The key qualities of a superior Chief Compliance Officer:

1. Lateral Thinking
Most compliance systems are set up to address regulatory violations head on.  It is the attenuated violation – the A that itself was permissible but which led to the B that was not – that is often the undoing of even the most careful companies. The superior CCO sees not only the B’s, but the C’s and D’s that sometime follow as well.

2. Fine Tuning
CCO’s face a daily wall of information as companies track and distribute increasing amounts of detail in new formats. Intelligently tuning to those frequencies is effective; listening to the entire spectrum just to be thorough is not.  The superior CCO dials through the static to monitor the channels containing the useful information.

3. Respectful Familiarity
CCO’s are like beat cops — trying to build trust and relationships with the residents, but knowing that their obligation to enforce the law will necessarily trump even the deepest of these relationships.  Like a beat cop, the CCO must develop a level of familiarity with the individuals in the company in order to know what is going on, but at the same time signal that enforcement of the rules prevails over personal relationships. 

4. Practical Rulemaker
The CCO translates the sprawling technical code of the regulatory agency into everyday rules clear enough for even new employees to follow.  If the rules are too general, there will be gaps in detail that will be second-guessed; if they are too specific, they will be ignored as impenetrable.

5. Technological Savvy
Technology has multiplied the volume of information being tracked about a company’s operations, but at the same time technology has provided new tools to automatically sift through that information.  Knowledge of what to look for is only half the battle; configuring the technology to extract that data on a daily basis is just as important.

6. Plugged In
Companies are made up of people, not data and systems.  A hundred hours of data analysis may not be as effective as a single phone call from an employee who wants to chat about something they find troubling. 

7. Gifted Translator
When problems arise, it will be up to the CCO to address them with employees, with management, with outside counsel, and with the regulatory or law enforcement agencies who become involved.  Each of those conversations may be about the same set of facts and rules, but each occurs in an entirely different language. 

8. Flexibly Immovable
Every company needs to take some sensible risk to stay in business.  A CCO who treats every potential rules violation as a crisis will be quickly viewed as a hysteric who needs to be circumvented rather than consulted.

9. Corporate Diplomat
While every company is unique, companies in the same industry regulated by the same agencies have much in common.  While these companies may compete for business, their CCO’s share common problems in self-policing.  The superior CCO stays in contact with the CCO’s of other companies in the industry to keep up with the new best practices.

10. Benign Skeptic
In corporations, wrongdoing is often committed by professionals with large responsibilities and commensurate salaries.  Treating everyone as a suspect because it is impossible to tell from appearances who actually may be worthy of suspicion is an unacceptable, offensive and ultimately counterproductive strategy.  The superior CCO respectfully gives everyone the initial benefit of the doubt without losing focus on the objective facts that will indicate when that benefit should be withdrawn.

11. Emergency Leader
Emergencies can be difficult to recognize even when in the middle of one.  Even if the emergency is recognized, the inertia of the daily routine and an unwillingness to accept that something has gone very wrong will frequently blunt a full and prompt response.  The superior CCO will not only know when to pull the alarm, but will lead to insure that the right people and the right response are mobilized quickly.

12. Egalitarian Enforcer
While junior clerks can sometimes cause disproportionately sized problems for their companies, the larger problems are often caused by those with larger powers and larger responsibilities.  The CCO’s responsibility is to the company and its shareholders, not to the individuals who may be managing it at any given moment. 

13. Player Referee
A CCO can often be viewed as Dr. No – the person who will find a reason why some inventive new strategy cannot be implemented.  It is easier to say no than to find creative ways to get to yes.  The superior CCO gains the trust of colleagues by working as a team player to find solutions while never relinquishing the role of referee.

While this list may make it appear that the superior CCO requires a certain touch of schizophrenia, to achieve this balance the superior CCO just requires a an uncommon ability to stay focused on the essential rules and values the company must enforce and not be distracted by the details and petty dramas of day to day business. It is a rare and elusive skill.

This article is available in full at Corporate Compliance Insights.