ASQ CQA – 3 Auditor Competencies Part 3

5. 3C Conflict Resolution – Part 2

Here in this lecture we are looking at a formal model of conflict resolution which is Thomas Skelman model of conflict resolution. So before we look at this model, let’s look at two underlying dimensions of conflict. So when you have conflict, there are two things. There are two conflicting needs, there are two conflicting views, there are two conflicting perceptions.

Now these perceptions are the views or the thoughts are of auditor and audit in our context. Now these two views are my interest versus your interest. And when I say your interest, your interest is the interest of the audit. My interest is the interest of the auditor. So we need to have a balance between my interest and your interest, the interest of the auditor and the interest of audit. And forget about auditor and audit. This model is applicable to any situation where there is a conflict.

So conflict has two parties, two parties have different interest. And this is what we are talking in the conflict resolution model. So my interest is interest about myself and this is also assertiveness. Assertiveness is when I assert my interest and your interest is the concern for others. And the concerns for other is also called as empathy. Now here we need to balance between empathy and assertiveness and that’s what this model shows. So let’s look at that model here. So this is the model here. In this model you see five areas, five ways to deal with conflict. And these ways are competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding and accommodating. So this model is based on two axes. On the x axis we have empathy. On y axis we have assertiveness.

And as I earlier said, empathy is taking care of other party. So on the left side of empathy, this is low empathy. Low empathy means I have less care about other party’s interest and this is high empathy. Here I am highly concerned about other party. Assertiveness is about myself taking care of my interest. At the bottom of this, this is low assertiveness. Here I’m not asserting much here, I’m not pushing more for my interest. At the higher side this is high assertiveness. So based on this we can have four quadrants. Let’s talk about these four quadrants and then we will talk about compromising later on. Starting with the bottom most, which is avoiding.

Avoiding is on the lower side of empathy and on the lower side of assertiveness. Empathy is other party interest, other party wins. Assertiveness is I win. So low on I win and low on other party wins. That means I lose, you lose. So this is avoiding where both parties lose. And we will come to these in more detail as we go further. Coming to the second quadrant, which is accommodating. Accommodating is high on empathy. High on empathy means I am taking care of other party. So that means you win and this is lower on the assertiveness. This means I lose. So accommodating means I lose, you win. Similarly when we come to competing, competing is you lose and I win. Here I am high on assertiveness and low on empathy coming to the fourth quadrant which is collaborating. In collaborating you win, I win. This is high empathy and high assertiveness. I am highly interested in my interest and I am highly interested in other parties interest as well. So both parties will win.

When we are talking of collaborating and in the middle is compromising. Compromising is the middle ground. Let’s talk about avoiding. First in avoiding you lose, I lose. So that means here in avoiding you are not pursuing your own concern nor you are taking care of other parties concern. So in a way what you are doing is you are avoiding the conflict situation. So in that case both of you lose. None of the parties gain from avoiding a conflict. So when you are talking about avoiding as a strategy to deal with conflict resolution, basically what you are doing is you are diplomatically stepping aside the issue or postponing the issue for a better time or simply withdrawing from a difficult situation. This is avoiding. Sometimes this could work. So all these strategies could work in different situations. So this was avoiding coming to accommodating where you win and I lose. So here I am taking care of other parties interest but I am sacrificing my own interest.

So here what you are doing is you are neglecting your own concern to satisfy or to help other party. Here it is basically a self sacrifice. You are sacrificing your interest and taking care of other party’s interest. So basically this is an indication of generosity, charity or let’s say just giving up or helping other person and not caring about your interest. Sometimes you might have to do that as well in case of conflict, when you have less power, other parties has more power, you have less strong case then you just accommodate that. The third strategy which we want to talk here is competing. In competing it’s basically I win and you lose. Basically here you are taking care of your interest. Your focus is your own personal interest and you don’t care or you care less about other parties interest. So here you might want to use your power to win for your own game.

You might be in a superior position because you have stronger facts, stronger things supporting you or you are a higher ranking person or you are up in the hierarchy of the organization, whatever it is, where you have power and you want to use that power to take care of your interest. Basically in that case what you are doing is you are competing. So this is the third strategy to deal with conflict. The fourth strategy is collaborating. Collaborating is a win win situation. Here you win and I win. So what you do in collaborating is you work with the other party help in finding out a solution which is mutually agreeable to both parties which is mutually beneficial to both parties. You take some time. It might require some more time when you’re doing collaborating. So take that time. Find a solution which is good for both parties. So these were four conflict resolution strategies depending on who wins and who loses. Compromising is the middle ground of everything here you are not focusing too much on yourself, gaining too much or losing too much and same thing for other party also you are not interested in other party to lose or to gain too much from that. This is the middle ground situation where you might want to compromise. This might not be as good as collaborating where both parties win. But here what you are looking at is okay if we are not winning, if both of us are not winning but then let’s not lose as well. This is what you will be looking at in compromising.

6. 3D Communication and Presentation Techniques

In the topic of auditor competencies, we are basically looking at some soft skills which an auditor or the audit team leader needs to have. In the previous lecture we talked about conflict resolution skills and how to use these skills in an audit process. Now, coming to the next skill, which is communication and presentation techniques. In an audit, communication and presentation techniques are important because that’s what you are doing in an audit. You are communicating with auditing. The way you communicate basically will help you in achieving the objective of the audit. Here you can make the audit successful or you can make the audit fail, depending on the way you communicate or present. Before we talk about the audit scenario, let’s look at the communication model here. In communication model you have a sender and you have a receiver.

And this is a very general model of communication. So when the sender wants to send some information, that information needs to be encoded. Encoded in form of the text which is written on the paper, encoded in terms of the voice which I’m using right now. In whatever way you want to convey this information, the information is encoded and then it passes through a channel. And that channel could be, let’s say email. The channel could be the paper which is presented to the receiver. Or the channel could be the voice channel or the visual channel which you are using right now, looking at my video and listening to my voice. And then once that message goes to the receiver, the receiver receives that and decodes that message. In decoding, the receiver understands what this message is and there is a good chance that message could get distorted when it is getting communicated from the sender to receiver. So here in this picture, if you see the message which was being sent was a hexagon, the six sided box and the receiver received a square which is a four sided box. So there is a good chance that whatever message you are conveying could get distorted. And this is what you need to take care of. And how do you take care of that? You take care of that by feedback.

So if you ask Oddity a question and Oddity responds to that, then you give feedback. Feedback will be the way you understood this. That basically makes sure that you got the right information. So feedback mechanism is important to make sure that the message is not distorted. And when this message is being conveyed, there will be noise. Noise in terms of the sound. The noise which you can hear around you when you’re listening to this video. Or noise could be some other non physical things as well. Noise could be distraction. The noise could be when sender or receivers have something else in their mind, they are thinking about something.

Noise could be in the channel. So this is a general model of communication. Now coming back to the context of auditing. How does these things apply in case of auditing? So, when we talk of communication, there are various ways to communicate. The communication could be the verbal or the oral communication, where you ask a question and then you get response to that question. And then there could be nonverbal communication as well. And nonverbal communication is the facial expression, the body gesture, et cetera. So that will also convey a lot of information. So, when you are auditing someone and the auditing is responding to your question, you don’t just listen to the words which are being conveyed, look at the facial expressions, look at the body gesture and see what other information those things are conveying, those nonverbal channels are conveying. So as an auditor, you need to get used to nonverbal communication as well. And the third form of communication here is the written communication. So these are the broad categories of communication. So, now coming to presentation, so I’m sure you would be doing a lot of presentations in your work environment in case of auditing, mostly you do presentation in the opening meeting and in the closing meeting. In the opening meeting, as a lead auditor, you convey what all is the scope of the audit, what is included, what’s not included, what’s the plan, those things are communicated.

During the opening meeting, you present that. You also convey how you will be classifying audit findings and so many other things you present in the opening meeting. Similarly, in the closing meeting, you convey the result of the audit, what all was good, what all was not good, where improvement could be done, what are the nonconformities, what are the categories of those, etc. So you make presentation in the opening meeting and closing meetings.

Now, here are few tips which are based on my own personal experience. So, when you do presentation, most of the times you use PowerPoint or Keynote as a software to make the presentation, put it on the screen and you talk about those points. In opening and closing meeting, when you are doing this for second party or third party audit, you are doing in some other place, in the place of auditing, in the factory, in the plant, in the location where your audity is. So make sure that when you have to make these presentation, make sure and check with the audit whether they have equipment for the presentation such as projector and which is available in the conference room. So make sure that you check that beforehand. And it is not uncommon that projector might not work, something might happen and projector is not working. Your slides are not being shown on the screen.

So whenever there is a possibility of presentation for which you will be using projector, make sure that you have a hard copy as a backup option, some hard copies which you can distribute during the presentation if the projector doesn’t work. This has happened to me more than once another important thing which you need to understand is that in opening and closing meeting, some of the participants might not be in the meeting. They might be calling in. So they will call in using the phone or using webex or some other media. So as an auditor or lead auditor, make sure that you are aware of these. Someone might be needing to call in or use webex to attend this meeting from a remote place. Let’s say the senior management of auditing is not immediately available to physically attend this meeting.

They might want to attend this meeting from other side of the world. They might be on a tour, so they want to call in using webex, using phone call. So make sure that you are aware of these and make sure that you provide the link or the phone number to those people well in advance who need to call in. These people can be from auditor side, from auditing side, or the audit client whosoever it is need to be aware of that and provide all this information well before the meeting. So these are some of the tips or things which I want to share based on my experience. If you have your own tip related to presentation, make sure that you post that in the question and answer section where others can also learn from that whatever made your opening and closing meeting presentation successful or what all went wrong in the opening or closing meeting, share it with the team. Some other perspective can come out of other participants in the course. So when it comes to communication, another important thing is listening. As an auditor, your key role is to listen. Listen to people, ask a question and then listen to that. Understand that here are a few tips related to listening. And these are related to active listening. Remember that hearing is not equal to listening. What you hear doesn’t mean that you are listening to that. Listening means basically you are understanding what is being told. So here are some tips which are maintain eye contact. So when you are talking to auditing asking a question, make sure that you make eye contact with the audit. Give some indication that you are understanding what is being told to you. So that audit can keep on telling or ask questions. If you have any question, keep your mind open. Because when you are auditing a different organization, different organizations do things differently. Don’t have a preconceived idea that this is how things need to be done, this is how nonconformities need to be recorded, this is how the equipment needs to be checked.

If you have some preconceived idea, that’s your idea. Because when you are auditing someone else, they might have a different way of doing things. So keep your mind open. Pay attention to non verbal cues as well. And this is what I talked earlier as well, verbal and nonverbal communication. So pay equal attention to non verbal communication as well, so that you are interested in listening and that you can do by nonverbal cues, by nodding your head and giving some indication, smiling or whatever way you want to convey that, okay, you are actively listening to what is being told to you. Don’t generally interrupt when the audity or the other party is speaking and when you have chance, when there’s a gap, when there’s a pause, when there’s an opportunity. Make sure that you ask questions, you clarify things, but don’t interrupt when the other party is speaking, when the audit is speaking, let audi speak. And then at the end, you can ask whatever clarifications or questions you have. In the model which I was showing, where we have a sender receiver, we talked about feedback link as well. And that feedback link is basically conveying or confirming what you understood.

So if the audit is telling that I pick piece number one and then I pick piece number two, and then I put a bolt in that and I join that, this is what audit is telling you, then you might want to reconvey this to auditing. So, okay, you told me that you pick piece number one, piece number two, and you bold them. Then you can ask some question. But then how do you select the bolt, whatever question those could be. But the intention here is restate the message which you listen to. You might want to take notes as well, because as you are listening, as an auditor, you need to make notes. Whatever parts the audit is explaining to you, note down the part number, note down the sequence number, whatever numbers or whatever details are there, make sure that you keep note of that.

And one of the important thing which I have learned here is the use of flowchart. Let’s say when I’m doing audit, my audit says that he or she picks piece number one. So I keep on drawing a flow chart. Let’s say, okay, this one is piece one, and then next one is pick piece two. Next one is bolt. Next one is assemble. The next one is checked. So as Oddity is telling me the information, I make sure that I keep on making notes. And these notes could be in terms of the text, or I prefer those to be in terms of this flow chart. That basically helps me in understanding the process as well. So these were a few things related to communication.