I’ve spent over 30 years working as an auditor, manager, and executive in the internal audit industry, including nearly 10 years running my own internal audit and risk management consulting firm. 

I’ve parlayed the techniques, skills, and strategies that I teach into a sizable net worth.

In other words, I’ve eaten my own dog food - I’ve done what I’m recommending that you do, and I’ve proven that what I teach works.

I’m confident that if you fully implement what I’m sharing with you, that you can achieve similar results.

 A Story of Two Interviews

I want to tell you two stories of actual interviews I went on early in my career. The two stories will contrast.

As a junior auditor I tagged along with an auditor who had been there for years. He was an auditor for many years, then was a manager, and then a few years out from retirement, he didn’t want to put up with all the nonsense related to being a manager and was just operating in a senior auditor role.

In any event, we were going to interview a C -Suite executive. The executive had a reputation as a mean, difficult old guy with a low opinion of internal audit. Neither of us had met the guy before.

After we were kept waiting for a ridiculously long time, his assistant guided us into his office where we exchanged handshakes and offered a seat. That’s when, we’ll call him ‘Bob’, did his thing.

While Bob was in the process of sitting down, he looked over and noticed a stuffed armadillo sitting on a table nearby. The armadillo was representative of where the old guy came from: Texas. Bob immediately started to ask questions about the armadillo.

Bob started asking him about what the story was behind the armadillo. He commented about how it looked fascinating and  how it’s not something that you see every day.

Well, at that point the cantankerous old guy perked up. He became excited; had a big smile on his face and started telling us all about the armadillo; the story behind it and so on – the details of which escape me at this point because it happened years ago and frankly, I don’t really have much interest in armadillos; especially his particular armadillo.

In any event, he went on for perhaps 10 minutes with Bob egging him on with follow-up questions: the what, why, where, when, sort of thing. The once grumpy executive was more than happy to keep talking.

When that played itself out, Bob could sense the old guy was getting near the end of his tale, and pivoted seamlessly into discussing the topic. You might say that the pivot was armadillo part two, because Bob started telling the guy what a unique way or approach the guy was using in this particular area of his department; complementing him and noting the accomplishments that the executive had achieved. To make a long story short, the executive ended up opening up his books, if you will, about his department and the issues that we were interested in. He actually had some of the same concerns that we had, and helped us better understand it. I think the executive would agree, that when this audit was done, we’d provided some real value to him; value that he wasn’t getting from his team.

The bottom line is that we were going into an interview with a known, difficult auditee and due to Bob’s unique ability to interview, we were able to turn into success, what 99% of all other auditors who’d faced him were not able to do.

This was an eye-opening moment for me. It showed the potential of how things could be if I took the path less traveled; if I thought outside the box and did things differently than I was taught and the way everyone else was doing it.

I mean I’d been on many interviews before with other senior auditors or audit managers.  They were done by the book.  You know, cold, impersonal, jump right into pointed questions, everyone on the defensive, everyone leaving annoyed.  I just thought that was how it was done. I was fortunate to find out otherwise. 

Here’s another story. It’s about an interview I attended some months before I went on the interview with Bob. 

I tagged along with a relatively new audit manager, to an opening conference with a C-Suite executive. That executive had a reputation as being all business, but fair; less difficult than the other 'armadillo' executive.

When we were escorted into his office, the audit manager immediately sat down and launched into some very direct questions about things that they thought were going wrong in that executive’s department. The interview immediately became confrontational. The audit manager wasn’t going to be bullied. So, the audit manager reacted by trying to exert their authority, to which the executive didn’t take too kindly. You know, something like “as Internal Audit, we’re charged with finding the truth, and we’re given total authority to obtain anything we want…”. 

 The audit manager continued to try to ‘exert her authority’, and continued to piss off the executive until it escalated into an abrupt conclusion of the meeting.

The meeting eventually ended with the executive telling us he had to get to another meeting. At least the audit manager had the good sense to excuse themselves at that point. Everyone was pissed off.

The result of that meeting was we got no useful information from the executive, but we annoyed him to say the least, and made it difficult for any other auditor to go in there and try and deal with the guy. Our team struggled to get any cooperation at all during the audit; not just from the executive, but from anyone on his team and in his department.  In fact, we had damaged the reputation of our internal audit department, perhaps for years. The audit manager was clueless. They hadn’t realized what they’d done; never thought about how it could have been handled better; everything was the auditee’s fault.

I remember thinking to myself: Is this what I signed up for? What an embarrassment. There’s got to be a better way.

These stories are meant to contrast the different interviewing styles in perhaps an extreme way. And in my experience, extreme is probably the correct characterization, in that the majority of interviews that I attended with others,  tended to be more like the audit manager’s interviewing style.

I only came across a handful, or less, of people with the interviewing skills and approach of someone like Bob. I often wondered how much more effective our audit organization, or any organization could be, if they had, all things being equal, only people with the interviewing skills of a Bob.