Risk Management Is All About Pain Relief
By Daniel Clark
Risks, especially if not fully understood, seem to irritate Senior Management. As a risk manager we often want to tell Senior Management to take two aspirin and call us in the morning. Unfortunately that is not an option because management’s pain is also our pain.
So what is the answer: surgery: out patient: prescription medicine? Those could work but maybe just buckling up and going for the ride is the only option. So is there something we can do to make the inevitable risk ride more confortable?
Yes, there are a few things we can do to help management with their pain and also maintain our own risk sanity.
Recognizing Challenges
First we should recognize that there are challenges. Often risk events emerge quickly, sometimes without any alert or alarm. Other times we are working on known pain points that still impact our business. And there are always the standard risk management governance items that require attention. Conflicting priorities are the biggest challenges facing many risk managers today.
Couple this concern with the fact that there are also time constraints for responding to emerging risks; often limited resources to assist in the management of risk events; and finally, there always are competing deadlines that impact our ability to retain risk sanity.
Once we recognize and quantify the challenges they don’t seem so daunting. Through certain behaviors and processes we can enhance risk governance, strengthen risk management and ease their pain, (excuse the blatant rip-off from Field of Dreams).
Try these steps and if your pain is not reduced you can always contact us for a house call.
- Prioritize activities based on immediacy. For example, have a stack of “Now”, another stack of “Tomorrow”, and another stack of “As Time Allows”. Prioritization or segmenting into groups makes the task easy to grasp and manage. Remember, it is easier to eat a watermelon slice by slice rather than all at once. Slice up the risk into edible parts and you remain sane.
- Define the actual risk and quantify its’ impact to the organization. Quantification helps management accept the prioritization you establish for resolution. Even if management overrides your decision they will also understand what is not being dealt with because of their priority and at what cost.
- Once you have defined and quantified the impact of the risk, prioritize for attack. A full assault seldom bears positive result. By prioritizing you will receive the curing effects of small wins that will carry you to the final and complete victory.
- Empower your team. The more others can help with the workload the more workload can be managed and issue resolution is often quicker. Also, delegation allows for you as risk manager to….
- Yep, this is the key component to pain reduction. More soothing than a gel and more affective than ADVIL, communication let’s management know that you are focused on their priority, progress is being made and if you need help they know that too.
- Monitor and update until the risk is resolved.
These six steps may not alleviate all the pain that we face from time to time but certainly will reduce it to a manageable level.
That being said there is one more thing that we as risk managers must do and do often. Reward ourselves: take a break, walk around the park, sip a coffee, take an extended lunch, do something just for you.
Whatever it is, dealing with pain points in risk management is what we do. Lets just do it less painfully.
Copyright 2021 by Z-Horse