Do you want people to avoid you?

Yesterday I read a post in LinkedIn by Ekaterina Potemkina of Fluence, where she reminisced about the worst advice she was ever given in her career. (Fortunately, she never followed it!)

Some time at the beginning of my Quality Journey one of external auditors I worked with told me:

"When you walk into the office and see that people try to disappear or pretend to be extremely busy, so that you, maaayybee, don't approach them - that means you are doing your job right!"

Seriously? Is that how we want people to act around us?

Of course not! More to the point, it doesn't have to come with the job.

In all the years I audited, I never tried to make auditees suffer. I never tried to squeeze them just to make a point. But that didn't mean making the audits artificially easier, either.

My intent was always to say, Look, we both know we have to do this. So let's do it and make it meaningful. But it's like soccer: we can still be friends afterwards regardless which of us scores the goal.

One useful strategy that I learned was to look for issues that actually made a difference to the department's ability to achieve its goals. I'm grateful that I never had to work to a quota (shudder!). As a result I could afford to spend less time on topics that were just window dressing (even though every organization has some of these) and more time on basic operations. Naturally I had my share of misfires, like anyone else. But I think over the years I had fewer than I would have had with a different approach.

Another strategy, that I discussed a couple of years ago, was to be willing to work with the organization after the audit: to explain the findings, and to help rectify them. For external auditors, it is important to build a hard wall between auditing and consulting; but for internal auditors, that wall is not only sometimes impractical but often counterproductive. The choice depends critically on the subtle details of the internal situation, so you have to be attentive to those details: then you can stand aside when you are not needed, but step in diplomatically when you are. 

As for the "walk-into-the-office" metric? At one point our unit had eight offices or plants, and I did internal audits in all of them. And every time I walked into one [not counting my home office, obviously] I could count on someone waving to me in the hallway and calling out, "Hey, Mike! Great to see you. Wait—are you auditing me today?"

That's what you want to hear.