There is a scene early in The Godfather where a man comes to Don Corleone asking for justice. He has a problem and has tried everything. Nothing has worked.

The Don listens, then points out what the man has failed to understand: asking for help is about more than offering money. It is also about respect, relationships, and understanding the person you are asking for help.

The lesson extends beyond the film. Money alone rarely solves a problem, and throwing more resources at a challenge does not guarantee results.

Many of the organisational conflicts and disappointments I see in fast-growing companies happen when people fail to get the results they want and blame things outside their control. The regulations changed. The regulator was slow. The product team did not cooperate.

These explanations are rarely the whole story.

The root cause of many compliance failures is the inability to answer a simple question: What can I do, and what should I do, when so many things are outside my control?

Until a compliance leader can answer that honestly, the team will keep cycling through missed deadlines, finger-pointing, and polite but meaningless status updates.

Here are six lessons from The Godfather that compliance leaders can apply to their teams.

1. Stop accepting competing priorities as an explanation

“Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment.”

Most meetings about delayed compliance projects have a recurring theme: we are doing too many things at the same time.

It sounds reasonable. In practice, it can become an excuse that assigns blame to no one and offers no clear path forward.

The problem is not that teams have competing priorities. They do. The problem is when leaders use those priorities to explain missed deadlines without making decisions about what should come first.

If everything is a priority, the team has no clear direction.

Either reduce the number of things you are asking your team to do, or make a clear decision about what matters most and what can wait.

Every successful project involves trade-offs. The projects that get completed are the ones where someone makes those trade-offs explicit and holds the team accountable for the agreed priorities.

2. Replace project tracking meetings with meaningful KPIs

“Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”

This famous line captures the ability to make a decision and move on without unnecessary ceremony.

Traditional project tracking can become the opposite. Teams spend hours reviewing dependencies, documenting delays, and explaining why other departments have not delivered. When the project eventually fails, the paper trail is ready.

But documentation is not the same as project management.

Tracking should help leaders identify problems early, assign responsibility, and make decisions that keep work moving.

Instead of holding lengthy meetings that focus on what went wrong, use KPIs that track what your team is actually doing.

For example, track whether the team submitted required documents on time, completed internal reviews, responded to regulatory queries, and escalated blockers within agreed timeframes.

These measures give leaders a clearer view of progress and show where intervention is needed.

The goal is not to eliminate project meetings. It is to make every meeting useful enough to justify the time spent in it.

3. Design KPIs around actions, not just results

“A man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.”

The broader lesson is that how people spend their time reveals what they value.

Your compliance KPIs should pass the same test.

A KPI that reads “obtain regulatory approval by Q3” is a target, but it does not tell you what your team must do to achieve it.

Your team cannot control whether a regulator approves an application. It can control when the application is submitted, whether the documentation is complete, and how quickly it responds to follow-up questions.

Those are the activities worth tracking.

For example:

• Submit the complete licence application package by the agreed deadline.
• Respond to regulatory queries within ten business days.
• Complete internal compliance reviews before product launch.
• Escalate unresolved regulatory blockers within two business days.

These KPIs connect expectations to actions your team can take.

You can still track regulatory approval as a business outcome. The distinction is that you should not use an outcome outside your team’s direct control as the only measure of its performance.

When you build your compliance programme around actions people can control, accountability becomes clearer. You can assess what was done, what was delayed, and what needs to change without confusing effort with outcomes.

4. Keep performance management with the people responsible for the work

“It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.”

Difficult conversations about performance should not be delegated entirely to a process or department.

When a compliance manager struggles to address someone’s performance, the next step is often to involve HR. HR provides a framework, the framework creates documentation, and the documentation creates a process.

Those things have their place. The problem begins when the process replaces the conversation.

Six months later, the performance issue may still be unresolved, only now it has been documented more formally.

HR can support managers with policies, fair procedures, and guidance. It cannot take the place of a manager who needs to set expectations, give direct feedback, or address underperformance.

Effective compliance leaders take responsibility for managing their people. They explain what is expected, provide feedback when standards are not met, and follow through on agreed actions.

This does not mean making decisions without HR or ignoring fair procedures. It means taking ownership of performance rather than using process to avoid uncomfortable conversations.

Clear expectations and timely feedback give people a fair opportunity to improve. They also help managers address recurring problems before those problems affect the wider team.

5. Get to the bottom of problems when they happen

“The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, lies in its loyalty to each other.”

Loyalty in the Corleone family was never simply about telling the boss what he wanted to hear. Trust depended on people being honest about what was happening.

Startups need the same honesty, especially when compliance projects go wrong.

The explanation is often that the team is overstretched, the company is still a startup, or resources are limited.

Those constraints may be real. But they do not explain every failure.

Sometimes the problem is a poor hiring decision. Sometimes the KPI was badly designed. Sometimes a decision that should have been made months earlier was repeatedly postponed.

The only way to distinguish between these causes is to investigate what actually happened.

When a project misses its deadline, ask:

• What was supposed to happen, and what actually happened?
• Who owned each action?
• When did the team first identify the problem?
• What prevented the team from resolving it?
• Which decision could have changed the outcome?
• What needs to change to prevent the same problem from recurring?

These questions move the conversation beyond blame and towards specific, fixable causes.

It may be uncomfortable to address poor decisions or missed responsibilities. But if leaders keep accepting vague explanations for failures, they risk repeating the same mistakes under different project names.

6. Make decisions instead of waiting for perfect conditions

Michael Corleone’s rise in the family is often associated with his ability to make decisive moves at critical moments.

Compliance leaders can take a practical lesson from this: delayed decisions can be just as damaging as poor decisions.

Fast-growing companies rarely have perfect information, unlimited resources, or complete agreement between departments.

Waiting until every uncertainty disappears can leave important compliance work stalled.

The answer is not to make reckless decisions. It is to distinguish between decisions that require more information and those that can be made with what the team already knows.

If a product launch depends on a compliance review, define who has the authority to make the decision, what evidence they need, and when the decision must be made.

If another department is blocking progress, establish an escalation path and a deadline for resolving the issue.

If the team lacks capacity, decide what to deprioritise rather than allowing every commitment to drift.

Decisive leadership gives people clarity about what happens next, who is responsible, and when progress should be reviewed.

The offer you cannot refuse

Michael Corleone did not become the most powerful figure in the family simply by working harder than everyone else. His story is also about power, judgement, relationships, and the consequences of decisions.

For compliance leaders in fintech, the useful lesson is not to lead through fear or intimidation. It is to recognise the value of clear decisions, defined responsibilities, and honest conversations.

You do not need more status updates explaining why things are taking longer than expected.

You need decisions about priorities. KPIs that measure meaningful actions. Managers who take responsibility for performance. And a culture where teams can identify the real causes of failure and address them.

You cannot control every regulator, department, or external circumstance. You can control how your team prepares, responds, escalates issues, and learns from setbacks.

That is where accountability begins.

Want to set better compliance KPIs?

Learn how to build KPIs that connect your team’s daily activities to your compliance objectives.

Explore Yana’s free fintech compliance KPI training.

You will learn how to move beyond vague targets, measure the actions your team can control, and create clearer accountability across your compliance programme.