By Janannee Harroo
for the 2024 Risky Women Writing Competition, presented in partnership with Bovill Newgate
Explore effective Risk and Compliance management through self-mastery. Discover how knowledge, honesty, sharing, and silence can resolve conflicts and enhance leadership in the FinTech world. Learn to turn challenges into opportunities for growth and collaboration.
Accurate Risk and Compliance (R&C) management has never been an easy job after the great 2008 financial depression – that’s what I was being told. However, I refused to accept this statement at face value. See, I am a millennial; I have worked in FinTechs nearly a decade now, and so challenges are opportunities yet to be solved. In my perspective, managing a Risk And Compliance department is not difficult per se as long as there is a clear understanding of the roles and responsibilities of individuals. However, one of the main challenges lies in the lack of powers of self-mastery of leaders in the position of managing this department.
I have witnessed so many conflicts between the Commercial and the R&C departments. Most of them are due to ego clashes, misunderstanding of requirements, misinterpretations of guidelines, uncalculated risk decisions, lack of accountability of individuals, and so on and so forth. After years of experiments and from my observations, here’s the secret ingredients I used to resolve any conflicts I handle as a R&C professional. I call it the perfect mastery of the self through:
- The power of knowledge
- The power of honesty
- The power to share
- The power of silence
The word ‘power’ often has a negative connotation. For instance, power abuse or corrupt power. However, ‘power’ in this context has positive meanings that make one elevate and help one to
remain on the seat of self-respect.
The power of knowledge
Knowledge and accurate understanding of the self and situations clear self-doubts and confusions and resolve inner conflicts. Through knowledge and reasoning, answers to questions are half answered. Spend no more than ten minutes dwelling over problems, but have a solution-driven mindset. The most important thing is the power to change by applying and using knowledge. Therefore, knowledge in itself is not powerful, but knowledge when applied brings clarity of mind. For example, if I feel trapped in the ‘imposter syndrome’ feeling, seek and apply knowledge to boost my confidence level by remaining authentic to myself.’
The power of honesty
Speaking and accepting the truth as it is requires courage and self-respect. Accepting that I might not always be right and recognising the talent of others tends to go a long way. I admit sometimes this may be hard to do as I need to let go of trying to control situations and people. I once made a mistake in judgement by miscalculating the risks associated with a client, and consequently it cost the business over a quarter a million pounds. I would lie if I did not think of justifying my mistake by blaming it on another due to unclear data given to me. But accountability was key, and honesty helped me explain the situation to my CEO and board.
The power to share
I was taught from an early age that the more I share and give, the more I receive. The corporate world changed this learning for me. If knowledge is power, then why do I need to share it with others? I have witnessed leaders climbing the career ladder by being a proud, selfish person. This is a misguided reality. Knowledge only gets better by sharing the experience with others. Sharing begets more sharing. For example, I have implemented a monthly one-hour session with my team to specifically share their learnings for the month. This has helped my team to open up about the failures they overcame and created a sense of trust among my team.
The power of silence
One of my ex-managers once told me that if people do not understand your words, your silence will speak louder than your words. I never understood this statement until I experimented with it. I once had to face a situation where I was repeatedly declining a salesperson’s client type for the same reason again and again. Each time I reject the application, a new application of similar attributes will be presented to me using different excuses (for instance, a promise of huge monetary value to the business if I were to accept the application). One of the steps I took for this particular scenario is that I stopped prioritising the request and, hence, stopped replying to repeated questions. When I was challenged on my method, I only answered that my time was more valuable than the answer to the request, and I failed to understand why people ask the same question over and over and expect a different answer. The lesson was learnt: I never received similar applications from the commercial department, as the answer was loud and clear.
Self-mastery is key for the successful management of the R&C department. Some people take years to master this, and some are born leaders. I had to learn, unlearn, and relearn many lessons in order to get these above four powers right, and guess what? I am still learning today.