How to Engage Regulators

Wow. I just read a new McKinsey & Co. white paper that’s almost insightful enough to make me forget how annoyingly reluctant the firm’s PR team is to return calls from all but a handful of media outlets (almost).

The white paper, “Managing Regulation in a New Era,” is a must read for corporate directors and the C-suite, executives who set GRC strategy for the organization. The paper describes three approaches companies may employ in their efforts to engage regulators.

First, companies can maintain an arm’s-length, often adversarial relationship (limiting communications to responding to official requests and legal instruments such as challenges and appeals. Second, they can seek to establish “constructive engagement” with regulators – disagreements will inevitably crop up, but the objective is to maintain open communications and foster trust between the two parties. Third, companies can build collaborative partnerships with regulators.

The co-authors (who, interestingly, are based in Brussels and London) describe the first and last approaches as extremes and argue that neither is optimal. The better approach is constructive engagement; the rest of the six-page paper lays out ways it can be developed.

Now, if only McKinsey would engage a tad more constructively with me, I’d interview the paper’s authors for you…