The CAE Bottleneck

As a professional who places strong emphasis on soft or human skills, my favorite example on how to build leadership across the team pertains to stakeholder relationships. Through my work on external quality assessments and other internal audit engagements, I’ve often seen the CAE as the only person on the team with consistent exposure to senior leaders and key business partners. Understandably, this isn’t by intention but rather the result of years of building institutional knowledge, trust, and authority across the organization.

However, being the sole strategic advisor can become overburdening for CAEs. Leaders are often copied on multiple emails, pulled into key meetings, and expected to weigh in on a variety of issues. When there is a backlog of requests for input, CAEs may become too distracted to focus on strategic work and department problems. Simply put, this “bottleneck” forces many CAEs to spend more time reacting to the organization rather than leading their team.

Beyond overloading department leadership, when all connection flows through a single source, it also limits the growth and visibility of the rest of the team. It can leave stakeholders with a narrow view of internal audit since they have fewer opportunities to build trust and working relationships with anyone beyond the CAE. Ultimately, it can render the department fragile.

Delegating Relationship Management Tasks

The CAE should spend some time reflecting on whether all of their touchpoints are truly CAE-level work. In many cases, the CAE will realize they are not. Department heads turn to the CAE when they need clarity, assurance, or a subject matter expert on risks and controls. If the team understands the organization, internal audit’s role, and the CAE’s perspective on risk, they can step into these conversations and represent the CAE effectively.

Sharing the responsibility for relationship management across the audit function gives department leadership the capacity to focus on higher-value priorities like emerging risks, audit planning, leadership advising, and stronger audit committee communication.

Delegation also allows the rest of the team to build relationships across the organization and learn to operate with influence. If the team only engages stakeholders during walkthroughs and testing, they may become strong at execution but remain weak at influencing others and providing advisory input.

Developing a Delegation Plan

Delegating relationship-building doesn’t mean casually handing off executive relationships. Trust takes time to build, and simply shifting a relationship to someone else doesn’t automatically transfer that trust. Without the right support and approach, there’s also a real risk that credibility can be weakened through missteps in how those interactions are handled.

This is best achieved by intentionally creating structured, real-world opportunities for audit team members to build credibility, strengthen communication skills, and represent internal audit with confidence. In practice, that can look like audit leads running check-ins and key meetings, with coaching and quick debriefs to make leadership development measurable and repeatable. This exercise helps junior auditors build confidence in presenting a point of view and in confronting pushback.

At one of my previous employers, leadership skills were reinforced through a simple but effective expectation: Managers, seniors, and staff regularly met business partners for coffee chats to learn the business and build relationships before issues ever surfaced. Done well, this type of program expands the CAE’s capacity while strengthening the team’s presence and the function’s credibility across the organization. The key is creating a culture of psychological safety so that the team can learn through moments of mistakes and errors — acknowledging missteps quickly, correcting course, and improving without fear.

Sharing relationship management tasks across the team increases engagement, a sense of ownership, and stakeholder-facing skills that can improve the quality and impact of auditors’ work. The result is a more accessible, scalable internal audit function with greater credibility and deeper relationships across the organization.