CPA Trendlines

Mentoring is every professional’s number 1 job.

By Rick Telberg
On Careers

Forget the strategic stuff, the visionary exercises, the long-term planning. What keeps most finance and accounting executives awake at night lies closer to home in the here and now: the day-to-day management of their jobs and departments.It’s no small task considering the many roles finance managers are expected to play, the layers of new rules and regulations and the competitive demands of just keeping up.

So it’s little wonder that all too many finance managers may overlook the human and personal aspects of the job. But accountants are people, too, and they need as much hand-holding, mentoring, encouragement and coaching as anyone else.

That’s why, in this era when getting and keeping good employees is tougher than ever, coaching underperforming workers can be one of the best investments you can make. The best finance managers, of course, already know this.

Sure, you have to know when to cut your losses after you’ve hired a genuine clunker, but there’s a growing school of Human Resources thought suggesting that underperformance by high-integrity people can be turned around by smart and effective management. The question is: are you up to the task?

For starters, good finance managers look first at themselves before pointing the finger of blame at others who may be underperforming. While these coworkers can sometimes be converted into top producers with a little coaching, managers are too often afraid to take that step. The reasons may be because they’re uncertain about their organization’s performance standards, fearful of alienating the coworker altogether or concerned that other managers, including the HR department, may not approve.

For finance executives, it may be critical to cut through those uncertainties and help the marginal staffer, as long as his or her attitude is ready, willing and able to accept coaching. It is, at bottom, a two-way street.

Coaching staff has the same basic components as coaching football halfbacks or baseball outfielders-a system of feedback, direction and support designed to get individuals to first recognize and accept their issues, resolve to fix their problems, do so and then build the self-confidence they need for future success. But business coaching includes an element that could cause Joe Torre or Bill Parcells to spit-negotiating coaching arrangements with the subject workers.

That negotiation can merely entail telling the employee that he or she will be the subject of one-on-one attention and that it’s not punishment but rather the employee’s opportunity to improve and prove his or her value. The negotiation could also set timelines for improvement-perhaps tied to the organization’s worker review schedules-and should let the employee offer his or her proposed solutions.

The coaching itself involves telling the employee specifically where the performance is lacking, advising him or her and then offering other resources that can help the situation with consistent feedback on the employee’s efforts to improve.

The tricks to that feedback include

1. giving it in private,
2. delivering it with the intent to improve, not to berate,
3. making it timely, and
4. being specific.

For example, you don’t merely tell the employee he was unknowledgeable about something. Instead, you should equate what that means: It may mean the loss of a budgetary battle that could hurt the department or an incorrect projection that could derail a major marketing push.

Similarly, don’t just tell someone he or she is “always late for meetings,” but identify the specific dates and times that the person was tardy, find out why and work together to fix the issue. It could be as simple as starting a meeting five minutes later to allow for the staffer to drop off his or her kid off at school.

Still, many managers object to coaching, saying it is not their job and the time necessary takes away from other things that they should be doing. But not coaching means otherwise good workers don’t meet their potential and the organization suffers even more.

The idea of corporate coaching is nothing new, but it is gaining more notice in the current scrap for talent while workforce numbers are dwindling. The Set-Up-To-Fail Syndrome: How Good Managers Cause Great People to Fail, published by Harvard Business School Press, makes an extended argument for coaching. The potential to cultivate underperformers into the lifeblood of organizations is being lost amid a currently trendy mindset to only identify and cater to so-called top talent.To be sure, the vast majority of underperformers are not diamonds in the rough. But uncovering just one or two gems may make the effort worth it.

WHAT DO YOU SAY? Comments, questions, rants or raves-contact Rick Telberg.

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Posted April 3, 2008
Related Topics: Bill Parcells, Business, Coaching, Consulting, Employment, Health, Human resources, Joe Torre, management, Mentoring, recruiting, retention, Staff