S1:E13 | Avoiding the Compliance Officer Burnout

Welcome back to The Securities Compliance Podcast! In the final episode of Season 1, we begin by discussing recent remarks from SEC Commissioner Peirce regarding the Game Stop situation and how it might impact the industry moving forward, as well as a warning from securities regulators to help raise awareness about the threats of social isolation and investment fraud.

For our feature interview, we welcome in former NSCP Board Member Rob Tull for an in-depth conversation focusing on the stress and demands inherent in being a legal and compliance professional that can lead to personal and career burnout, and what you can do to reclaim your sanity and energy, and even increase your creativity for problem-solving.

Finally, we’ll wrap up today’s show with another installment of the What’s On My Mind segment, where we do a deep dive on newborn babies, sleep deprivation, and compliance.

Headlines

Commissioner Peirce Reaffirms SEC Mission to improve the way markets work and to make them work for more people in Light of GameStop
SEC, NASAA, FINRA raise awareness regarding social isolation and Rrsk of investment fraud

Interview

Demands of being a legal/compliance professional can lead to personal and career burnout
Understanding the causes and impact of stress
Managing the challenging expectations of compliance professionals.
The fallacy of stress
Stressful environments and the impact on decision making
Getting comfortable with risks and deep water survivors
Best practice recommendations to stay grounded and increasing your creativity for problem-solving

What’s on My Mind

Newborn babies and the notion of banking sleep
Acclimating yourself to a stressful or challenging environment
Training your compliance program to perform at its best

Quotes:

“Stress is actually a form of a threat response.”

“Deep water survivors are the kind of people that if you were at the beach, they seem like the crazy person that swims way past out the breakers and you're just like “Where are you going? You’re going to drown.” And what I found in people that are like that is that they have an equation for risk which basically says my risk of a problem exists in the first 10 feet of water. Everything else below that is irrelevant. If I solve the top 10 feet of water I'm not drowning, so it doesn't matter how deep the water is. And so that got me thinking about in risk solving...you get so wrapped up in the details that you forget the fundamentals, which is if I do these core things at the top—and again if I just rely on compliance principles, not necessarily the specifics of the rules, but if I know my principles, and I can nail my principles down—then I shouldn't have to worry about how deep the risk is, if I can do the basics, I will survive. It might not be pretty, but I'll survive.”

“So what I found for me is when we're stressed out, we're running on depleted resources. And not only that there's a burnout factor, and it's like it's a question of “What are you willing to lose in the process of burning out?” And, we have to, we have to be willing to step out of that situation.”

Resources:

Compliance in Context