do they have these attributes?
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?
more on edge leadership: assessing your firm | the 4 traits of great cpa leaders | why leaders must ensure clarity | incremental vs. exceptional success | do you lead or just manage? | managing vs. leading | is your leadership team at the edge? | 6 leadership challenges through covid and beyond | edge leaders share 7 strengths | leadership must drive culture | leading from the edge
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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.
a good place to start is assessing how well you are performing against the goals that were established for you. your goals should reflect the above four key attributes plus the financial performance of the firm, the success against the implementation of the strategic plan and finally, the culture of the firm.
“if your actions create a legacy that inspires others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are an excellent leader.” – dolly parton, entertainer
a challenging aspect of assessing your leadership is that for the most part the characteristics against which you will be measured are more subjective – other than financial performance. most of the factors relating to your performance rest in the softer, more subjective attributes. how do you assess your team building or your success as a communicator, for example?
there are some relatively routine methods that are used in many firms, such as self-assessments, upward evaluations and informal feedback from those reporting to you, as well as individuals whose judgment you trust. each is good at providing some insights, but even taken together, are they good enough to provide an insightful look into your performance as the firm leader?
one client firm leader i worked with believed that as long as the firm hit its profit goal and there were no major upheavals in the firm, he did his job well. in a certain type of firm culture, that simplistic view makes sense. however, if the overarching goal is to build a sustainable, standout, high-performing firm, that simplistic view doesn’t work.
why are the above four key attributes so critical in assessing your leadership? how can you assess your leadership against each of the attributes? do you need to score high on all four to be a great edge leader? all good questions.
let’s start with a deeper dive into the four attributes and why they are critical for a great edge leader.
visionary: a great edge leader is visionary and has a clear and impactful vision about where the firm will be in four or five years. center leaders get caught up in today, this quarter, this fiscal year, and end up making good tactical decisions, but perform poorly on the more critical strategic decisions. vision does not mean having some great flowery statement. it means having clarity about where the firm needs to be in four to five years and being able to inspire and motivate the entire firm to see, believe and achieve that vision.
one of my clients had a clear vision of where he wanted the firm to be in five years. his vision was fairly simple and mostly financial in nature:
- achieve $100 million in revenue and net profit of 35 percent,
- build the firm on multiple pillars of revenue, and finally
- be listed among the top 50 firms in accounting today.
at the time this vision was articulated to the partners, the firm was doing $35 million in revenue and generating 22 percent profitability, so it was a big lift. more partners were skeptical, but this edge leader knew it was the right vision for the firm, and his challenge was to inspire and motivate every person in the firm to believe in and share this vision. this vision was achieved in four years, which was accomplished through hard work, with some bumps along the way, but persistence in the vision and an unending confidence by the edge leader in all his communications and messaging. key to the success this firm and its edge leader achieved were the remaining three attributes below.
team builder: no edge leader can succeed without a talented, motivated and skilled leadership team. every person the firm leader chooses for the leadership team will either make the leadership team better or worse, and therefore make the firm leader better or worse. edge leaders select members of their leadership team with care and a good understanding of the talent and skills each leader needs to be effective. the leadership team selected will reflect on how the edge leader is viewed as a leader, so making sure the right people are selected is an area the edge leader must focus on. the leadership team selected is a strong indicator of how well the edge leader is doing as the firm leader.
a great edge leader understands that without a great team, the firm will never achieve great results.
“you have to let the right ones in and get the wrong ones out.” – steve feron, leader of johnson o’connor
once the right leadership team is in place, the edge leader can focus on the longer-term vision and leading the firm with a comfortable reliance on the leadership team to take care of the day-to-day tactical issues.
great communicator: another skill that all edge leaders have is their ability to communicate. an edge leader is able
- to communicate with the leadership team and the entire firm to motivate and inspire everyone,
- to keep everyone focused on the game plan and firm goals, and
- to provide coaching when needed to help a team member improve their performance.
the edge leader ensures that each and every member of the leadership team always knows where they stand, what they need to do to improve and how they can help other members of the team and the firm succeed.
communication with the entire firm is a key factor in the overall health of the firm. the edge leader communicates the vision of the firm, how the firm is doing, what is working, what needs to improve. the edge leader accepts the responsibility to motivate everyone, recognize their achievements, and communicates through their filters and not his – i.e., what is important to them.
center leaders very often don’t value meaningful transparency with the team and with the rest of the firm. center leaders tend to rely on a very small circle within the firm and are more comfortable communicating and sharing information within this circle. center leaders tend to limit their communication to the broader firm and to those outside their circle by sharing limited firm information at annual town hall meetings. center leaders see communication as a chore, whereas edge leaders see it as a responsibility.
client-centric: to become a standout, high-performing firm, leadership must drive, without exception, a culture that puts the client first within a client-centric business model. firms with center leaders tend to pay lip service to client service and do little to stand out from the crowd in terms of how client service is actually delivered. edge leaders, by contrast, preach and promote a client-first mentality, at all levels of the firm. edge leaders are the voice of client-centricity. every process within the firm, from accounting to client service delivery, is focused first and foremost on the firm’s clients, what they want and need, what they expect from the firm, and finally, creating a mindset focused on value-added services relevant to each client’s success. the edge leader communicates to everyone that delivering value in every aspect of servicing clients must be as normal for each member of the firm as brushing their teeth in the morning.
center leaders think of and preach value-added services but do little to instill that mindset in the partners and staff. edge leaders believe that adding value should not be seen as something extra you do for a client, but as a basic aspect of how the firm services its clients.
“our responsibility to clients is to provide value. it’s not a value-added issue and for too many it has evolved into being an exclusionary event rather than the norm.” – ron weiner, leader of perelson weiner llp
if you look outside of professional services, amazon presents a perfect model for client-centricity. every aspect of amazon’s operational model is built for creating and delivering an exceptional client experience.
amazon ceo jeff bezos sums it up pretty well: “the most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. our goal is to be earth’s most customer-centric company.”
how does the concept of firm-first correlate with client-centricity? firm-first reflects the need for every member of the firm to act in all ways as a member of the team and not as an individual. client-centricity reflects how the firm’s actions, processes and focus are on maximizing the client experience.
assessing your leadership
so back to the question of how you assess your leadership.
self-assessment: first, no one knows better than you if you are doing a great job leading the firm. with that said, every one of us tends to be a bit more lenient when self-assessing. there are 12 questions edge leaders can ask themselves as part of a self-assessment providing good insights on their leadership. you should add any questions not listed below that relate to specific goals you agreed to at the beginning of the year or issues specific to your firm.
- what was the overall financial performance of the firm?
- what was the client churn rate?
- what was your success in achieving the strategic objectives for the year?
- what were the employee turnover and recruitment statistics, and were they acceptable?
- how did your leadership team perform against their objectives?
- how many team members did you personally help make a difference in their success? how?
- how many marquee client meetings did you have?
- what actions did you take to support the firm’s vision, mission and core values?
- did you take steps to improve your skills as a leader, coach and mentor?
- what advice do you think your leadership team would give you on your performance as the firm’s leader?
- how did you perform against each goal that was agreed to at the beginning of the year (if not addressed above)?
- what improvement goals would you give yourself for the coming year and why?
take the time to answer the above questions and then review them with someone whose judgment you trust (e.g., another partner, a coach, another firm leader). take stock of the self-assessment and the feedback, then take a breath and develop your own self-development plan.
never, never be satisfied with where you are at and with your effectiveness as an edge leader; learning is a constant when you are leading any organization. also, never be satisfied with where the firm is at or how your team is performing. edge leaders consistently push themselves and their organizations to higher levels of performance.
“nothing ever moves fast enough. i am never satisfied with where i am at, the firm’s performance, how quickly we can adapt to change.” – jim pitrat, leader of singer lewak
upward evaluation: this is a great source of more objective feedback on your leadership performance. an upward evaluation does not have to be complicated; in fact, the simpler the better. as the firm leader, list up to 10 areas where you want feedback from your team, and do not make the feedback confidential. as an edge leader, you have already built the trust in your leadership so your team should be comfortable providing constructive feedback to you. don’t get defensive; take the opportunity to learn from the feedback. a great step in this process that will reflect on your edge leadership is to meet with your team to review their upward evaluation, and what actions you are taking as a result. that’s a great message to send to your team about how you value them and their input.
performance evaluation: listening to your performance evaluation against your goals is the third piece of evaluating your leadership. when goals are set at the beginning of the year, someone is charged with evaluating how you performed against those goals. in larger firms, it might be the executive committee. in smaller firms, it might be a small group of partners or even the entire partner group. the point is that whoever is conducting your performance evaluation should provide you with constructive feedback that you can use to modify your future actions, to make you a better edge leader. it is important that you show respect and that you listen to the feedback. if you don’t agree with an aspect of the feedback, it’s important that you explain why, so those who provided you the feedback understand that you did in fact listen even if you did not agree. listening does not mean you must agree with everything that is said; it means you heard what was said, evaluated it and made a thoughtful decision.
as the leader, your performance and actions are what everyone sees and responds to. it is a powerful message of your edge leadership confidence to review your overall performance for the year and your personal development plan with the entire firm when you review the firm’s performance for the year via town hall meeting, webinar, etc. exhibiting the confidence to share your performance evaluation and development plan with the entire firm is priceless and will reflect a leader who
- is confident in his leadership,
- accepts the responsibility for self-improvement and
- is someone who values listening and feedback.
as the leader of the firm, it is important to always be looking for ways to improve your performance and to communicate to the entire firm that improving performance and learning go hand-in-hand with creating a standout professional – a standout team – a standout firm.
“my number two responsibility is continuously learning the job.” – glenn friedman, leader of pragermetis