3/31/2026 ● 1min 9 sec
Standardizing Risk Rating Language
When Audit and Enterprise Risk teams use the same labels to mean different things, it stalls decision-making. Join Andrea St. Pierre, VP of Service Delivery, as she breaks down how to align your rating systems by defining their true purpose—moving your team away from debating severity and toward taking action.
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Andrea St. Pierre, VP of Service Delivery:
How do you fix misaligned risk ratings?
It starts with being clear about why each rating exists in the first place.
Audit ratings are meant to drive remediation.
Enterprise risk ratings are to inform strategy.
They serve very different purposes, and they should not be used interchangeably.
Next, get specific about what “high” actually means in each case.
Not just the label, but the impact, the urgency, and the kind of decision it is meant to prompt.
Then make sure those definitions are shared and used consistently across teams.
When everyone understands what a rating is supposed to signal, leaders spend less time debating severity and more time deciding what to do next.
Alignment is not about adding to your process.
It is about using the same language so risk conversations move faster and lead somewhere.
