Story 299

The Head of Risk at USCC likes to say she was trained by great managers. The results haven’t shown up in how she develops her own people.

For years, she has harbored a repeat bully, harasser, and discriminator in her group — shielding her from any accountability, any consequence, any scrutiny. The reward for years of Anti-Harassment policy violations? A promotion to MD.

Why? Partly because she is fundamentally out of her depth on the actual substance of Enterprise Risk Management and what regulatory compliance demands of the firm. In her own words, in an internal meeting, she has stated not understanding the substance of her function’s core work.

Unable to stand on her own two feet, she needs someone in place who is willing to do what she can’t — and the bully obliges.

The newly minted MD cannot align stakeholders, cannot work through credible challenges as the three lines of defense model requires, and cannot be bothered to learn the talents of the people she manages or meet with them to discuss personnel issues. Positional power and the ivory tower are her comfort zone. Engagement is beneath her.

So problems are eliminated instead. “At will” employment and mass layoffs are the tools she reaches for when employees become inconvenient witnesses to her failures.

When your own position is built on sand, you aren’t incentivized to look at the foundation you created.

No amount of performative rapport with senior management during dedicated events undoes the damage inflicted on people by her MD.

In a risk management function, it isn’t just poor leadership. It’s a control failure. The Head of Risk cannot hold her MD accountable without indicting her own judgment. So she doesn’t.

The people charged with seeing risk clearly cannot afford to see it in themselves.