Fulfilling your Succession Plans & Promising Staff’s Career Goals
Growing the partners of tomorrow & overcoming obstacles on the pathway to partnership
If succession planning, coaching and growing the leaders of tomorrow into senior management and partnership in your firm is part of your job, you should be reading this.
Similarly, if you aspire to become a senior manager or partner yourself, you should be reading this.
Getting Started with Long-Term Career Planning
Even for aspiring staff with clear long-term career goals, the journey from where they are today to the point where they are confidently welcomed into senior roles is going to take time. For staff who don’t recognize their latent potential to become effective leaders, it’s going to take even longer, but in a world where accounting talent is in short supply, the need to grow future leaders from your existing team is greater than ever, but where to start?
As most accounting people relate well to measurements, plans and processes, the easiest way to get started is by measuring where team members are right now, comparing those measurements against a desired future-state, identifying the gaps between these points and agreeing long-term coaching plans to bridge those gaps.
What should you measure and how?
Personality. What defines an effective partner, manager or leader is largely down to how they interact with others, solve problems, make decisions, deal with change and cope with emotionally tough situations.
Personality is best measured with reliable and valid personality questionnaires. How about one that is designed specifically for accountants in a changing world of accounting, with modules wholly targeted on assisting aspirational people reach their career goals by identifying their current personality preferences, matching them against the Ideal Profile for Partners and providing a career development plan to bridge the gap? We’ve got the only one on the market, so we can help with that.
OK, I’ve got the measurements. Now what?
Focus on the gaps between where your staff member sees themselves now and where their desired future-state as a flourishing partner needs them to be, keeping front of mind that this measurement isn’t a tool to extinguish someone’s career goals, but rather a starting point to sit down with them and begin mapping out their career development journey to get them where they want to be.
Personality traits shift over time and are heavily influenced by someone’s work environment and content. For example, in the early stages of an accounting career, jobs require people to be highly conscientious in valuing and adhering to established polices, processes and externally imposed deadlines. Some firms require junior accountants to put work before home life with well publicized long term damaging effects on their wellbeing. A partner who retains that high conscientiousness focus runs the risk of not challenging the value of outdated policies holding the firm back or contributing to a long-hours culture that damages the firm’s employer brand to a generation who want more from life than a job.
Shifting someone’s conscientiousness personality trait to become more selective in where they apply conscientiousness and recognize its dark side is a long-term plan, typically supported by outstanding coaches and mentors who give people development opportunities challenge ‘the way things are done around here’ and make some mistakes along the way. If you don’t have those coaching and mentoring people in-house, then you will likely need to partner with coaching firms who can assist.
Is it worth it?
Aspirational staff are likely to warmly remember the firms that took the time and put in the effort to help them overcome the obstacles to their career goals. Some of them will still leave and join your competitors, but more are likely to stay and afford the development opportunities they received onto those following them up the ladder, further enhancing your employment brand to job seekers and services you can provide to your clients.
Want to get started today?
You can access the Accountant Personality Profile Questionnaire and it’s Pathway to Partnership module at this link.
Try it out on yourself before rolling it out to the rest of the team.
Any queries do get in touch.
Steve Evans | Steve founded Accountests alongside a career using his expertise in candidate testing and assessment to support employers to attract, recruit, and develop talent.