Effective conflict management and handling difficult conversations for internal auditors

Overview

At every stage in our internal audit careers, we are likely to have to face and address difficult situations and challenging conversations that can rapidly escalate into conflict if we aren’t careful. It comes with the territory, many may say. Chief audit executives face these situations, and so do their team members, whether audit manager or trainee internal auditor. 

For example, our internal audit findings and recommendations often challenge existing practices, which can make our clients feel defensive or misunderstood. Scope and access issues, such as limited availability of personnel or data, can create tension between us and areas of the business we are reviewing. Finally, an audit committee chair may want us to review an area of the organisation that we perceive to be low risk, and we may not want to use our limited resources on less critical areas.

However, there are techniques and strategies we can all certainly employ to reduce the number, nature, and negativity of these situations.

Conflict management skills are vital in internal audit because they can help us navigate disagreements, maintain professional relationships, and ultimately ensure audit effectiveness and positive outcomes for our organisations. Effective conflict management can help address these challenges and enable us as internal audit to add greater value, insight and foresight in the volatile world of emerging risk that we are in today.

This course will equip you with the skills and confidence to conduct your internal audit assurance and advisory work with courage, and to equip you with a range of strategies, techniques and tools to navigate a better (and easier!) path through the difficult situations and conversations we can regularly find ourselves in. It may even help you outside of work!

Target Audience

Heads of internal audit, internal audit managers, senior internal auditors and internal auditors with diverse levels of experience will all benefit from this course and its coverage.

Course Content

This course will take you through the following learning aspects:

• What is conflict and why does it happen?
• Internal audit, key stakeholders and conflict
• Ways of resolving conflict
• Coping strategies
• Negotiation, empathy and compromise
• Team conflict
• Bullying and harassment
• Difficult internal audit conversations
• Dealing with difficulty and being courageous
• Additional resources and websites

The course includes facilitator input, practical situations and experiences, short practical discussions and a small number of interactive, task-based exercises to reinforce the methods you have learned and build upon existing knowledge.

John Chesshire, CFIIA, QIAL, CRMA, CIA, CISA, has over 24 years' experience working in the internal audit, risk management, business improvement and governance fields. John is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute in the UK, an Independent Internal Audit Committee Chair, and was Chief Assurance Officer for the States of Guernsey until the start of 2021. He has delivered many well-received courses to IIA Belgium in the past, as well as to many other European Institutes of Internal Auditors. 

His other recent clients include FTSE listed companies, multinationals, central and local government, law enforcement, charities, professional services companies, and international organisations such as NATO, the OECD, and UN Agencies. He is a principal examiner for the Institute of Risk Management and has been a visiting lecturer in the Governance and Assurance Hub at Birmingham City University. 

He loves internal audit, is a great friend of IIA Belgium and particularly enjoys working in new and emerging areas of assurance interest.