Ask the Great Women in Compliance Anything: Careers, Culture, and Programs That Last

Ethicsverse Day 2026 closed with its warmest and most personal session: an Ask Me Anything with the Great Women in Compliance. Hosted by Matt Kelly of Radical Compliance alongside Ethico's Nick Gallo, the conversation featured Lisa Fine and Ellen Hunt of the long-running Great Women in Compliance podcast, fielding crowdsourced questions on how to build a program, survive as a team of one, weather retaliation, grow a career, and stay sane in a profession that can be genuinely lonely. After a day of behavioral science, AI, and the DOJ, this session pulled the lens back to the human beings doing the work.

The panelists reflected on how far the profession has matured — from a rules-based, check-the-box discipline into one focused on why people do what they do and how to harness it — and agreed that the last mile of impact is human behavior. What made the session valuable was its candor: rather than presenting themselves as leaders who have it all figured out, Fine, Hunt, and Gallo repeatedly emphasized that everyone is still learning, and that humility, relationships, and community are the profession's real infrastructure.

Key Takeaways

Where to Start When You Build a Program

The standard answer is a risk assessment — identify where the organization's greatest risks live so you do not waste early effort on the wrong things. But Lisa Fine paired it with a listening tour, virtual or in person, to build credibility before you act.
The listening tour is a set of questions, not a lecture: what is your job, what do you see as important, what works well, what concerns you, and do you feel heard. The goal is to build trust so that when something goes wrong later, people remember you as someone who cared and engaged.
Ellen Hunt reframed the questions toward leaders — what do you need, what do you want — to reveal gaps and to understand what the business is trying to achieve, positioning compliance as a guide who enhances the business rather than disrupts it.
Nick Gallo, borrowing from consultant Ross Ronan, argued the single most important first building block is an enterprise-wide disclosure system, which — combined with the listening tour — opens the communication channels that feed a credible risk assessment and training plan. The recurring warning was not to boil the ocean or pull a risk assessment off the shelf.

Surviving as a Team of One

Hunt's counsel for the "team of one" was to make allies and friends across HR, marketing, and communications, and to do favors so others return them — because you will never get everything done alone, and colleagues have resources a one-person budget never will.
Fine stressed prioritization and the discipline of knowing what not to do, citing Kristy Grant-Hart: with limited resources you cannot chase every issue that comes through the door, so make deliberate, defensible choices about focus.
The panel reminded the many solo practitioners in the audience — some at surprisingly large companies — that they are not truly alone; the community is a genuine resource, and reaching out through channels like LinkedIn and events like Ethicsverse Day is part of the job.

You Are the Director of Your Own Program

Gallo offered a filmmaking metaphor: the same script becomes a very different movie depending on the director, and in compliance — especially as a department of one — it is on you to direct. There is no single right way to do the work, only best practices and principles to borrow from.
Expertise, he argued, is knowing what matters and what does not; like an editor cutting hours of footage, a compliance leader has real creative agency to shape a program around what makes the most sense for the organization.

Retaliation Against Compliance Officers Is Pervasive

Matt Kelly cited his own research report in which roughly 70 percent of surveyed compliance officers said they had experienced retaliation, with another 9 percent fairly sure they had — a striking figure the panel took seriously as an occupational hazard.
Hunt's antidote is to train the board and executives in advance on how to respond to bad news, rather than waiting for a crisis when leaders may target the messenger instead of the problem. She described a predictable emotional pattern — deny, ask who came forward, discredit them, and dismiss the message — that compliance must proactively break.
The panel recommended framing the compliance role before the bad thing happens: run a tabletop of a scenario like a senior executive caught in misconduct, and establish early that the compliance officer's job is to de-risk the organization and pursue a culture of integrity, not to be the problem. Fine added that if you are living in a permanent blame culture, that is information about the organization — and sometimes about whether to stay.

The Challenges That Made Them Better

Ellen Hunt recounted being pulled from an M&A legal role into compliance, and later into a chief audit executive seat, despite lacking the traditional pedigree — opportunities that expanded her world and, unlike drafting memos and NDAs, let her actually help people.
Lisa Fine described the cultural learning of delivering anti-harassment training in India, where answers to "what is harassment" ranged from serious crimes to sitting next to someone's spouse on a bus — a lesson in humility, in choosing the right messenger, and in adapting a message across very different cultural contexts.
Both returned to resilience: do not get too excited when the best thing happens or beat yourself up too much when the worst does. Invoking Ted Lasso's goldfish and the difference between baseball and brain surgery, they argued you can strike out often and still reach the Hall of Fame — and that perfectionism can paralyze a profession full of people who care deeply.

Nobody Has It Figured Out

A liberating thread ran through the session: the panelists insisted they have not mastered this, and that the podcast exists precisely to build community and learn together.
Gallo's framing was that the "dirty secret" — and the freeing one — is that nobody fully knows what they are doing; everyone is figuring it out in real time, which means you can too.

Community and the Great Women in Compliance Podcast

Fine traced the podcast's origins — started almost accidentally with Mary Shirley after a colleague dared them to launch one — and its evolution after 200 episodes into a roundtable format built with Ellen Hunt and others to keep serving the community.
The panel credited the profession's unusual lack of competition: unlike sales teams, compliance peers freely share what has worked and what has failed. The book Sending the Elevator Back Down, which Fine co-authored with Mary Shirley, captures that ethic of lifting others up.

Careers, Gender, and the Path Beyond CCO

Responding to a listener's observation that women may treat compliance as a career while men treat it as a stepping stone, the panel connected the pattern to the chief compliance officer often sitting outside the C-suite, subordinate to the general counsel.
Hunt argued the profession should treat the CCO like the chief auditor — with a contract, independence spelled out in the audit-committee charter, protection from termination without notice to the committee, and a seat on the executive team.
On where to go after CCO, the panel pointed to chief risk officer — a natural fit that, unlike general counsel, does not require a law degree — as well as board seats, and noted that highly regulated industries like pharma and oil and gas are more likely to elevate compliance into the C-suite because a license may depend on it.
Gallo urged practitioners to fight limiting beliefs and focus on usefulness at the individual level — marketing, communication, sales, relationship-building, and resource allocation are all transferable skills — citing a company whose CEO had previously been a compliance officer as proof the ceiling is higher than most assume.

Telling the Story to the Board

Having spent much of the session on listening, the panel turned to telling: the ability to deliver a concise, compelling story matters enormously when you may have only twenty minutes in front of the board.
The implicit lesson mirrored the day's behavioral-science session — know your audience, lead with what matters, and make the message land rather than drowning it in detail.

Closing Summary

The closing session distilled a decade of hard-won career wisdom into a few durable principles: start a program with a risk assessment, a listening tour, and an enterprise-wide disclosure system; survive as a team of one by prioritizing ruthlessly and leaning on the community; and inoculate against retaliation by training leaders on how to receive bad news before a crisis arrives. Lisa Fine and Ellen Hunt were candid about the profession's emotional realities — the loneliness, the perfectionism, the retaliation — and offered resilience, humility, and relationships as the antidotes. Perhaps the most encouraging message of the entire day was the simplest: nobody has it all figured out, the ceiling on a compliance career is higher than most believe, and the community that gathers at events like Ethicsverse Day exists precisely so that no one has to figure it out alone.