Steffen: Leadership Is About Energy, Not Tenure | Gear Up For Growth
When you’re too tired to lead, step aside.
Gear Up for Growth
With Jean Caragher
For CPA Trendlines
LEADERSHIP
How Teamwork Drives Firm Success
Potential leaders fall into four categories.
By Anthony Zecca
Leading From the Edge
When You Might Need a Forensic Professional
Four ways to add control to your systems.
By Ed Mendlowitz
77 Ways to Wow!
Where Strategy Meets Firm Culture
Four actions to take.
By Anthony Zecca
Leading From the Edge
Deter Fraud with Forensic Techniques
BONUS: 11 services that create a “control culture.”
By Ed Mendlowitz
77 Ways to Wow!
How Accountability Drives Firm Success
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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How an $8.5 Million Fraud Happened
Five accounting weak points that helped hide it.
By Ed Mendlowitz
77 Ways to Wow!
In this fraud, ING, an extremely large and well-known financial services company, had approximately $8.5 million stolen from it by a single employee for a little more than four years.
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Here’s how it worked:
Standout Teams Require Everyone to Be on Board
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.
Six Ways an Internal Audit Helps
The six principal tasks required.
By Ed Mendlowitz
77 Ways to Wow!
Every business has a system of internal controls. Very small businesses likely rely on luck and the honesty of their one or two office staff. Small businesses rely on their independent auditors to check their system once a year and large companies employ one or more internal auditors on their staff.
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This post explains the internal audit process that applies to every size business. Businesses have voluminous transactions; multiple people involved, companywide; and assets that need protection.
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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?
Systems Must Be Used, Not Just Implemented
Internal controls are no good on their own.
By Ed Mendlowitz
77 Ways to Wow!
I have addressed the importance of controls when trying to get a client. But it is also important to retain the client. A good system that is not monitored is a sure way to not only lose the client but be kept awake at night.
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If you have been around long enough, you’ve experienced a theft at a business or not-for-profit organization. For nearly ever fraud I have seen, the slightest effort would have thwarted those frauds. Nowadays the only frauds I encounter are new engagements, where I try to quantify what was taken.
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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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What Internal Controls Mean to Clients
And how to explain them.
By Ed Mendlowitz
77 Ways to Wow!
What are internal controls? Auditors widely use this term. It also appears multiple times in engagement letters for audits of businesses and not-for-profits, but I do not believe many outside of the accounting profession really know or understand what internal controls are. I will try to explain it here.
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Internal controls refer to an organization’s system of deterrence, oversight, checks and balances. An illustration is where someone in a business writes and mails the checks to pay a bill. If this same person then receives the bank statement and performs the reconciliation of that account, there would not be any control or oversight on that person and whether the payment was proper and not misdirected. They are checking their own work. This is how many frauds occur.
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