What are The Biggest Obstacles on Your Pathway to Partnership?

Every credible personality assessment explores conscientiousness, with higher scorers tending to prefer to be reliable, prudent, dependable people who value planning and organising, structure, adhere to established policies and processes and not only meet deadlines, but do so with quality output to meet their high personal standards. 

Unsurprisingly, conscientious people are prized by accounting firms when they are hiring people to do accounting jobs where immovable external deadlines and quality output are a must-have. 

But every personality trait has a dark-side, and when conscientious accountants start moving upwards through the business to the point where they are managing others and affecting organisational culture, the dark side of conscientiousness can manifest itself in ways such as: 

• Sticking with policies and processes that have long outlived their usefulness
  
  
• Not taking reasonable shortcuts to get the same result
  
  
• And the big one – always business before pleasure.  Long hours, going in on the weekend, expecting the same of their team and steadily contributing to a culture that is the absolute opposite of what 20 – 40 year olds tell us they want from their work life. 

So when I talk about Conscientiousness done differently, it’s about not letting the immovable deadlines and quality expectations slip, but questioning the value of the way things are done around here to see if they’re still adding value and being acutely aware of whether the way you work is negatively affecting your businesses ‘employer of choice’ brand in a market that is perpetually short of accounting talent. 

Being good at accounting tasks requires forensic levels of checking, verification and not taking information at face value.  Gullible accountants don’t tend to be viewed favourably by their employers when they’re submitting flimsy accounts manipulated by clients who notice they’re getting away with it. 

So, employers tend to hire accountants with a healthy degree of suspicion to perform the accounting tasks, but what happens when these people start moving up through the business and managing teams of their own? 

That healthy degree of suspicion manifests itself in struggling to delegate, needing to verify and check everything team members do.  Also called micro-managing and you don’t read to many positive things about that. 

The transition towards partnership often requires coaching on getting comfortable with delegation to grow the careers of those in your team, allowing them to make mistakes that don’t harm the business and affording opportunities to others. 

This can be particularly acute in people with high Self-Discipline scores who expect perfectionism from others when competent is good enough. 

When we developed our Accountants Personality Profile Questionnaire (APPQ), we placed a heavy emphasis on the traits linked to EI so employers of accountants get a good look at whether their emerging leaders are likely to be attuned to their colleagues and clients and positively contribute to a people-first culture that staff want to be a part of and candidates want to join. 

EI isn’t a personality trait on its own, but rather a combination of several traits found in credible Big-5/OCEAN model personality assessments, including our APPQ. 

These include the Warmth scale which is all about how interested somebody is in other people, typically experienced by others as remembering personal details and getting to know their colleagues to the point where people walk away from interactions with a sense that that person is genuinely interested in them. 

Affiliation is the Team-Working trait, with higher scorers tending to be more engaged with team-based working environments, which has positive connotations in EI, but a coaching balancing act to maintain a degree of separation for senior managers 

EI is inextricably linked to the Trusting trait I just described above in people who trust the abilities and intentions of team members and likely to develop a culture of career progression through delegation 

Openness in Big5/OCEAN PQ’s is mostly about Communications Style, with high scorers tending to consider the weight of their words before they speak them, applying tact and diplomacy to sensitive communications and careful not to create a negative impression.  
 

Assertion and Social Boldness fall under the Emotional Intelligence setting too, but I’m going to address them separately in a moment. 

So from a coaching perspective, EI can be developed, but it’s a long-term career development project covering a multitude of personality traits that combine to make up EI.

I want you to think for a moment about the accountants in your team.  Which ones are trusted and competent at their jobs, well and truly able to move up through the business, but just don’t back themselves in having the self-belief to put themselves forward? 

How do you suppose they got to that conclusion?  Toxic bosses undermining them, useless parents reminding them they weren’t as smart as their siblings, vindictive teachers, dreadful people they thought were friends?   

The list goes on, but the result is a latent pool of talent who could be fulfilling your succession plan but won’t put themselves forward because they fear the real or imagined ghosts of all their past failures will come back to haunt them. 

Resilience-based coaching to address emotional stability and apprehension is a long-term programme that may well need external expertise but imagine how staff who come out the other side will feel about your business and the people who helped them.  And not just the individuals, but their colleagues who see your business improve the wellbeing of their colleagues and facilitate their career progression and positively affect team-wide motivation, retention and fulfilling succession plans. 

I’d venture to suggest it would make you feel pretty good too.   

The further up the business accountants move, the more they get exposed to situations and people with whom they need to assert themselves with a convincing degree of self-confidence. 

Accounting staff who have up until now focused on providing great customer service and avoiding conflict can find themselves facing situations such as: 

• Clients who may coerce them to do something unethical
  
  
• Addressing conflict with staff before toxicity spreads among the team
  
  
• Getting unexpectedly put in the spotlight at client meetings or events
  
  
• Initiating action and Driving for results when managing multiple projects with competing deadlines 
  
  

All these things become a greater part of an aspiring accountants expectations and coaching around becoming comfortable with these situations when much of your early career has been back-office support should be an early coaching priority. 

From a personality perspective, the sixth most commonly recurring obstacle on the Pathway to Partnership is the shift away from focusing on the operational detail of completing accounts which makes up so much of an accounting job towards thinking strategically and creatively by focusing on what could be rather than the details in front of you. 

In a changing world of accounting where tasks of the past won’t provide revenue in the future, aspiring partners need to think creatively about different revenue streams and strategically to be ahead of the curve in where the profession is going. 

How do you find out if these obstacles are in the way of your aspiring accountants and your businesses succession plan? 

Much more easily than you might think. 

Completing an APPQ Pathway to Partnership assessment takes about 15 minutes, resulting in an instantly generated report comparing participants against the Ideal Profile of Partners and Senior Managers in a range of accounting and professional services firms. 

Where significant gaps exist between the participant’s profile and the Ideal Profile for partners, targeted training, coaching and development recommendations are given for the participant to use with their manager in overcoming each obstacle. 

You can join the growing stream of people developing meaningful and rewarding accounting careers with this simple click.