More than a prestigious title or hefty pay with fancy perks, leadership is a choice.
In the accounting industry, it’s a choice to step up and find solutions to important challenges that have baffled many accountants for years.
These include finding skilled accountants and motivating them to stay; staying up to date on regulations that change fast; and advising your clients so they’ll adapt in an uncertain economy and grow.
Accountants who lead firms influence the health of businesses, as well as the individual career prospects of the team members they lead. The more they grow as leaders, the greater their impact on the lives of others.
Here are three ways accounting leaders can step up.
Get clearer about what you want your business to do
Michael McAllister is a CPA and Registered Tax Agent who has worked in accounting for more than 30 years, advising small and medium enterprises and providing services related to self-managed superannuation funds (SMSF). He leads Great Accounting, a firm based in Melbourne, as its managing director.
Completing the Emerging Leaders Course, Michael said, gave him more clarity.
“And that meant freedom. It meant that I could see what I wanted my business to look like. I could make changes and make decisions. If you can design what you want your life and your business to look like, and it’s good, that’s going to flow onto your leadership.”
“That’s going to flow onto your people.”
Leaders are responsible for helping everyone understand:
- Why the business exists
- Where the business needs to go, by when
- How it’s going to get there
- How each team and each individual contribute
- How well the organisation is doing—what key results to measure
Marcus Buckingham, author of “Love + Work” and “First, Break All the Rules”, wrote: “Effective leaders don’t have to be passionate. They don’t have to be charming. They don’t have to be brilliant. They don’t have to possess the common touch. They don’t have to be great speakers. What they must be is clear.”
“Above all else, they must never forget the truth that of all the human universals—our need for security, for community, for clarity, for authority, for respect —our need for clarity, when met, is the most likely to engender in us confidence, persistence, resilience, and creativity.”
Create a culture of learning
Despite his wealth of experience, Michael showed he remains open to learning when he completed the course. And that’s a powerful example leaders can share with their teams.
“One of the topics in the Emerging Leaders Course was Your Personal Purpose Statement. Well, I’d never thought about a personal purpose before. It was always about the business’ purpose, the vision and mission statement,” Michael recalled.
“I said to myself, ‘What do I really want?’ And I wrote down, ‘I want to be happy; I want to be positive. I want to care. I want to share that and not expect that back in return.’”
Leaders help their teams tremendously when they “create the space for learning,” authors Herminia Ibarra, Claudius Hildebrand, and Sabine Vinck advise in their Harvard Business Review article “The Leadership Odyssey.”
“Carving our regular time for reflection is a simple way to speed up your progress, capitalize on small wins, and learn more from your inevitable setbacks. But this sort of daily exercise works best if you also periodically pause to contemplate the big picture.”
The Emerging Leaders Course takes place over seven weeks and helps you:
- Understand what has shaped you as a leader.
- What frameworks can help you deliver feedback or have challenging conversations effectively.
- Manage your time and plan your actions better.
- Build a high-performing team.
- Learn when to coach and how.
How are your people skills?
Develop other leaders in your firm
Even if you’re many years away from retirement, developing the next generation of leaders in your firm is a step you’ll need to take.
Your managers who currently head specific practice areas will need to complement their technical skills with leadership training. It will help if you and other senior leaders in the business define what qualities you want to see in your younger team members and emerging leaders.
Author Steve Adubato advises one of the 15 largest accounting firms in the U.S. on leadership and executive development. He observed that the most effective leaders in the firm were the ones who, despite their full schedules, found the time to help managers and junior staff members pass their CPA Exam.
“Great leaders understand that motivating their team members takes a lot more than simply telling them, ‘You need to pass your CPA exam’ or every once in a while, encouraging them to do so,” Steve wrote in his book “Lessons in Leadership”.
“What that really takes is sitting down with team members to find out what stands in their way, what obstacles and challenges they face, and whether any of these obstacles have to do with time constraints arising from their work on current engagements with clients.”
Be ready to ask for help in developing your firm’s next generation of leaders.
Courses in management and leadership
Not everyone may choose to lead or learn how to step up.
But those who do will need a training and development plan that reinforces their strengths and helps them overcome any weaknesses. Some experienced accountants, for example, will need to learn how to sell so they can win the new or additional business the firm needs.
A course like Emerging Leaders will benefit your firm’s candidates for senior roles.
This facilitated course runs for seven weeks at two hours each week and will have two more cohorts in 2023. These cohorts will start on 1 August and 3 October.
Find out more about the Emerging Leaders Course today.
Emerging Leaders | Ab² Institute of Accounting (ab2institute.edu.au)
