Leadership development for your accounting staff is an intentional investment. In both theory and practice, leadership encouragement correlates positively with job satisfaction, employee morale, work productivity, and even retention rates. If you’re an accounting firm owner, it’s imperative to utilise staff development strategies to cultivate leadership qualities for accountants.
Does Your Accounting Staff Really Need Leadership Skills?
Yes, they absolutely do. To build a strong and effective accounting team, firm owners should invest in skill building and character training for accounting firm leadership. Considering this, there are interesting findings from studies on businesses and workplaces that emphasise why leadership development is necessary for accounting roles.
Research tells us that good leadership within the team can lead to greater job satisfaction, increased productivity, and higher retention rates. Effective leadership positively impacts everyone in the firm, from your C-suite executives down to their managed departments and employees.
With this, we can safely say that investing in staff development for effective leadership in accounting can result in a more knowledgeable and more highly skilled workforce. Teaching advanced leadership skills allows your team to work more autonomously, execute tasks more efficiently, handle day-to-day challenges better, and drive organisational success faster.
The Psychology Behind Accounting Staff Development: The Expectancy Theory
Canadian psychologist Victor Vroom of the Yale School of Management posits that motivation comes from anticipated consequences or results. To kickstart accounting staff development, you should make sure that your team is aligned with your firm’s vision and mission.
If your firm and your staff are misaligned in terms of long-term goals, this could be a source of issues and concerns along the way. Some of the biggest possible impacts of this misalignment on your firm would be the seemingly unending internal conflicts. Meanwhile, your employees are likely to suffer from low job satisfaction, which will likely negatively affect your firm’s overall retention rate.
Building leadership in accounting firms means outlining expectations alongside providing adequate training and resources for your workers and recognising the achievements of your accounting employees. When your employees see the correlation between their efforts and the rewards they receive, you enhance their engagement and job satisfaction in turn. Ultimately, using the expectancy theory for leadership encouragement builds stronger relationships with your team members and drives improved productivity and morale within the organisation.
What Types of Leadership Skills are Needed for Staff Development?
Staff Development Ideas: Equipping Your Employees with Leadership Skills
1. Teach the Importance of Taking Initiative
Your team must start at some point – after all, it takes only one person to get the rest of the team going. Taking initiative is one of the salient leadership qualities for accountants. Projects and tasks are finished more efficiently if there’s one who gets the ball rolling and makes the rest follow suit.
Managing accounting teams with initiative means that you won’t need to give them a constant bump or push to do so. If there are pending bank statements and accounts to be reconciled, then your staff accountants will step up to the plate and do that task. If there are clients who need further assistance with their financial analysis, your team members will always be ready to take on this responsibility.
2. Encourage Taking on Bigger Roles and Projects
Leadership development for CPAs (or accounting employees in general) means going beyond their comfort zones. When developing leadership in accountants, it’s essential to teach them to be ever ready and prepared, allowing them to take on roles or projects outside of their usual scope.
Letting your employees wear larger hats significantly helps with staff growth and development – they grow from being specialists to generalists, learn responsibility and accountability especially for major projects, and get to practice skills that are useful to their careers (or when it comes in handy).
3. Approach Previously Untapped Departments
As Howard Schultz puts it, “Success is best when it’s shared.” The development or usage of cross-functional skills happens when a team collaborates with other departments. When managing accounting teams, firm owners should teach their members to occasionally leave their silos and learn the ropes from those in different subfields.
For instance, those in marketing who are assessing their returns on investment (ROIs) can consult with accountants, who are well-versed in calculating customer lifetime value (CLV). Another example would be the talent or human resources department seeking the help of the media/comms/marketing teams for more targeted, eye-catching job postings. Overall, good team management allows different departments to work together smoothly and seamlessly.
4. Ensure Teaching Accurate and Timely Communication
In any field, timing and accuracy are vital parts of any system. When building leadership in accounting firms, this includes dealing with the ATO/IRD or relaying messages the right way to their clients requires skills in conversation, negotiation, and overall PR. But more than technical knowledge is the timing – a good communicator in accounting should neither bore nor shock their audience, be they clients, firm owners, or employees.
Accurate and timely communication directly impacts how you liaise with key people for business dealings, and especially the success of how you deliver the company’s mission, vision, and goals to relevant parties. Excellent communication skills allow you to extract crucial information from employees, firm owners, and clients so that you can gauge where they stand and come up with improvements to your current business approach – in short, how well a leader communicates is crucial for effective staff development.
5. Impart How Authority is Essential
Authority figures (i.e. those in charge of managing accounting teams) serve as role models for junior staff members. When they demonstrate proper conduct, good decision-making skills, and adherence to ethical standards, they become the benchmark for accounting team management. Accounting employees learn to follow established protocols and seek guidance from experienced professionals, while collectively fostering a culture of accountability within the organisation.
When your workers understand the structure of your firm, they recognise chain-of-command dynamics, promoting teamwork and collaboration among them. Overall, teaching about the essence of accounting team leadership instills trust and respect for authority figures and cultivates a sense of professionalism and integrity among your employees.
6. Hire an Experienced CPA Business Coach
Staying ahead of the curve means learning from an experienced CPA business coach. Up-and-coming institutions like Topfirm are game changers, complete with playbooks and tools designed to help accounting firm owners with their growth plan, world-class trainers specialising in CPA business coaching, and an exclusive peer-led, accounting-focused community to boot.
Compared to other coaching programs, Topfirm doesn’t make you shoulder the risk –it’s committed to a different standard. The promise? Clients get a 100% return on the cost of the program after 12 months if they don’t achieve their target results. With Topfirm, you gain access to foolproof strategies in the field of accounting and take better control of your practice’s growth.
Can a CPA Business Coach for Staff Development Actually Teach and Build Effective Leadership in Accounting?
No road to long-term success is consistently smooth, but there are ways to prevent unwanted road bumps and achieve your desired results for your practice faster. Hiring an expert who knows the ropes in running accounting firms helps you achieve just this – specifically, a dedicated growth coach offering deep insights and expert guidance on complex business challenges, as well as providing actionable strategies for long-term success.
But will a CPA business coach suffice for a holistic transformation? Business coaching is a crucial element to elevate and improve your practice, but you’ll ultimately need a strategic program complete with growth plans and a dedicated community to sustain your accounting business regardless of the many changes in the industry.
Total Growth System for Accounting Businesses with Topfirm
Topfirm goes beyond providing your firm with a CPA business coach for staff development — they offer a total growth system for your practice, incorporating the most crucial aspects to growing your firm.
Their industry-tested formula teaches you how to motivate employees as a leader, helps you attract only the best leads and clients, and unlocks new levels of performance and growth for your accounting firm. With their tried-and-tested strategies, Topfirm will take care of the rest — no fine print, no surprises.
Want to experience how Topfirm can transform your practice and help you stay ahead of the competition? Join the exclusive list to get first dibs on Topfirm’s offerings when it’s ready to launch.
