In competitive sports, having good bench strength means building a team of first-string and reserve players who possess the skills and confidence to step up to any challenge the team may face. Developing these qualities takes planning and effort well before the game begins. It means knowing your players well enough to leverage their individual skills and talents even as they discover and develop new ones within themselves.

While the corporate sphere is replete with sports analogies, I think the concept of building bench strength is one that really resonates, especially when you are talking about the internal audit function. At a time when organizations are focusing, more than ever before, on managing resources effectively, internal audit directors know only too well that every one of the positions allocated to them has to count. If one of the occupants of any of those positions is impeding the game due to unaddressed performance problems or other issues, it means problems for the rest of the team – including errors, poor morale, and unplanned voluntary turnover.

To win, whether competing in a sporting event or running an audit department, you need a strategy and a conscious commitment to build bench strength:  a team of people with the skill levels and experience that will empower them to step up to whatever challenges may come.

Why Does Bench Strength Matter?

There are many reasons why building this kind of bench strength is vital to an effective internal audit department. Foremost is the fact that auditing is a professional service that depends heavily on sound judgment. Such judgment is not inherent. It is the product of knowledge and experience. Cultivating sound audit judgment means coaching less experienced auditors to think consistently in a manner congruent with auditing principles and the organizational culture.

Bench strength is a clear prerequisite for creating a viable succession pool. However, it also provides the potential for cross-training and back-up support in case of loss or injury to a key performer. In addition, a systematic strategy for bench strength development satisfies the individual auditor's career needs and goals. Auditing is, and probably always will be, a title-oriented, upwardly mobile discipline. Most professional auditors want to have a clear sense of what they need to know and do to move up within the function and organization, and garner recognition.

Finally, it is important to recognize that bench strength is necessary to simply ensure an audit function is effective on a daily basis, not just the achievement of long-term goals such as succession planning. The fact is that not everyone is going to be able – or want – to ascend to a leadership position. You need capable individuals with effective leadership abilities, but you also need a team of players with the skill sets and experience in the right positions to build a superior and consistently effective audit function. While every audit team needs a leader, it also needs people who excel at and enjoy “ticking and tying” in order to execute the audit plan.

Conversely, there are costs in the failure to develop audit bench strength.  The primary one is that  work quality and client relationships will suffer, especially the important Audit Committee relationship. Without an effective complement of critical thinkers on your team, clients are likely to perceive that you are not focusing on the right areas and asking the right questions – and they might be right. They may not have confidence in your findings and may not perceive the audit department to be an effective business partner. Ultimately, this means a less respected, less productive audit function and a lot of wasted time, money and effort.

Challenges to Developing Bench Strength 

An audit is a very task-oriented, time-intensive process. New auditors are indoctrinated and coached to get the audit done within the time allocated in the annual audit plan. Audit supervisors and lead auditors quickly realize that exceeding the hours allocated for an audit creates negative repercussions.  With such a heavy emphasis on tasks and time, any focus on people development often gets short changed. This means that professional development such as training and coaching is handled on an ad hoc basis, if at all.

The reality is that technical skills, while important, are not enough to yield a consistently successful audit department or to develop bench strength that will enhance audit effectiveness and lay the foundation for succession planning. Bench strength development must include an emphasis on the acquisition and demonstration of interpersonal, critical-thinking, and managerial skills. Demonstrations of critical thinking mean being able to answer questions such as:

• What should be audited?
• What do the test results mean?
• What is the opinion of the area’s internal controls?
• What is an acceptable corrective action plan and time line?
• How should results be communicated to engender client support instead of antagonism?

Transitioning from Contributor to Manager

A key metric of effective bench strength is that auditors are able to make the transition from the role of the individual contributor to one of managing the work of others. In this context, “managing the work of others” means much more than issuing review notes. It means taking responsibility for each audit team member’s skill development and making time to talk to each audit team member about his/her performance. This can be a difficult transition, since the in-charge auditor for a particular assignment needs to demonstrate strong planning and interpersonal skills while still making sure that the technical and administrative aspects of the audit are being accomplished.

Another tough transition is expanding one's ability from managing one project at a time to overseeing several projects at once. This may be the greatest career development difficulty for auditors who possess insufficient people development or delegation skills. To compensate for the inability to get others to perform as required, the ill-equipped in-charge auditors often redo the work other audit team members should have performed because this is most expedient in the short run. It makes it possible to meet the audit’s time deadline, and it avoids the negative repercussions exceeding budget triggers. Unfortunately, within organizations possessing little or no formal bench strength development and coaching, these in-charge auditors have no way to learn a more effective and efficient management approach, and consequently reach a premature career dead-end as a result of being labeled “unsuitable for management.”

Best Practices for Bench Strength Development

To prevent such career-limiting situations and ensure that the audit department is indeed encouraging effective bench strength, it is important to identify within individual team members the specific audit management competencies required. Some of the behaviors are:

• Demonstrates creativity, synthetic thinking and innovation
• Demonstrates strategic thinking
• Possesses business and technical acumen
• Has executive presence
• Demonstrates sound judgment in decision making
• Acts as a role model for attracting and developing talent
• Demonstrates an array of effective situational leadership styles
• Uses strong communication and presentation skills
• Demonstrates the ability to provide effective, useful 360-degree direction and feedback (upward to audit department and senior management, laterally to peers and internal clients, down to team members)
• Sets a learning climate within the team
• Displays initiative
• Delegates effectively
• Coaches and develops talent, i.e., people feel they can learn from this person
• Establishes and monitors career development, i.e., people feel they can progress with this person

To inculcate these behaviors, make sure that a written new hire orientation program exists and is followed. This program should be adapted to suit the needs of auditors at various levels, e.g., new college hires, internal transferees, experienced audit professionals. In addition, provide newly promoted in-charge auditors with three-fold lead auditor training that addresses the technical, administrative, and managerial aspects of the position.

Other best practices for bench strength development are:

• Assign newly promoted managers a mentor. These mentors need not be auditors, especially since it is important for auditors to have the broadest possible exposure to all other aspects of the organization. However, all those positioned as mentors should receive some training and coaching in the role.
• Ensure that the audit team is provided with the tools, training, and etiquette for working in a virtual, technology-saturated environment. The goal is to create a climate in which auditors can interact productively with others on a consistent basis, augmented by mutual respect and clear communication. Be sure that success metrics for an effective audit encompass more than simply completing projects on time and within budget.  Redefine success as producing a high-quality audit within expected parameters while at the same time developing the talent of the audit team members.
• Institute bottom-up project evaluations at the end of each audit to complement the traditional top-down ones that emanate from the audit manager and in-charge auditor to team members.
• Create a climate of learning within the audit organization to keep your technical approaches evergreen and vibrant.
• Hold audit directors and managers accountable for bench strength development.
• Accept the reality that building bench strength is an ongoing process – not a one time affair.