It’s Time to Join the Diligence Revolution – Great Diligence for All!

The Core Values

To be an organization that reaps the benefits of great diligence the organization must communicate, educate and insist that diligence is everyone’s job. This means that diligence is not siloed into the legal, audit or compliance department and pulled out when these departments are need for their expertise.  

In a diligent organization people understand the concept of “day to day” diligence as it relates to their own activities and responsibilities. They understand it because it is communicated, taught and rewarded. “People” needs to be defined broadly. It is not enough that employees understand the concepts and responsibilities of diligence. Contractors, service professionals, consultants and vendors also need to understand your diligence requirements and their diligence responsibilities to you.

Checklists and written rules and guidance are important, but they don’t overrule need to be flexible and continually exercise critical thinking and ongoing action. A major element of good diligence is the ability to be flexible. You have to follow the information where it leads you – not where you want it to lead you.  

People who pay “lip service” to diligence construct a process where diligence is reduced to a list of requirements that are rigidly followed and “checked off” as they are completed. This mechanical way of performing diligence means you will miss something important. Setting up a “check the box” diligence process as a hedge against regulatory criticism or worse, regulatory reaction is a recipe for eventual diligence failure.

Instead, diligence processes and strategies must emphasize the need to:

• Think
• Act
• Think again
• Act again

Repeat this as many times as needed – until you obtain clarity on your diligence questions.

Diligence is a culture and the leaders must promote a culture of diligence. This means that:

• leadership must define, communicate and demonstrate the diligence values of the organization
• educate the organization as needed
• provide adequate resources
• require open, transparent and truthful dialogue around diligence work
• value the work by rewarding diligence work

Think about it, when an organization wants a great sales team it hires the salespeople with proven records of success. It provides them with the best products to sell and plenty of resources to find and convince customers to buy. Then the organization rewards the salespeople for their success. In fact, sales people may be some of highest paid individuals in an organization. This is understandable because of the value that they bring to the organization.

The same is true for diligence. If you want to attract diligent people who do good diligence work, you need to demonstrate that the organization values diligence, will provide the resources needed to perform great diligence and when it is performed it is rewarded. Diligence needs to be valued as highly as sales because great diligence is also of great value..

There is no such thing as sloppy diligence. If diligence is performed in a sloppy manner then by definition it is not diligence. Diligence requires the mindset and actions of a diligent person. I call them PICKIE.

How do you achieve this? 

• By communication of standards and values
• Education and training on the mindset and the practical aspects of performing diligence
• Providing resources
• Rewards and acknowledgement

What if people are making errors, omitting process steps, giving up too easily? These issues also need to be acknowledged and there needs to be a process for assessment and correction

Diligent people are an and asset to an organization. If you do not value their contribution they will leave and someone else will have the advantage of their diligent work.

People are the reason you have a diligent company. Perhaps at time in the future it will be possible to perform diligence without people but right now, successful diligence requires people.

Technology is a benefit and increasingly in certain industries a requirement for proper diligence. But software, computers, mobile devices, the internet, even artificial intelligence (at this point) are still just tools of diligence. Tools that assist people in doing the diligence work.

People still perform diligence. With the rapid advances in technology, especially artificial intelligence, it is easy to lose sight of the value of people. But people play a unique role in the performance of diligence. After all, people bring the:

• ethics
• creativity
• principles
• judgement
• experience

that define great diligence. Don’t forget people fuel the discoveries and inventions that advance the technology.

Think back, when was the last time you were comfortable telling your superiors, bosses, board or your regulators that a diligence failure was the responsibility of the technology? I can’t imagine that you tried to do and if you did that it was accepted. People bear the ultimate responsible for the outcomes and failures of the technology.

People are at the core of all diligence, people are the stars of diligence.

Join the Revolution

Do you really want to pass up the opportunity to have a diligent organization? Can you afford to miss out on the advantages you get with great diligence? If the answer is – no – then answer yes to the call for a diligence revolution and use these core values to begin the process of changing or improving what you have today.

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