Working with regulators

At Kiddy, we talk to a lot of business leaders. They all share a concern about regulation. But many don’t think about it rigorously enough to manage regulatory relationships effectively or with clarity. We decided to take a closer look.

You may be a HR professional charged with helping your organisation and its leaders respond to increasingly challenging stakeholders. Or a Regulatory & Compliance executive trying to balance external demands and internal pressures. Or a CEO who must satisfy regulators and other stakeholders while maintaining forward momentum in the business. Whatever your role, you are likely to be as interested as we were in the insights gained from our interviews with executives who have direct experience of stakeholder issues. The details are in our new white paper which you can download here.

At a headline level, we found that business leaders will often:

• start out with an adversarial mindset towards regulators, feeling fear, mistrust, and lack of respect, as well as a major concern that the regulator will damage their business
• try to think about how they can outwit the regulator, bully them, or get a step ahead
• ‘shut up shop’ and try to question the authority of the regulator.

These approaches, though understandable, aren’t helpful or even intentional. And the problem is compounded when regulators are caricatured as bureaucrats or lacking in commercial understanding.

Based on the research – and our experience – we believe that a leader who is intentional and less adversarial in their stance is more likely to create a positive outcome for their business. That’s why we’re sharing the results of our interviews, and we hope you enjoy them and find them useful.