What happens when your compliance champion suddenly disappears? Todd Coshow and Adam Goslin explore the hidden risks of building a compliance program around one go-to person. From tribal knowledge and scattered evidence to undocumented processes and failed handoffs, discover why single-person dependency can derail your next audit. Learn how clear ownership, documented procedures, distributed responsibility, and a centralized source of truth can create a resilient compliance program that survives resignations, vacations, turnover, and the unexpected.
Episode Transcript:
Today, Adam, we’re gonna talk about a fateful day, and that is the day that your compliance champion leaves.
Every successful compliance program seems to have that one person who knows where everything is, understands every control, remembers every audit finding, and somehow keeps the entire program running and the coffee cups full.
But here’s the question, Adam: If your compliance manager quits tomorrow, would most organizations’ compliance programs survive? Also, why do so many compliance programs become dependent on one single person?
Adam Goslin:
I just had this visual of people running down the hallway screaming. It’s cats and dogs and da, da, da, da.
I think it’s a little extreme to go, would they survive? Well, yeah. There’s that expression out there, right? “Everybody’s replaceable.” That’s what they think.
It doesn’t mean… Now, could they be replaced? Sure. But at what cost is really the question.
Todd Coshow:
Exactly.
Adam Goslin:
Most companies kind of have that central figure.
Quite honestly, the main reason why for a lot of organizations that it ends up funneling down to this one person is that, at the end of the day, most organizations are managing their stuff manually.
There’s too much going on. There’s too many control owners. There’s too many hands in the pie. There’s too many assessors. There’s too many states this stuff can be in for everybody to go sticking their fingers in the midst of all of the tracking, etc.
If you’re using a manual system, then you’re almost forced into this notion. But not even almost forced.
For every single company that I’ve ever seen that has either completely manual or hodgepodge manual and internal systems, etc., it ends up eventually gravitating to that single individual.
The reason is simple. Organizations keep getting burned as they are trying to manage their programs.
Somebody went in there to go and make mass updates to their stuff. Let’s pretend we’re using an Excel sheet.
I go, “Oh, I need to mark these 10 things in this state.”
Inadvertently, the person that’s going in to make their 10 things update accidentally blasts 57 items in the process and overwrites their statuses, etc.
When you’ve got shared sheets, etc., it is not if you’re going to have a problem, but when or how many times you’re gonna experience a problem.
It forces organizations to move into this notion where they’ve got the one ring to rule them all, type of deal.
So you end up with that go-to person.
The other thing is that whoever that central figure was, they’ve learned a lot, right? Year over year over year.
It’s knowledge building that basically accumulates between their ears.
I’ve been through so many audits, and I’ve learned what the assessors are looking for and their feedback. I’ve got boots-on-the-ground operational experience of running the program, etc.
That person that’s at the center of the compliance efforts, they literally amass an unbelievable amount of data, information, experience.
It isn’t experience that this person could just poof, walk away, and somebody else is just gonna inherit it. It’s not the reality.
Over time, the knowledge, data, and information moves out of documented processes and things along those lines and lands up in somebody’s noggin.
