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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
For CPA Trendlines
Young accountants still want to become leaders. They just don’t want to work the way many of today’s leaders do.
A 2026 KPMG intern survey cited by burnout coach Lynette Oss Connell finds 92% of interns aspire to reach the C-suite or another senior executive role. Yet the workplace behavior they most want eliminated is an “always-available” culture.
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For accounting firms worried about keeping their next generation of managers and partners, Oss Connell says younger professionals hear firms encouraging boundaries and work-life balance while watching managers and partners remain constantly connected, work long hours and push through stress.
Burnout, she argues, is not simply an individual problem to be fixed with more resilience or better self-care. Chronic stress is also built into how work gets done — and changing the outcome may require firms to examine the behavior they reward and the example their leaders set.
“We thrive on feeling like we have a sense of control, or certainty,” says Oss Connell. But when medical crises with her children collided with impossible business demands, she hit that wall of burnout. “The illusion of certainty had really been washed away from me, and it felt like an existential crisis of what value am I providing?” she explains.
Today, as a burnout prevention and recovery coach at ReInspired Leadership Consulting and founder of Burnout Bestie, she helps accountants find their way back without having to blow up their careers to do it.
Oss Connell wants accountants to understand that burnout is not a weakness, but rather, it is simply biology. “Burnout is the cumulative effect of chronic stress,” she says. “It’s not your personal failure. It’s actually your body working in predictable ways in response to chronic stress.” When we experience constant stress, our nervous systems get locked in fight, flight, or freeze. Willpower alone won’t break the cycle. Pushing through tends to make it worse.
Try ‘mono-tasking’
While meditation apps, aromatherapy, and weekly massages are good things, those alone won’t cure burnout. “There is a systemic element to burnout,” she explains. “Every solution to an individual’s burnout needs to have two components, internal and external. It needs a self-care component, where I’m addressing my needs. But it also needs a collective, systemic solution.” This systemic solution requires conversations at the firm and family level “around reasonable capacity and what it means to be a human in this system.”
The systemic drivers of burnout include the always-on culture that has intensified since the pandemic. “The anxiety and the nervous system activation that comes from your phone giving you alerts all day long from Teams or Slack, pinging you all day long, is just keeping that nervous system activation on full high level,” she says. “Supporting one another looks like respecting our time as a starting point.”
A practical, quick-acting antidote she recommends to her coaching clients is what she calls “mono-tasking,” which means blocking time for a single task with all notifications silenced. “Everybody comes back the next week and says, ‘I feel so much more at peace,’” she says. “And that doesn’t mean that people need to spend their whole life doing it that way, but blocking out time where you are not going to be interrupted, where your stuff is genuinely silent, and you work on just one thing at a time can make a huge difference in a very short amount of time to your nervous system activation.”
Through her work as a CPA exam coach, Oss Connell hears directly from young accountants about their perceptions of the profession. Many of these young accountants struggle to reconcile their own abilities to create boundaries with the behaviors they see modeled by managers and partners, who are always on. “You’re saying one thing, that it’s okay to have boundaries, and you want me not to burn out, and you want me to be here and be fulfilled. And yet you’re burning the candle at both ends. You’re running on all cylinders. You’re going crazy. Is that my future? I don’t want that future,” she reports as a common refrain from younger accountants.
‘Stop rewarding overwork’
The KPMG survey also reported that 93% of interns say strong workplace friendships increase their desire to stay at a firm, which Oss Connell sees as an urgent need in the modern workplace. Remote work makes it harder to form the informal bonds with co-workers that used to make busy seasons more bearable. “Even when we were slammed, even when we were so busy, we were in it together,” she recalls of her own early audit days. “One of us was heading out to get burritos. One of us would run and get coffee.” Cultivating a similar sense of camaraderie and connection as part of a team could be a powerful retention tactic.
Oss Connell recommends that accountants who want to be better leaders start modeling the behavior they want to see. “Stop rewarding overwork,” she says. “Be the thing that you say you want the firm to reflect.” When partners send emails at 11 p.m. and skip their vacation days, staff will see firm policies promoting work-life balance as insincere lip service.
Looking to the future, Oss Connell sees automation and AI as opportunities to encourage the human side of our work. “The thing that’s going to set people apart isn’t the price. It’s not even the speed,” she says. “What we provide with our insight, with our intuition, with our compassion, with our uniquely human traits is going to be the differentiator.”
Top Ten Takeaways
- Many accountants are natural perfectionists and people pleasers. When we’re good at our jobs, we will be given even more responsibilities. This can lead to burnout unless we learn to say no.
- Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you should keep doing it forever.
- Accountants often use work as an escape during personal crises. Work can provide a sense of certainty and control when everything else is falling apart.
- Working in your zone of genius creates a self-reinforcing energy cycle. This allows us to give much more back to our jobs and our families.
- Many young professionals never learned to plan on paper. Instead, they try to manage everything in real time from memory.
- Mentorship in the form of walking alongside people through the hard things can turn difficult seasons into growth rather than exits.
- Technical training, while important, isn’t the biggest gap for professionals. The biggest gap lies in learning to respond to pressure, to becoming more resilient, and in providing realistic role models for success.
- Firms need to allow the younger professionals to shape the future. Dictating culture from the top without listening to staff drives disengagement.
- The firms that thrive in the future will be those that use technology to eliminate drudgery while supporting and encouraging the human qualities of creativity, intuition, emotional intelligence, and caring for clients and colleagues.
- Stop ignoring stress until someone reaches burnout. By fostering self-care and mitigating stress as a habit, you will have more sustainable energy to do the work you love.
More about Lynnette Oss Connell
Lynnette Oss Connell believes that sustainable success happens at the intersection of self-awareness and strategy, not on the altar of self-sacrifice.
With over two decades in the accounting industry, Lynnette deeply understands the pressures accounting professionals face. Starting as an auditor in public accounting, then as a fractional controller, and finally as the co-owner of a successful CAAS firm, she bought into the narrative that success is purchased at the price of one’s mental health. After health challenges forced her to confront her chronic, cyclical burnout head-on, Lynnette made the decision to exit her own accounting firm and dedicate herself to helping others prevent and recover from burnout at all stages of their careers.
Lynnette currently provides individual coaching to accountants, group training sessions, and keynote presentations. When not deep in conversation or down a research rabbit hole, she can be found in the yoga studio or out on a hike. Contact: lynnette@burnoutbestie.com
Transcript
Liz Farr
Welcome to The Disruptors. I’m your host, Liz Farr from CPA Trendlines, and my guest today is Lynette Oss Connell, Burnout Prevention and Recovery Coach at ReInspired Leadership Consulting and founder of Burnout Bestie, how are you Lynette? and welcome.
Lynette Oss Connell
Thanks for having me. Liz, I’m doing well, thanks.
Liz Farr
Well, I’m so glad that we met last year at Bridging the Gap. You know, you just kind of cornered me after one of the parties and said, Oh, I’ve been wanting to meet you, and so I’m so glad that you did and we got to talk.
Lynette Oss Connell
Absolutely you are a legend and a delight to talk to, so I’m glad you accepted my cornering.
Liz Farr
Well, thank you very much. The honor was all mine. Now, Lynette, can you tell listeners a little bit about your business, where you’re located, what services you offer, what kind of clients you work with.
Lynette Oss Connell
For sure, I’m based in the greater Seattle metro area, but my clients are all across the US. I am a burned out CPA who now provides one on one coaching and group coaching for accountants who are struggling with symptoms of burnout or questions about burnout, feeling run down, isolated, confused, not sure if this profession is still for them, and it is my deep honor to walk alongside them as they explore the next steps of their career, either within the job they have, or exploring options for what they might need to change to find sustainable fulfillment.
Liz Farr
Oh, you sound like exactly the kind of person that I was looking for about 10 years ago, when I was myself burned down and that led me to becoming a writer. I didn’t I didn’t have anybody to ask.
Lynette Oss Connell
I think a big reason why I took this direction after I sold my CPA firm was because I could have used somebody to confidentially speak to about my doubts and my mental health in a capacity where accounting industry is understood, where the nuances and the options are, I don’t I didn’t have to explain it to anyone. So being able to provide a listening ear and some wise insights and ideas and creativity and help people tap into what might be fulfilling for them, gives me so much fulfillment to help them reach greater potential by tapping into an unburned out state of themselves.
Liz Farr
Yeah, that’s That’s amazing. Now, you mentioned your own journey with burnout. Would you be willing to share that with listeners?
Lynette Oss Connell
Absolutely, it’s a complicated story, and it really starts even in childhood with programming around perfectionism and a desire to please teachers and parents. And a lot of people in accounting can understand that, and come from backgrounds where we want to do the right thing, and that leads a lot of people into accounting, because it’s an industry where we’re serving people. It’s an industry where a right answer is possible, right we can get something to balance. We can have it make sense, and it can be hard to know where our capacity ends when we’re operating in a world of so much certainty, just to tap back into our humanness can be very difficult. So my story is one of accepting a lot of things into my life, tasks and responsibilities because I was good at them. And people would say, Oh, you’re so good at that. Here’s another responsibility. Oh, you should take this opportunity, and so I accumulated a lot of doing and I don’t think I ever really learned to say no, and I don’t think I learned until probably in my 30s, that just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean that you need to be doing it, and certainly doesn’t mean that you need to be doing it forever. So in my journey, I left public accounting when my oldest kiddo was born, and I started a CPA firm, just advisory. I would do controller for hire work, CFO for hire work, I would manage the books of companies, and ended up doing a lot of pre M and A books cleanup for companies, especially tech companies here in the Seattle area really enjoyed a lot of that work and really created this beautiful balance between my home life and my work life that I felt was sustainable. But what I didn’t account for is that as life evolves, I needed to stay flexible, and I needed to make the hard call to adjust. Things in my life constantly to really care for my own capacity. I ended up going through several iterations of my accounting firm to meet the needs in my life, and ultimately, it was because of my kids’ medical issues that I ended up really full fledged, falling into burnout, feeling like I was burning the candle at all ends and really in over my head. It felt like I would escape into work, not into work, but into this computer, into the files, because it was the only place I felt like I could give something with any certainty that I was good at when your kids are in the hospital, or kid one kid at a time, but multiple kids were in the hospital, I felt so out of control. And as accountants, we thrive on feeling like we have a sense of control, or like, I’ve said, certainty. And so the illusion of certainty had really been washed away from me, and it felt like an existential crisis of what value am I providing? Is this really where I need to be? And it was really lonely place, and through a lot of soul searching, realized that the work I was doing in my accounting firm wasn’t the best and highest use of my skills that the thing I loved about my job needed to evolve, and that was working with clients, and specifically not with accounting clients, but with accountants. A lot of the favorite part of my job was collaborating with accountants and helping them see a vision for whatever, whatever it is they needed a vision for. So my husband and I sold our firm in the beginning of 2023 I like to say I sold off my husband. He and our clients and our employees went to work at a larger firm, and I pivoted my practice to now doing coaching.
Liz Farr
That’s sound like a perfect a perfect journey for you. You found your highest and best use. Now too many people don’t really even discover that or even allow themselves to even seek it out, so kudos to you for doing that.
Lynette Oss Connell
Yeah, thanks. I think you’re right. A lot of people are fixed in their mindset of where their career trajectory is going, or what a career in public accounting is going to look like, and it often takes a life crisis, whether it’s for me, sick kids, for a lot of people, it could be a divorce or an unexpected layoff, or any number of big disruptors to your life that causes you to reconsider. And often, I think people could really use an assessment of where they’re going before they’re in crisis. And that’s where a lot of I hope we can have more conversations in our industry around not needing to follow one path, but really using our skills in ways that benefit everybody, by by paying attention to and tapping into each of our unique contribution. Because when we’ve tapped into sort of our zones of genius, our skill sets, we can give so much more back to everybody, whether it’s our families or our jobs.
Liz Farr
Absolutely, and I like that you brought up genius zone that I’ve heard several people talk about what it’s like to work inside their genius zone, that the hours just slip away, and you get up every morning excited to do the work and honored to do the work, that it’s the best thing you have ever done, for
Lynette Oss Connell
sure, with my coaching clients, I find occasionally, but it’s such a joy when I see it. A palpable difference in the tone and the demeanor of my client when they’ve done a lot of work and reached a point where they’re now focusing more of their Energy on things that are in their zone of genius, versus spending more of their time on areas that are energy draining the life that they come into the meeting with. And the joy is just so incredible, and the way that they’re able to pour energy back out is synergistic, like they’re creating more energy as they go, instead of just being depleted. And that, even just witnessing it, gives me and everybody around them so much more of our own Joie de Vivre right
Liz Farr
absolutely now. Now, what are some myths? About burnout that you can address for me.
Lynette Oss Connell
I’m so glad you asked. I see burnout content floating around on LinkedIn and everywhere, and I think so often I wish we could just define it, because I think I see it and I’m like, What are we even talking about? So just to level set for a second, burnout is the cumulative effect of chronic stress, and it symptomatically comes out in some pretty predictable ways. There’s the drive to prove yourself, there’s neglecting your own needs, there’s readjusting your values all the way up to depression anxiety, there’s a whole bunch of symptoms, and it can feel like when you’ve reached a deep degree of burnout. So you feel an inner emptiness. You’ve reached existential crisis. You’re wondering if you can even be in this job anymore. It’s so isolating because you feel incredible guilt that you weren’t able to prevent getting to this point. But the myth I want to debunk is that it’s not your personal failure, it’s actually your body working in predictable ways in response to chronic stress. Your body when it’s continually met with threat or the perception of threat is going to respond in constant fight, flight, freeze and often, what will happen is that you’ll get stuck in that. Your nervous system gets locked and no amount of wishful thinking is going to get you out of it. There’s no amount of pushing through. In fact, pushing through can make it worse. So the first thing I want to debunk is that it’s personal failure. It’s not it’s the signal that your nervous system has reached a point that you need an intervention and we need to make a change. The other myth I would like to debunk is that self care alone can fix burnout. I see so often brands will advertise a workflow software or a diet or or something that’s going to fix burnout, and while those things can be incredible, incredibly useful in preventing it, in some people at the same time, there is a systemic element to burnout. You are in an environment that is causing chronic stress. So a solution to burnout needs to not just be the self care component, while that’s necessary and while being aware of yourself, giving yourself a rest, all very, very important. At the same time, we need to address the systemic drivers of burnout that could be at your workplace, in your company, at the firm. It can also be in the way we run our families, in the way that society puts a heavier emotional load, most of the time, on moms than dads. There are a lot of systemic things we could go on and on about, and being cognizant of the fact that every solution to even an individual’s burnout, needs to have two components, internal and external. It needs a self care component, where I’m addressing my needs. But it also needs a collective, systemic solution, and there’s no one right solution. What it takes is the group, the firm, the company, the family, having conversations around reasonable capacity and what it means to be a human in this system, right?
Liz Farr
And, you know, and I, and I like the emphasis on the whole picture that the individual is not going to solve this on their own with a meditation app or getting some scented candles, or some aromatherapy, or a weekly massage. All those are good things.
Lynette Oss Connell
I’ll take all the things, yeah,
Liz Farr
but if you’re still having to work too much and even in an environment that you don’t feel you can perform your best, then you’re only addressing part of the issue. Am I getting this correct?
Lynette Oss Connell
You’re absolutely correct 100%
Liz Farr
Yeah, well, that explains why I had to solve my own burnout by leaving the firm.
Lynette Oss Connell
And I think a lot of people end up in that place where because they. Gotten to that crisis point, they feel like the only way to regain control is to burn it all down, is to start over. And I certainly have been in that point myself. And I won’t, I won’t say that’s not the right answer for some people, that is what systemically needs to happen given your circumstance, but is not always what needs to happen. And when we increase our awareness around mental health in our profession, I think it will become less and less necessary for people to feel like they need to burn it down. If we can have more community around our capacity conversation, I see so many communities popping up, and I’m so grateful for each one of them providing an environment for one another to express what’s difficult, to get advice, find solutions. That makes me so happy to see those kinds of communities serving these needs, these mental health needs of one another.
Liz Farr
Absolutely. Now, what does support for burnout look like?
Lynette Oss Connell
Well, I think we just hit a big one, which is recognizing that there are two sides to every burnout solution. We do need to care for ourselves. It is not somebody else’s responsibility to care for us, but as a as a whole, we need to be having conversations around what needs to happen. Support also looks like recognizing that when somebody is in advanced burnout, it’s a nervous system issue, not just a logical issue. I see so often people try to talk one another into being okay, or just pushing through and recognizing that it’s at a nervous system level, can really open your mind to what needs to happen. For example, the always on culture that we still have in our environments needs to change the anxiety the nervous system activation that comes from your phone giving you alerts all day long from Teams or Slack, pinging you all day long is just keeping that nervous system activation on, on full high level. Supporting one another looks like respecting our time as a starting point to being being, allowing one another to not be always on will make a huge difference, as does a high degree of communication around expectations, so that everybody’s clear on what people need to be doing. That will calm down the nervous system when people say they expect one thing and then deliver that, as far as when you need to be, where you need to be, when you need to be on when you don’t. I think support starts there, depending on the individual situation. It could be much more elaborate, yeah,
Liz Farr
and, and I would imagine that since the pandemic, this always on culture has just gotten worse. You know, I left public accounting before the pandemic hit, so I was never really subject to my phone going off or getting emails all the time. I didn’t even really have my work email on my phone at the time. I could access it, but it was a pain to get to it, and I didn’t really make it known that I could access my email if I wasn’t in the office.
Lynette Oss Connell
You have very good boundaries. Just by that description. I have so much I want to say on this one. It’s it’s interesting. I do CPA exam coaching with Amber Setter, and in our cohorts, we get student or people who are recently students who are probably now employed by a firm and are studying for the CPA exam. So most of these people are in their 20s, and it’s been really eye opening for me to hear from them their impressions of being at firms and the culture and their their perceptions and a couple things stand out to me about what they’ve told me, and one is that they have a hard time reconciling the fact that, on one hand, they have no problem putting down their phones or having boundaries around their time, but they’re watching their managers, senior managers and partners, be always on. And so asking the question of, you’re saying one thing, that it’s okay to have boundaries, and you want me not to burn out, and you want me to be here and be fulfilled. And yet you’re burning the candle at both ends. You’re running on all cylinders. You’re going crazy. Is that my future? I don’t want that future. It was interesting. Speaking of Amber Setter, she just sent me. I’m going to look at it right here, this KPMG intern pulse survey from winter of 2026 from LinkedIn. And the statistic that’s on here is that 92% of the interns aspire to reach the C suite or a senior executive role, yet the number one workplace behavior that they want eliminated is an always available culture. So they want to get there, but they don’t want what they’re seeing that involves, right, right?
Liz Farr
And, you know, and I based my not wanting to be connected to work by my phone on my boss, because as soon as he got a smartphone. You know, I started working there before smartphones came along, before iPhone, and as soon as he got one, he kept it by his computer and but he would turn his back to his computer to talk to me, because he sat in sort of a U shaped desk. And so when I came in to sit across from him, he would turn his back to his computer. But then every time his phone went off, he would swivel around and look at the phone, and even pick it up and look at it, and then put it back. And I just thought, well, that’s that’s a little weird and a kind of off putting. I’m not going to do that when I get one. And so I didn’t, yeah, so
Lynette Oss Connell
I see in people I work with on burnout, that there feel like I need to be always on. And I when I’m speaking of people I work with, I mean people who work for firms, as well as independent firm owners, who feel as though I need to be available for when my client has a question, and additionally for the narrative that if something comes through my email, some of it’s easier just to triage right away and get rid of so it’s easier for me to go ahead and get it and then clear it out. But if we remember the fact that burnout is a nervous system level issue, when you start feeling burned out, when you start feeling emotional exhaustion, lack of accomplishment, that your work no longer has meaning for you, that’s a big red flag that your nervous system is starting to get depleted, whether or not you actually consciously realize that these alerts are taking your energy, you you’ll it’ll start to get worse, like irritability and anxiety, feeling like I have to always be attending to all these demands will start to accumulate. I see in the people I work with that when they try what I call mono tasking, instead of multi tasking, which is not some sort of revolutionary concept, but just doing one thing at a time, everybody comes back the next week and says, I feel so much more at peace. And that doesn’t mean that people need to spend their whole life doing it that way, but blocking out time where you are not going to be interrupted, where your stuff is genuinely silent, and you work on just one thing at a time can make a huge difference in a very short amount of time to your nervous system activation, and then when you start to feel the relief that can fuel your motivation to start to manage your time differently based on your energy expenditure, and also energy being refilled based on types of work, as we already talked about, that are aligned With what you want. Things you’re passionate about are filling So paying attention to how you how your tasks and you’re always on, affects your energy. Increasing your awareness can make a big difference.
Liz Farr
It’s huge, huge to do that. Yeah. And I remember somehow unconsciously, I figured out that I needed to do that when I was at work. So I would always block out, say, an hour at the beginning of every day to do the most important things. Then I did have a boss who liked to interrupt me during that one hour, and after about the 10th time of him interrupting me, I snapped something smart ass like at him, which he did not appreciate, and it did not go over very well, but at that point, I realized, you know, there is just something wrong with the way that firms operate that that we’re expected to be able to turn on a dime?
Lynette Oss Connell
Yeah. Really interesting thing I’ve noticed about my own kids, so I have five, and four of them are teenagers, which, speaking of things that will burn you out, parenting teenagers is high on the list of things that will bring you out.
Liz Farr
Oh yes,
Lynette Oss Connell
watching the way that they interact with their schoolwork has been really interesting for me to take a look at, especially side by side with these CPA exam students who are mostly in their 20s, and just taking a look at the similarities between how these groups operate. And one thing I notice is that they don’t rely on lists to do, lists, task lists, everything is kind of in real time. Speaking of my kids, so I’ll ask, you know, do you have homework? Oh, no. Like, how do you know? Like, you didn’t check and like, oh, I don’t remember it. And so they’re queuing up tasks in their mind and hoping they have to remember them. They never had a like a student planner, where they had to write out their tasks and the due dates and manage a calendar. And so that’s been a really interesting concept for me to then come up alongside them and say, how are you managing your work? And they’re like, really irritated, Hey, Mom. Like, why are you talking about workflow management? I’m a high schooler. Like, because this is so important to your future health in your career, is how you manage your workload. If you’re only ever doing tasks the second that they appear in front of you, you’re going to forget some really important things, in addition to the fact that you’re going to have less agency, choice and strategy around how you attack your work, because you’re always just going to be responding to whatever’s right in front of you, and there’s no long term planning involved. So that’s been a really interesting thing to navigate with my kids, and to keep in mind that it’s not just because they’re my kids. This is the this is the next group of people who are going to be entering the workforce. They’re This is how they’re managing their tasks, and furthermore, they’re seeing people my age and older their grandparents, to interact with technology in a way that’s fundamentally different from the way that they interact with it, because my kids never learned how to do it on paper, whereas I learned how to do it all on paper before I ever learned how to do it on a handheld device or on a computer. And so I have the foundational knowledge. So they they’re like, Well, you do it this way, and I’m like, Well, I can take the shortcut because do as I say, not as I do. I can take the shortcut because I know how to do it the longhand way. I could do that whole long division. That’s why I get to use the calculator like nobody ever does it the long way anymore. So maybe they should. So we do some exercises with our kids to help them understand by exercise, I just mean I make them do it the long way, sometimes, in spite of the fact that they’re annoyed because I’m looking at them as future contributors in not just our firms, but in in our hospitals, In our in all in all places of work.
Liz Farr
So you know you you said your kids manage things in real time. So how does that work? When the teacher tells them you need to read this book for your English literature, and then two weeks after you finish it, you need to turn in a paper on it. How do they do that?
Lynette Oss Connell
The real answer, frankly, is that my one, well, one of my kids, is that sort of genius level, ADHD. And so he will read the book that day and then turn in the write the essay in two weeks, when he goes, Oh shoot, the deadlines tomorrow. So that’s that one, and that’s problematic. And then I have other kids who are cons too. In particular I’m thinking of who constantly work on homework. They’re so anxious about it because they’re afraid of dropping the ball, and so I’ll come and say, What are you doing, honey, more homework like you have all A’s. I’m gonna forget something. I’m Forget it, afraid of forgotten it, and just obsessively checking. So there’s two different sides of the coin on that. One is procrastination, and the other is hyper vigilance, which itself is incredibly draining on the nervous system, to constantly feel like there’s something I’m not anticipating. It feels like like a tiger waiting in the bushes for them to come out and say, Oh, you forgot this assignment. Oh, you forgot that.
Liz Farr
Yeah, yeah. So now we talked a little bit about the challenges for younger accountants in terms of fighting against boundaries and the always on culture. What other challenges are you seeing? What are the other things that you see,
Lynette Oss Connell
yeah, well, I’m going to go back really quick to this KPMG intern pulse survey, because it has another statistic on here. That’s I was like, wow, I totally see that. Is that 93% of the interns say that having strong workplace friendships increases their desire to return to the firm. In a world where we are so disconnected from one another and our relationships are on Teams or Slack, and even if you come into the office, it’s a very different culture from when I was an auditor, We were in the office, or you were out on assignment, and you were with a cohort, and there was a great sense of bonding. That even when we were slammed, even when we were so busy, we were in it together, right? I had a team, even if we were working 10-12, hour days, one of us was heading out to get burritos. One of us would run and get coffee like it was. It was a camaraderie around it. And I when we work so disconnectedly physically from one another, we don’t get that energy from one another in the same way. And so I think that there is a sense in which these younger professionals are craving that they want connection. And it’s the that’s the catch of working remotely has its advantages, but definitely one of the ways drawbacks that they they are struggling with is I want connection. And furthermore, when we take that into the longevity, the sustainability of people staying in a firm community. So much has to do with whether or not somebody stays somewhere in anything, feeling not alone, feeling seen, feeling understood, not like all of your emotions, but just feeling like I’m in it together, like we’re I’m part of a team. I’m not just a lone ranger.
Liz Farr
I would agree with you 100% on everything you just said. One of my clients, somebody I do a lot of work with, Alan Anderson, noted that in among the audit firms he was working with, there were these seniors who came, who came to be seniors during the pandemic, but because they had always worked remotely, they didn’t really know what it meant to be a senior, and so they were still trying to figure out what it meant to manage people and also get their deliverables done. And so a lot of them just ended up doing all the work that they were supposed to be delegating, instead of trying to show people how to do it, because they didn’t really know how to do any of that.
Lynette Oss Connell
You make such an important point about being able to model or see something modeled for you, because you can be trained all day long on how to do it, but witnessing somebody do it has its own special magic sauce, like secret sauce to making it really stick the. Younger professionals are taking a look at, as I said before, the people who are leading by being always on, and they’re saying, I want to be a manager, Senior Manager, partner. I want to be an owner, but I don’t want it to look like that. So what does it look like? And that’s that’s the question they’re asking, What does it look like? And with the way that the industry is evolving, with automation and just the speed of all that, it’s going to look incredibly different. Nobody knows exactly what shape it’s going to take, and it’s tricky to navigate, keeping young professionals engaged when they don’t have something to model that career trajectory after that they want, right?
Liz Farr
So how do we support these younger people better? You know, we mentioned modeling. What? What are some other things we can do to keep them in this profession? At the very least,
Lynette Oss Connell
at the very least, yes, well, we definitely need people in the profession. The differentiator, long term, as we’ve already said, is remembering how to people. I think the firms that are going to be most successful are the people who, while we automate, remember how to be human. That involves, yes, the nervous system. It involves workplace relationships, like, like I just said in the statistic, friendship. I think it requires a lot of flexibility and having real conversations, which again, is that human, human element being flexible and less rigid, and having the learning, collectively, how to let people be seen and have buy in without making it feel like a dictation. This is what must happen. But how do we collaboratively find solutions that people want and let the younger people help shape the shape of the firm, the shape of the profession. Because people, in general, when you have buy in, that’s buy in. You’re invested. Now, if there’s no emotional buy in, and that’s what the reason why I’m getting too emotional is because that’s what these statistics tell us. Yeah, they want to be human. So how, how do we have those conversations? Yes, and it’s for leadership to be willing to have some degree of humility to say that the way that it has worked is not going to continue to work.
Liz Farr
Yeah, yeah, that SALY same as last year has perhaps reached its end point. Was never a good policy from the beginning, it’s kind of a time saver, but it also cuts off the options for thinking about doing things better, yeah, doing doing something differently?
Lynette Oss Connell
Yeah, for sure, and that is something just now that you say it, thinking about how like my kids do their schoolwork too. I getting it done, just getting the answer done that. I tell them all the time, it’s like, that’s not going to cut it. The thing that’s going to differentiate you is your ability to analyze and provide some kind of creative insight, or do something outside the box of just the answer, because the answer can just be plugged into a computer and somebody else can give the answer. What value are you providing that is beyond the simple completion of the assignment? There’s got to be some sort of intangible. So like, what is your special thing that you offer? And that we can apply that parenting principle to our professional lives, as well as firms in general, that’s who’s who’s going to really succeed and who that’s the firms are going to succeed with the younger people too. Is allowing these intangible, uniquely human things to be at the forefront.
Liz Farr
Yes, yes, and AI can be used as a tool to help you find that. But it’s not the substitute for the answer.
Lynette Oss Connell
for sure,
Liz Farr
yeah. Now, so what else can we do to help them? You know, can we give them more free time? Model setting, boundaries better give them more options for career paths in accounting. What else can we do to support young people?
Lynette Oss Connell
Younger people?
Liz Farr
Yes,
Lynette Oss Connell
in particular, I think we see again and again that there is some degree of like social emotional development that needs to be fostered. The technical training isn’t where the gap is. The gap is in how how I respond to pressure, how I’m resilient, how I can visualize my success. I think that it comes down to mentorship. In a lot of respects, is that’s the thing that’s going to make a difference, like, again, just the human element and connection. We look at the anxiety levels of this group of people, and not to say that everybody has an anxiety diagnosis, but the the always on culture, having a cell phone from the time they were really young keeps that nervous system activated, and so creating environments in which they we can bring that down is going to that’s, that’s the biggest thing we can do.
Liz Farr
Yeah, yeah. I think so. I think so. Well now I’m going to switch gears and ask you some questions that I ask most of my guests. So start with mistakes. We often learn by making mistakes. So what would you say is the most valuable mistake you’ve made? Valuable in terms of what you learned.
Lynette Oss Connell
I think the most valuable mistake that I’ve made is probably just staying in jobs that I was not suited for for longer than necessary, getting to the pain point of saying, Why am I even doing this at the time that that happened? It was incredibly painful, and the the tension between my alignment, it was out of alignment, staying in jobs, specifically in accounting, doing things that I didn’t enjoy doing, like CFO level, stuff that, yes, I could do. I was good at it, and I knew how to sit in a meeting and give the breakdown and all the numbers and impress the client, and then get more business doing it, because I did a good job at it. And thinking to myself, I’m good at this, so I should continue doing it, taught me that I have an incredible amount of grit. But then, on the flip side, also taught me how taught me skills I never would have learned otherwise, and ultimately helped me know that that wasn’t an alignment for me. So I learned. I learned a lot by doing things that I didn’t want to be doing. In fact, to go back to the kids thing, I tell my kids that a lot, they’re like, I don’t want to do it. It’s uncomfortable. Like, you know what a lot of life is, doing things that are uncomfortable. Trust me, this is worth it. Look, whatever the task is, and there’s a lot of resistance there.
Liz Farr
You know, sometimes what you learn is that, no, I don’t want to go on this path. Or sometimes you learn, hey, this was really hard at the beginning, but now that I’ve gotten over that big hump, this is this is okay. I kind of like this
Lynette Oss Connell
to to back to your other question. Liz about what we can do for younger people, walking when I say mentorship, to expand that thought is walking through doing difficult tasks with them so that asking they don’t have to ping you to ask a question, having regular check ins with staff members where they can ask questions, anticipating that they’re going to need encouragement, and being available for that or help them think through it creatively. Walking with people through difficult, unusual, uncomfortable tasks is is key to helping them get through it. And as you said, to say, I’m better for it. That wasn’t as bad as I thought. I mean, there could be a number of outcomes to getting through a difficult task or season, but when you walk with somebody, they don’t feel alone in it or like they don’t know that they’re on track. So often, when we’re doing a task that is challenging, we ask ourselves, Am I doing it right? This? Is this harder than it needs to be? Am I? Am I? Should I even be here like the doubt creeps in and walking with people to encourage them through uncertainty helps us stay grounded and say, Oh, I am on the right path. This is hard, but my mentor is telling me that I’m I’m doing a great job. Okay, like I’ll keep going. I’m going to trust you, and so that relationship becomes an anchor for getting through the challenge, instead of having to go solo. Because how many of us like to do the difficult thing alone?
Liz Farr
None of us, no, no, oh no, no. And, you know, I think back to many of the other hard things I’ve done, and how much easier it was when I had a group of when I was in the middle of a cohort of people who were also doing that same hard thing with me.
Lynette Oss Connell
Yeah, it all comes back to relationship and the human element, like we can do any number of incredibly challenging things when we’re with peers or we’re with mentors who care,
Liz Farr
yes, absolutely. Now, what advice do you have for accountants who want to be better leaders,
Lynette Oss Connell
lead by example, to go back to what we were talking about earlier. Stop rewarding overwork and saying that you don’t if you’re going to say, We value your boundaries. We value your time off. Value your own time off. I mean, these are all I mean, they’re platitudes for a reason, like lead by example, people, actions speak louder than words. Be the thing that you say you want the firm to reflect. It can be incredibly hard to change habits, but people are watching you. The way that you manage your stress is going to make it okay for other people to manage their stress with intentionality. So take your time off, but also, I I don’t if you’re feeling irritable, don’t take the meeting. I mean, just take care of yourself. When other people see leaders who were on edge, burnt out, and they’re like, I have to push myself there too. And even if that leader says, No, I never want you to be like me. Nobody believes that.
Liz Farr
No, no, because that’s not what is modeled to us.
Lynette Oss Connell
Yeah. Model good boundaries. Yeah, boundaries and model self care.
Liz Farr
Oh, yes, self care and boundaries.
Lynette Oss Connell
Model it leaders. I’m just going to keep saying it
Liz Farr
Yes, and if you are, I think that there’s a subtle hint here that if you have to do this for others, then that also gives you permission to do it for yourself.
Lynette Oss Connell
Yeah, for sure. One big reason why, when I was thinking about specifically what I wanted to focus on in coaching, work with accountants, and there were a bunch of things that I considered, like, what could be something I coach about? Ultimately, I’m prone to burnout because I’m so passionate about whatever I’m working on, I just get really into it and I’m all in and being focused on burnout holds me accountable to myself. I have to model that moderation in all things and not overdoing it and being able to find the balance between things, like being so passionate about things I care about. And and still taking care of myself. So the struggle is real, but with some intentionality, it can be done
Liz Farr
true. This is true. We can always make a change if we want to badly enough. Yeah, yeah. Now you work with accountants, and you’ve worked with accountants. You’ve been in accounting for some time. What should accountants stop doing immediately?
Lynette Oss Connell
Well, stop ignoring stress until somebody gets burned out. What happens is we’ve normalized being stressed out as just part of the industry, and then when somebody gets so stressed out that they’re totally burned out, then we respond to it. Then you need a vacation. And so it’s reactive. It’s really we would all be so much healthier if we would attend to our stress levels sooner. Don’t wait till you’re desperate. Don’t wait till you want to quit your job. Don’t wait to burn it all down, or until you’re all your relationships are toast and you end up losing your friends and getting divorced. I mean, when you attend to your self care and attend to mitigating your stress as a habit, you will find so much more sustainability, so much more sustainable energy to do the work that you’re passionate about, rather than throwing yourself all into the fire and burning up. So attend to your stress sooner. Stop ignoring it. That is what we can do immediately.
Liz Farr
That’s really good advice, and I wish that more accountants would do things like that, more, yeah, well, now I want you to pull out your best forecasting spreadsheet. Okay, favorite fortune telling app, whichever is most appropriate. Where do you see the accounting profession in 10 years?
Lynette Oss Connell
Yeah, we already alluded to a lot of what, and I think about this a lot. It’s I see accountants being more advisors in the advisory seat, more than they ever have been in the past, because all these tasks are getting automated. What we provide with our insight, with our intuition, with our compassion, with our uniquely human traits is going to be the differentiator. And we don’t have to be all things to all people, but the thing that’s going to set people apart isn’t the price, it’s not even the speed. It’s going to be those intangible qualities that our clients or employees find valuable in us, and so I actually very hopefully see the profession becoming more personal, and that the firms that resist that are not going to do as well as the ones that embrace this personal touch, this human touch, to the services that we provide and the way that we interact with our employees and clients,
Liz Farr
yes, because if the bots can do it, yeah, then what do we need the human to do?
Lynette Oss Connell
I see it as a really beautiful opportunity for us to return to not treating us as data entry people or just the doers, but that we all have a contribution and with our mental faculties, with our way we relate to people, those are all things that I think the profession will benefit from tapping into. For sure,
Liz Farr
absolutely, I’m 100% in agreement with you right there. Well, Lynette, it has been just a joy, and this, this time together, is just flown by. I can’t believe how fast it’s gone. I think I could sit here and talk to you for another hour or two.
Lynette Oss Connell
Me too.
Liz Farr
Yeah. Now if listeners want to connect with you, what’s the best way to find you?
Lynette Oss Connell
The very best place to find me is on LinkedIn. Question So Lynette Oss Connell, you can also find me on Instagram at Burnout Bestie, and those are the two places you can easily find me
Liz Farr
perfect. Now I want to thank you once again for taking time out of your very busy day to share your experiences with burnout and your ideas for making this profession better, I want to thank you so much.
Lynette Oss Connell
I really appreciate you having me and thank you for having conversations like this one, increasing awareness in our industry about what burnout really is, and the hope around what the profession is evolving into these kinds of conversations are what really differentiates is going to differentiate people who adapt and succeed versus those who stay in flexible and stuck. And so thank you for moving the profession forward in I’m excited to see where we all go 10 years from now. As you say,
Liz Farr
Me too. I can’t wait to see what happens. It’ll be wonderful. Whatever happens, it’ll be wonderful.
Lynette Oss Connell
Thanks. Liz, well, thank thank you,
Liz Farr
Lynette, and have a wonderful day. Thanks. Bye.