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LEADERSHIP

How Accountability Drives Firm Success

senior businessman with five colleagues

Four challenges to address.

By Anthony Zecca
Leading From the Edge

I’ve been focusing on the leadership accounting firms need to succeed in a future driven by seismic disruptors. We began with strategy, then empowerment. This post will address the critical element that makes empowerment work – accountability.

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A characteristic of a great “Edge” leader is the ability to empower everyone and understanding that as a leader, your responsibility is to lead and not manage. If you are the type of leader that manages, you own accountability since you can’t manage and empower at the same time. As I defined it in my previous post, a simple definition for empowerment that applies to all organizations is, “Authority or power given to someone to do something.” 
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LEADERSHIP

Standout Teams Require Everyone to Be on Board

four people talking in office

How to overcome roadblocks.

By Anthony Zecca
Leading from the Edge

“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” – Henry Ford, inventor, founder and CEO of the Ford Motor Company

Let’s follow Mary as she works through the first principle – creating a firmwide, standout team.

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Mary’s Firm (continued)

Mary is back in her office after the partners’ meeting where she told all the partners that the firm must become a standout, high-performing firm and move out in front of the pack. She continues to think about what she shared at the partners’ meeting and what comes next – how to move this process forward and create the vision that she shared. She knows she must get deeper into each principle and what leadership must do to fully actualize the goal – becoming a standout, high-performing firm. She decides to bounce some ideas off of another partner and asks Jim, a trusted long-term tax partner, to join her for some discussion.

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LEADERSHIP

Five Principles of High-Performing Firms

Transformation must occur at every level.

By Anthony Zecca
Leading from the Edge

“The world accommodates you for fitting in, but only rewards you for standing out.” – Matshona Dhiliwayo, author, “The Art of Winning.”

After your assessment of the leadership team, and the assessment of your own leadership, we move on to the challenge of answering the key question – what steps need to be taken (the road map) to move the firm from where it is today to a standout, high-performing firm?

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The call to action and question for you as the Edge leader, for your leadership team, for your partners, and in fact for the entire firm to answer is, do you just want to fit in or are you willing to do what it will take to stand out? If you want to move to the top of the pack, what does the firm need to accomplish and how does leadership drive that transformation?

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LEADERSHIP

How to Assess Your Firm’s Performance

Seven key filters to use.

By Anthony Zecca
Leading from the Edge

Now that we have completed an assessment of your leadership team and your leadership, the third leg is assessing the overall performance of the firm. This assessment, coupled with the assessment of the leadership team and your leadership, provides a strong foundation upon which to build the roadmap (strategies) for moving the firm from where it is today to a standout, high-performing firm. The underlying objective for this assessment of the firm is to have a factual basis for establishing a myth-free and accurate baseline of the firm by analyzing a number of key characteristics.

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What are the major areas of focus for the firm assessment? In center-led firms, the assessment of how well the firm is doing is generally focused around financial metrics. How much profit did we make? What was our growth? What was the change in average partner compensation? What profit percentage to revenue did we achieve?
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LEADERSHIP

Four Traits That Great Accounting Firm Leaders Share

key leadership attributes

BONUS: Questions for self-assessment.

By Anthony Zecca
Leading from the Edge

As the leader of the firm, as important as it is to complete a comprehensive assessment of your leadership team, it is equally if not more critical to assess your own leadership. What are the key leadership attributes that reflect great Edge leadership?

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How can you get a meaningful and comprehensive assessment of how well you are doing as the leader of the firm? The trap to avoid is to just listen to yourself and your own self-assessment. To really understand how well you are performing, you need multiple checkpoints.
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