know, we really kind of, what can we learn kind of from industry? I also think we need a framework to work off of. So he meant to talk about the fact like, hey, anything and everything we need to look at. But I do think if we kind of allow our teams to have a framework, I think that's one way to focus. I mean a lot of innovation I think is around services, but we need to think about innovation in terms of how we manage stakeholders, how we manage our teams, how we engage, how we report, how we scope. I also think how do we define value is a way also to kind of innovate and evolve. How we kind of think about brand is a way to innovate and evolve how we think about kind of the user experience on both ends. The other thing I think is really interesting is as we kind of start to come up with these innovation ideas is that we capture them in a pipeline and we're not going to work on all innovation ideas at once. Some innovations are going to be smaller, we'll be more likely to be able to be successful and they're going to have smaller roi. Other innovation ideas are going to be very transformative. They might take more time, but they're going to have a larger roi. And so how do we have a balanced portfolio, balanced innovation portfolio that has both the little ideas and the big ideas and show them successes on the little ideas while we're picking one or two of the big crunchy areas as well. So I also think having kind of a portfolio view, a pipeline and a process around bringing innovation to life, including kind of change management communications, is critically important as well as.
- [24:38]
B
Yeah, the process is what I was looking for there. I think for a lot of people and this seems to be a common topic or theme maybe that pops up is, is regardless of its innovation or, or some other topic we're talking about. It's either I was born that way and I have that mindset or if it's not the case then or maybe to develop that mindset, which is pretty difficult or it is, we have a process in place for doing that. So I know one CAE is like process improvement. That's like her world, that's all she, not all, but that's like her thing. And she's like I've, she's, you know, she's always been that way since like she was a kid. So she has that mindset. Whereas others maybe aren't like that and they need a kind of like formal process to follow. Whether that's taking, you know, a few notes from Agile and going, we're going to do a retrospective every two weeks to understand like what's working and what's not and what we can fix and even those little tweaks and changes. So I think a lot of the reasons I ask those how questions is because there's some folks listening, they go, I do that all the time. Like I just wake up and think, how could I, you know, get my day started better and make, you know, every little aspect better? And there's other, that others that need some kind of process to follow depending on what that, what that is.
- [25:55]
C
I mean, and the one thing I would just add is, is the leadership commitment to everything. Because we can have a process and we could have the ideas and we could have the investments. But so many times I see we have kind of like, oh moments as we get to year end and we have to complete the audit plan and then we lose all of the continuous improvement ideas. We really need to be thinking at the beginning of the year when we're budgeting and allocating time for our people audit plan, non audit plan work, that we're allocating time and investments to continue to push these ideas forward because they just fall off at the end when we're competing with completing the audit plan. We're going to lose all the momentum, both the momentum we've built, but also the incentives around the team.
- [26:38]
B
Yeah, the kind of governance over these that that is dependent on the CAE is huge. So I know empathetic leadership is something else we wanted to hit on. And I don't know Jeff, if you pulled this from like some kind of management book or if it's something you came up with, but it sounds like it. You said that soft skills equals power skills. When you said that, I went, that sounds like, you know, a tagline in a book or like even the title of a book or something. So is that, is that an original from you? If so, very nicely done. And regardless, what did you mean by that? And when I asked that what really what I'm looking for is if you could pick a specific soft skill as like the example to run with. Because there are so many that I feel like we could run with. But maybe for the both of you, if we could stick to, like an example of a soft skill and how that is a power skill. And then I hate when people do this in interviews, but I'm gonna do it. This is where you ask, like three questions at once. How do you develop that, that power skill as well?
- [27:36]
C
So, Trent, I appreciate the question. I appreciate the compliment on soft skills, equal power skills. If I was going to be really honest about it, I might have heard Jimena say that before I actually said it. So Jimena, maybe, maybe I'll let you kind of start on it.
- [27:52]
B
That's why you have to be on the, the pre recording, so we know who to give credit to.
- [27:55]
A
That's great. No, I don't know that I said that. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, technical skills, they're super important. But just like technology, any technology, it's only as good as the people using it and employing IT processes. Super important. Operating model, super important. But I talked about curiosity. I think that's huge. Social and emotional intelligence, I think that's huge. I know the world that we operate in pushed us away from interacting with human beings in the same way that we used to. So I think we need to be much more intentional. This is the kind of stuff that I'm super passionate about from a cultural perspective, is upskilling people in this way and actually giving them tools, trainings, techniques to hone those skills in a much more intentional way. I remember when I first started my career, empathy was one of those shiny new words that was, you know, getting brought into the workplace. As a millennial myself, I was excited about that. Some of the people that I was working for were like, you know, rolling their eyes, like, oh, my God, what is. What does this even mean? This doesn't belong at work. And it's actually been fascinating to see how that's evolved over the past, like, 14, 15 years. Empathy is super important, but empathy without accountability, there's. There's a bunch of literature out there, actually, research around this. Empathy without accountability is ruinous. Right? It'll actually create a lot of toxicity and low performance on a team. Because empathy is about your ability to feel what somebody else's feel, what somebody else feels. Your ability to put yourself in their shoes, which is great and useful, but not if you get stuck there. Right? So if somebody has a personal situation that disrupts their work and you're so focused on having empathy for them that you lose the accountability side of the equation, you're not going to be able to Sustain a high performing team and we need to be able to sustain high performing teams to solve for some of the talent challenges that we're having. We're seeing it in the industry. Talent retention is really difficult. Attracting high performing talent is really, really difficult. People are burnt out in multiple ways. I think that's going to be a continuous trend that we see just as the world evolves and evolves and evolves. But yeah, I think curiosity, empathy with accountability and social and emotional intelligence are super key.
- [30:43]
B
Like a use case, since you said that, because it's pretty top of mind. We had to put our dog down like four days ago. So when we had for like 16 years, it was like our dog, you know. And so anyway, it's been pretty brutal. I would say it's affected kind of the 9 to 5 work, you know, where it's just like, I'm not in the mood right now to do this. And so how would you. If you were like, man, if you were my boss and you see that, you know that like I've told you, you know what's going on, how do you empathize with that situation and then hold me accountable without me going, yeah, I'm not really feeling the empathy. If it's just like, hey, that's great, I understand how you feel, but you have to get this report done today. You know what I mean? Like, how do you have those conversations?
- [31:30]
A
Yeah, you kind of, you remember that you don't operate in a me state, you operate in a we state. Right. So you can give that individual space. I actually we had this exact situation happen with a team that we were working with. We had this big workshop. A lot of planning went into it, global attendance. And the leader of that team came in that morning. And we started the day as we often do in some of our workshops with take a minute to be human first. We're going to go around the room. How's everybody doing? Like one word answers. And this leader told us later that he was going to give a different answer, but he checked himself in the moment and he said, I'm going to be really honest, I'm having a tough morning. We just had to put our family dog down this morning. And I want to be very present for all of you that came here and I need to tell you that that's where I'm at. And that share from him was so powerful because what it did is if he had not shared that with everybody else and he would have shown up differently and tried to kind of fake it, people would have picked up on it without knowing why. And then the stories run loose, right? Or the perceptions run loose. Instead, what happened? People appreciated his honesty and his openness. They jumped in immediately and said, if you need to step out, step out. We got this. Like, we will lead ourselves. We understand what your vision is. We know why we're here. It was so powerful. And a lot of what we were talking about in that workshop is how do you lead your global teams in a new environment and into innovation? And that was a perfect example. So accountability doesn't mean I take a stick and I hit you with it. Accountability means we have standards. One of our standards is open communication. Transparency about where you're at doesn't mean everything shuts down around you. It means, okay, we see the bottleneck. We see the issue just like we do in our audit work. We see it, we call it out. We kind of rally around fixing. Right? So it's actually a team mindset. It's. I'm not in this alone. I'm in this with other people around me.
- [33:40]
B
All right, well, Jimenez got me a little emotional now, so thanks for that. I think this is the first on the podcast. We'll have to maybe pause and grab a Kleenex, But, Jeff, I'll throw it maybe a little bit more tactical to you. I know when it comes to empathy, and this comes back to the how. Maybe if you. If you've looked into it, like, how to become more empathetic, I know a lot of folks will. There's various ways you can, like, meditate to develop empathy for others, et cetera. Is there a, again, process, slash, mindset on your end of how to become more empathetic? Short of. I mean, for me, it was. I had a kid, and then I was like, oh, this is what everything is about. And so short of everyone going, well, if I got to be empathetic, I guess I got to go get a kid or something.
- [34:26]
C
Like, we all are different people, right? And all of us are going to flex in different ways. All of us have opportunities to evolve in certain ways. And I do think there's a thing around how do we kind of get people to the mean, and then those who are going to lean in more from an empathy perspective, kind of lean in more. I mean, to me, it's all about kind of the stories. It's all about people understanding the impact and the outcomes, and then people kind of figuring out that it's okay to also be authentic as well. I. I don't think it comes any other way from Experience. And I don't think it comes any other way from an experience. Doesn't have to be like, I've been doing this job for 20 years. That's not what I mean by experience whatsoever. What I mean by experience is just experience engaging with human beings. And I also think empathy comes with taking care of yourself. I mean, you know, the conversation you and Jimena were was just having, like, yeah, I'm not going to be my best self right now. And I may not have the ability to be empathetic because I'm just trying to get myself through a day right now dealing with what I'm dealing with. And so kind of also kind of recognizing that as well. But if you're kind of able to take care of yourself emotionally, physically, socially, et cetera, I do think that that allows you to kind of come into work and kind of show up in a little bit of different way. I don't think there's an answer, a direct answer, Trent. I think we all need to go a little bit on our own journey. But I do think when you hear the impact you've had on people, and I do think when you kind of hear the stories and people kind of also coach you and say, hey, you could have handled that situation maybe a little bit differently. You didn't have to give the person a hug, per se. But you know what? And part of it also, to me, it comes back to also critical thinking skills, like, how are we being reflective in our question asking, how are we starting with. I understand kind of what you're saying. How do you kind of pause? How do you be comfortable not having the answer? I don't have an answer for how you feel better. If you had to put your dog down that this week, that's horrible. And you're going to go through an in and out and up and down on that. And by the way, you're probably never going to be 100% from it. You're going to learn to live with that, being a part of who you are, but it's never going to be not part of who you are. And again, I just think hearing these stories, learning how to just engage with human beings, it's just part of the evolution that we're all going on.
- [37:03]
B
All right. I'm going to appreciate it a ton. Covered a lot of good stuff. I really appreciate how we can hit the how from you guys also, but anything else that you want to leave the audience with?
- [37:13]
A
Yeah, we. We kind of touched on culture a little bit, but I would probably want to End there. Right. For me, I think for everybody, culture exists. Whether you're intentional about it or not, whether you work in an office all the time or you work remotely or not, it exists. So, you know, Jeff kind of got into this a little bit in his last response, but culture is made by humans and the connection between humans. So if there's anything that I would ask any internal auditor, whether you're the CAE or you're an intern on the team and just starting your career, connect with other people on your team, tell them who you are, tell them the stories of your life, share your interests, connect with them as human beings, and you will lean into and actually create the culture around you because of how you show up. If you don't kind of take that step to be the driver of connection around you and wait for others to do that for you, you'll find yourself in cultures that you don't want to be a part of and that you don't connect with. And you can't possibly perform well. Right. For yourself as a professional or for yourself in your personal life. So, yeah, connect, connect, connect.
- [38:25]
B
Perfect. All right, Jeff, bring us home. What would you want to leave the audience with?
- [38:28]
C
Yeah. First off, Trent, thank you so much for. For having us. We really kind of appreciate kind of your time and your energy around the profession. Look, I. This is going to be really nerdy. I think being an internal auditor is a privilege. I really believe it's a privilege. It's a privilege to show up, have people care what you think about what they're doing, even though you don't do the same exact job that they do. And so, one, I think remembering that, you know, our profession is a privilege, and I say that in a very endearing sort of way. And number two, a lot of what we talked about today, it's all about. It's a journey, not a destination. You know, we talked about some soft topics around innovation and leadership and whatnot. We're never going to get there. Right. And I'm just really excited to kind of just continue to go on the journey with the profession, learn from the people we meet with. And, yeah, it's a really cool spot. And I think this profession is at an inflection point. And with Gen AI and whatnot, I think we have a really, really cool opportunity. Opportunity to redefine what this profession is going to be over the next 1, 3, 5, 10 years.
- [39:38]
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, 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.
- [40:11]
C
Thank you all.
- [40:12]
B
Have a great one.