How does the brain of the auditor and auditee work? Management Drives provides insight.

Management Drives is an analytical technique for providing insight into drives and understanding what motivates individuals and groups. This makes you aware of your own drives as well as those of others. Everyone looks at the world differently and reacts to situations in a certain way. What gives you energy? Or what do you dislike? This is different for everyone. Even auditors have different drives.

This clarifies why sometimes an audit report is sent out without any problems and other times there is a whole lot of "hassle.

On Sept. 19, twenty-five members of the IIA PAS group attended ARC People in Hilversum and gained insight into their drives. In open and interactive sessions, we discussed each person's drive profile. Management Drives uses a language with six colors, uniquely represented in a matrix. Each color represents a style of leadership or group culture. Each profile has do's & don'ts. You might not expect it, but internal auditors have very diverse drive profiles.

The outcome of the ARC event: What motivates and energizes you differs from how others experience it. This difference can be very large.

This sounds like an open door. Yet we quickly tend to make assumptions for the other person. You may find an audit report excellent and maximally focused on improvement; the recipient may see it as meddling and disrespectful of hard work. This difference can occur as early as the inclusion or omission of one sentence in the introduction. Or going into "social talk" at length in a conversation, or leaving that out.

Therefore, the most important lesson is: Make the effort to understand your interlocutor's motivations. Communication will run more smoothly and you will become more effective as a result.

The Management Drives analysis is also part of the Intervision for CAEs program. In this program, CAEs come together with the goal of discussing challenges.