Section 2
Leading Staff

What kind of people are you currently attracting to your firm? When I visit an accounting firm, I can tell a lot about its leadership by the people on its staff. The quality of the people in your organization does not depend on your human resources department or hiring process; their quality depends on you the leader. In this section, we are going to discuss building other leaders and creating a multiplier effect of leadership development within your team and firm.

In his book, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You, John Maxwell explains the law of reproduction. He says that we have a choice of either addition or multiplication. We can lead people and help them be successful, or we can raise up leaders who, in turn, will lead other leaders. So, the real question is, Are you recruiting potential leaders, or are you settling for followers?

Leaders who train, coach, and mentor followers focus on improving their weaknesses, treat everyone the same to be fair, grow by addition, and affect only the people they personally touch. Leaders who train other leaders focus on strengths, treat every person individually, grow by multiplication, and affect people far beyond their own personal sphere of influence.

In his book Wooden on Leadership, Coach John Wooden said, “Ultimately, I believe that’s what leadership is all about: helping others to achieve their own greatness by helping the organization to succeed.”

One of the crucial understandings that everyone must have when leading other people is that everyone has a different perspective. Every person you lead has a different family experience, education, and communication style. Because of these and many other differences, you cannot take a one-size-fits-all approach to leading. Steve Mayer, managing partner of Burr, Pilger & Mayer LLP in San Francisco, CA, says that you can’t make assumptions about how other people will act based on your own experiences.

I coached in a very poor area of San Francisco. About 70 of our 80 kids on the team were from the projects in the Bay Area. Many of those kids were from broken or single-parent homes. One of our kids suffered a concussion. I couldn’t reach his parents, so I drove him to the hospital. The hospital workers wouldn’t take care of him because we didn’t have the right paperwork. Finally, I located his parents out fishing on a pier. I drove out there and said, “Your son is in the hospital,” and they asked me if I would take care of him because they still wanted to fish for another hour or two. I was 17 or 18 years old and I thought, “God, not everybody grew up in the same family I did.” So, I don’t take for granted that people grew up or think like me. When I begin a relationship with a partner or client, this realization has helped me understand better where other people are coming from.

Mayer’s experience working with youth has profoundly affected his understanding of the importance of mentoring, as well. Approximately 20 years after those coaching experiences, he ran into one of his former players at a black-tie dinner for a charity. “He said, ‘Coach Mayer, I still talk about what you taught me on the football field. I played college ball and pro ball. Then, I blew out my knee, so I couldn’t play anymore, and now, I spend all my time working with underprivileged kids. It’s all because of Coach Mayer and the other coaches.’”

Many people believe that if the cause is good, then people will follow, but that is not the case. People follow good leaders first, and then, they will pursue the vision. When we have that understanding, we see how necessary it is to develop great leaders around us. When people don’t buy the vision or leader, they seek another leader. When people don’t like the leader, but they like the vision, they seek another leader. When people buy into the leader but not the vision, they keep the leader and seek a new vision. When people buy into the leader and vision, they create momentum.

The most stable and successful accounting firms have leaders who create a leadership culture. The best firms are willing to invest in their people today for a greater return tomorrow. Achievement is derived when someone is able to do for himself. Team success comes when the leaders and followers do great things together. Real significance in life and business comes when the leaders train up other leaders to carry on after they have gone.

Eventually, every leader leaves his firm. Some may step back gradually; others may do it abruptly. A huge part of a leader’s role is to prepare the next generation of leaders to carry on after he or she has left. When all is said and done, your success as a leader will not be graded by what you have done. You will be graded by how well your firm or team did after you were gone. Your lasting legacy will be judged by your succession.

In this four-chapter section, I will address the four key elements in building a great team:

▴ Teaching, coaching, and mentoring

▴ Challenging personal growth

▴ Empowerment

▴ Accountability

Teaching, Coaching, and Mentoring: Multiplying Your Leadership

Challenging Personal Growth: Leading the Whole Person

Empowerment: The Secret to Exponential Growth

Accountability: Trust but Verify

Chapter 7

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 8

Section Two: Leading Staff

As a leader, if you will concentrate your efforts in these 4 areas, you will be focused on the 20 percent of the things you can do that will get 80 percent of the results in developing great people and teams.

Everyone watches the leader. Remember when you were in high school, and you always knew the kids in the class ahead of you, but you didn’t know many in the class behind you? It’s the same concept. When you are the team or firm leader, everything you do provides a teaching moment. How seriously do you regard this role? A good leader will recognize his or her teaching power and can begin to coach others in specific skills related to running an accounting business. Great leaders select a few future leaders for personal mentoring. Mentoring is the highest form of teaching because it extends outside the confines of the everyday work life of an accountant.

The best leaders are great at building long-lasting relationships. They know that you must touch people emotionally before moving people into action. Bill Hubly, founder and managing principal of Corbett, Duncan & Hubly, PC, believes, “As a leader, you live in a glass house, and you need to set the right example as a leader every day. That’s critical if you expect other people to develop leadership skills because they’re watching you and learning from what you do.”

Personal growth is the essential ingredient for young accountants to grow into maturity. Personal growth is not professional growth. It has nothing to do with becoming a better accountant. Personal growth has everything to do with the emotional intelligence, social intelligence, and relationship ability of people. When you truly care about your team members, you will be willing to risk the relationship with them to help them grow. If you don’t care, then you can avoid the conflict by not challenging them, and they will not mature. Rather than reacting negatively to personal growth challenges, rising leaders will welcome it. As a leader, your role is to challenge your staff members to be the best they can be both professionally and personally.

Bill Haller, managing partner of the national firm CapinCrouse LLP in Indianapolis, IN, takes the personal growth of his team members seriously.

I think loving your employees means that you are going to have the patience, the honesty, and the responsibility to make sure that you do what’s right for them. Sometimes, that might be telling them no. Once a month, the partners have a prayer meeting where we pray for our staff and our clients. Our directors and managers get together on a phone call around the country to do the same thing. Our commitment to CapinCrouse staff is we pray for them, we care about their families, and we care a lot about their careers.

For a leader to grow others and build a strong team, he or she must delegate authority and risk to others. Empowerment combines all the pluses of the micromanager and abandonment leader with none of the negatives. Empowerment allows you to assess the risk in the assignment with the training and experience of the staff member and then select an empowering strategy that works best in each situation.

Finally, holding staff members accountable for great performance is a key ingredient in successful leadership. Without accountability, you can achieve only a 50/50 chance of success, even with the most dedicated and talented work force. In this challenging era of business, 50/50 is not enough and will not make you great. In chapter 8, I will build a case for accountability and then provide some power tools to help you succeed.

Leader Profile: Frank K. Ross, CPA, director of Howard University School of Business Center for Accounting Education in Washington, D.C.

When he first arrived in New York, Frank Ross was dazzled by the experience of immigrating from St. Kitts. Over the next 40 years, Frank developed great leadership skills in himself and thousands of others who worked alongside him. To get a real sense of this American leader, you must read his book Quiet Guys Can Do Great Things, Too: A Black Accountant’s Success Story. As the first black partner at Peat Marwick (now KPMG LLP), he endured verbal abuse from some white partners, but Frank set an example for everyone by his personal leadership.

Frank points to the mentorship of several partners who challenged him to be the best he could be. Sy Bohrer and Jim Powers mentored him in both technical and client service skills and taught him many valuable leadership lessons that he passed on to thousands of up-and-coming KPMG LLP team members and partners.

Frank rose to become a member of KPMG LLP’s board of directors and the chairman of the board of the KPMG Foundation. After a stint in the New York office, he was selected as the mid-Atlantic area managing partner for audit and risk advisory services and managing partner of the Washington, DC, office. In December 2003, he retired from KPMG LLP after more than 38 years of service. Today, Frank is the director of the Howard University School of Business Center for Accounting Education and a visiting professor of accounting, teaching auditing and ethics.

In 1968, Ross was one of the 9 cofounders and the first president of the National Association of Black Accountants (NABA). His personal leadership has been instrumental in the growth of NABA to more than 5,000 members today. Frank’s business life exemplified mentoring, challenging personal growth, empowerment, and accountability.

Richard D. Parsons, chairman and CEO of Time Warner, Inc., says

As a West Indian immigrant, Frank and his family took a giant leap of faith when they decided to make the journey to America. People of color have always had unique obstacles to overcome as they strove to make a way for themselves in this country. But, imagine a young Frank K. Ross, unfamiliar with either the white or black cultures of America in the 1950s, living in Yonkers, plunged into the thick of the civil rights movement, and trying to become one of the first African Americans to make it in the old boy world of corporate accounting.

Elaine Hart, Frank’s former administrative assistant, recalled one such incident in particular

There was one group of new hires that came in, including quite a few African Americans, one year. And I don’t know what it was about this group, but whenever things didn’t go their way, they would use the race card. They expected that because Frank Ross was black, he would support them, but he wouldn’t. At first, I wondered why Frank didn’t step up for them, too.

After we talked, I fully understood his rationale. He told me they were not holding up their end of the bargain. He had had meetings with them, and their work was substandard. One young man came in and talked with him. Frank told him he couldn’t use the race card every time things don’t go the way he wants. “Before pulling the race card,” he said, “make sure it’s a race issue.” In this case, the youngster simply wasn’t performing up to the firm’s expectations and then questioned why he wasn’t getting the good clients. But when he was given the good clients, he wasn’t performing.

The advice Frank gave him was, “You will always be under the microscope in corporate America. The only way you’ll make it in this environment is to consistently cross every T and dot every I, in spite of what everyone else does or gets away with not doing.” He told him that he had been given an opportunity that few people got and that if he blew it, it would follow him.

It is very impressive to say that you work at KPMG. It is so important coming into a place like this to have a mentor, and Frank served as a mentor for blacks and whites. He tried to work with that group of young people and impress upon them that theirs wouldn’t be an easy job but that once they proved themselves it gets a lot easier. Even now, Frank serves as a mentor to a lot of people in this field, and he has helped a lot of people’s careers.

Frank is a graduate of Long Island University, where he earned a bachelor’s of science in accounting and an MBA. He received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Long Island University in 1998 and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree in 2001. In October 2008, Accounting Today named Frank to its 2008 list of the 100 most influential people in accounting.

Frank is a board member of Pepco Holdings, Inc., and Cohen & Steers mutual funds group. In addition, he currently serves on the board of the following not-forprofit organizations: Hoop Dreams Scholarship Fund (chairman of the board), the Greater Washington Urban League (treasurer), and the Howard University Chartered Middle School of Mathematics and Science (treasurer).

Leading staff members depends on your own dedication to self-knowledge, trustworthiness, critical thinking, preparation, and self-discipline. You must first lead yourself, and then, you can successfully employ the challenges of teaching, coaching, and mentoring; personal growth; empowering; and holding staff members accountable.

What is the payoff for you? The benefits that you will receive from growing other leaders are immeasurable. Not only will your team members lighten your burden today, but they will also revere you tomorrow. Your influence will reverberate through the next generations of leaders, much like the impact that Herb Kelleher, the beloved former CEO of Southwest Airlines, has had. Herb Kelleher was a man who could connect with people and build relationships. I cut this full-page ad out of USA Today more than 10 years ago:

Thanks Herb

For remembering every one of our names.

For supporting the Ronald McDonald House.

For helping load baggage on Thanksgiving.

For giving everyone a kiss (and we mean everyone).

For listening.

For running the only profitable major airline.

For singing at our holiday party.

For singing only once a year.

For letting us wear shorts and sneakers to work.

For golfing at the LUV Classic with only one club.

For outtalking Sam Donaldson.

For riding your Harley Davidson into Southwest Headquarters.

For being a friend, not just a boss.

Happy Boss’s Day from Each One of Your 16,000 Employees.

When a leader has built a relationship with his or her people, you can see it in the way that the team performs. Although vision sets the direction of your firm, and relationships set the culture, the staff members and their talents determine the potential of the organization. Ultimately, the leadership of those staff members determines the success of the accounting firm.

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