As a compliance specialist, even from a relatively junior position, you will be uniquely influential in your firm. On Episode 13 of The UNCOVER Pod I was joined by Amy Bell, the Chief Executive Officer at Teal Compliance, to talk about how you can manage your interactions with senior partners and effectively manage up in your role. Read on to find out what she said.

“The first thing for a candidate in that situation is to establish if the firm understands the implications of their risks. Often, the firm doesn’t understand the consequences. I’ll give you I’ll give you an example. There’s a lady that I used to work with who was a member of support staff. When she went to work at a new firm, she said ‘Oh, Amy, all of the support staff were invited out on the staff strategy away day. That’s never happened to me before. No one’s ever been interested in what I think about the strategy of the business. We talked about the strategy, did workshops, and went on a treasure hunt and to the pub afterwards – it was great fun.’ 

I said ‘That’s great! It’s forward-thinking and I can see the inclusivity. Make sure to get your input into that because you’re at the coalface, you’re the one trying to make these things work. It’s tough to get compliant working.’ 

It was great until they got their pay rises. A week later, she said, ‘Well, the lawyers got 7%. And we got 1%. He told me I was valuable and that my opinions mattered. Then he gave me a 1% pay raise, and he got 7%. So I’m right back where I thought I was, being unappreciated.’ 

I’m sure the firm didn’t mean to make her feel like that – in fact, they were deliberately trying to make sure she felt included and valued. However, they didn’t see the risks in how they distributed pay raises. When you start picking up on some of this cultural stuff, you’ll find that it’s not intentional. The business isn’t saying that compliance or regulatory fines are just a cost of doing business because you’re always going to get the odd one. Don’t worry, we’ll just save up for the fine. Most lawyers are not in the compliance space. 

Most managing partners or leaders of law firms are working on loads of competing things, and they often don’t know what’s happening to the compliance programme as a result of that. You need to get people to tell you where they are with compliance, and if you think that they’re not going to tell you the truth, you need to figure out how to get that from them. 

I’m interested in what everyone thinks at Teal. If you’ve got 100 employees, that is a lot to manage. But if you’re not doing that, you’re running the risk of having dissatisfied employees, winding each other up and getting upset. That is a recipe for disaster in compliance. People have to care about compliance to be safe because that’s what compliance is for. And if they’re grumpy, they aren’t caring about you.”

To hear more from Amy, tune into Episode 13 of The UNCOVER Pod here.