If you're like me and decide you're going to play in the financial services space, then the playbook we all agree to play by are the government mandated regulations. It's not always fun but it's what we signed up for. In some cases, organizations go into this game kicking and screaming like a petulant child while others accept the challenge and look for ways to navigate their business despite all the regulation. Which one are you?
Culture plays a major factor in which way you decide to play it. Here are three strategies you can use to help shift your culture to one that owns regulations instead of regulations owning you.
1) Do a Culture Audit - You need to establish where you are before you can move to where you want to be. Work with your executive team in understand what is the vision for the company and how the executives look at their own risk appetites. This will help you understand how quickly the organization intends to move. Bottom line: If the executives aren't on board, you've got an uphill battle. Find a influencer within the organization to back you up.
2) Set Goals and make them SMART! - Once the background work is understood, now its time to set goals on where we want to be culturally in a reasonable timeframe (6, 12, 24 months). But try you're best to make your goals SMART rather than goals with no real bite to them. SMART goals stand for goals that are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Actionable
- Reasonable
- Timely
I assure you, this is not easy to do but by including others (like that influencer perhaps?) to assist you through it, setting goals can work and be achievable for your organization. Something like this:
"To implement all of our consumer compliance projects within our project management system to help with consistency and managability within the next six months."
Notice I kept the goal small-ish (only consumer compliance projects) as well as something that we really could do. This is a great starting point!
3) Use Metrics to track success - Now that you have these really great goals, use metrics to track the progress of each. Take the goal above...each month you could report that you've implemented 5 of the 40 regulations required to meet this goal and what the overall timeline looks like. This will show success back to executives that this is something we can actually accomplish!
Shifting any culture isn't an easy thing but with the right strategies in place you move from reactive to proactive in no time flat!
