Compliance lessons are life lessons.  Compliance professionals are, by their nature, optimistic people. They see challenges as new opportunities to strive closer to an ideal.  Compliance professionals live in the shadow of the ideal — some may call it the compliance curse.

Like the famous artist curse, compliance professionals suffer from an internal struggle — the obsession with perfection, an effective compliance program, and the stark reality that companies often ignore the need for an effective compliance program under a deluded perspective that ethics and compliance is a cost center and not a value add.

Compliance professionals face an unending challenge to their idealism. As a result, compliance professionals are forced to compromise. 

Effective compliance professionals often have terrific interpersonal skills, and the ability to build alliances needed to achieve certain outcomes. Relying on these skillsets, compliance professionals work tirelessly to gain internal consensus.  If successful, and when the stars are aligned, compliance professionals achieve their objective.

What I just wrote — it is a fantasy.  As all compliance professionals know, there is always a countervailing force, one that reflects internal politics, turf wars or fear of change.  An organization rarely operates in lockstep.  Resistance is par for the course and compliance professionals learn to accept this reality.

In the end, compliance professionals have to learn the art of compromise — advancing closer to an objective while not necessarily achieving what may be needed.  Instead, compliance professionals have to accept that sometimes compliance cannot attain the perfect, that the ideal may be elusive.

A seasoned compliance professional learns to compromise but, interestingly, the compliance professionals never lose the true burning desire for the compliance ideal — an effective compliance program. In this respect, compliance professionals adapt so that they can prevent the frustration of failing to meet the standard of perfection.  Compliance professionals have to learn this balance to avoid self-doubt and self-imposed demands and pressure.

The internal dynamic for chief compliance officers is really only a question of degree.  With the support of the board, the CEO and senior management, CCOs can make significant improvements.  However, CCOs will always face countervailing forces.  The question often turns on the degree of change.  With leadership support, CCOs will achieve more than they would otherwise be able to do.  Nonetheless, there are always limits — the challenge for CCOs is to accept the reality of compromise, to know when to accept the compromise, and when to keep pushing. 

Compliance accomplishments are often achieved on a path of effective compromise.  Learning when and how to pick and choose your battles is the real way that CCOs work.  And like everything else, it is a life lesson.