Taking Your Life Back! Maintaining Work/Life Balance as a Leader

Sam Allred begin his session by discussing his observations on time management within today's CPA firm environment.  He has found that while overall charge hours are fairly constant amongst firm leaders, that total hours spent in the firm are increasing.  He also found that upper management were the least likely to take personal or vacation time off, which eventually leads to burn out in today's highly stressful CPA Firm environment. Sam felt that one of the reasons that young people are not as motivated to work in the accounting profession, may be because all they see upper management doing is grinding out hours, where work is the only priority. To make matters worse, those partners that do have a personal life, but work below 2,400 hours are seen as slackers by the "grinder" partners who have no life outside of work.  Sam also estimated that many of these grinder partners often spent 60% to 80% of their time on tasks they were comfortable doing, but which could easily have been done by someone at a lower staff level.  On top of that he quoted W. Edwards Deming stating that "the average American worker has fifty interruptions a day, of which seventy percent have nothing to do with work" causing many firm leaders to work late or take work home to get projects done, which impacts their personal lives negatively.  He felt these constant interruptions break overall concentration, reduce problem-solving skills, stifle individual creativity and keep firm leaders working at a crisis management level, so these leaders seldom resolve issues below a surface level.

Sam stated the first step to improving personal work/life balance is for the leader to recognize they ave a problem which he highlighted with the following listing of indicators:

• You have an overflowing email inbox that is never under 100 emails and you constantly feel you have to check and respond to both email and voicemail

• Your work style is making everyone around you miserable

• You fail to do what you say you will do and let others down regularly on projects

• You miss important family events regularly

• You start many more projects than you can finish and you can't remember the last time you were actually caught up with work

• You feel stressed out or guilty when you take personal time off

• You feel pressure to do work-related tasks, even when at home

• You feel that work is your top hobby

If many of these indicators apply to you, it may be time to reconsider your work/life balance. He then provided a number of ideas that leaders could implement to improve this work/life balance:

1. Tips for Better Time Management: Sam suggested firms establish a culture of personal productivity time where everyone blocks hours out to focus on specific project time without interruptions. Each of us has an optimum time of day when we work at our best so we should schedule our most important projects during that time.  Sam recommends that individuals turn of email notifications and get in the habit of checking email only at specific scheduled times of the day to better focus on the project at hand.

2. Reduce Things that Waste Time:  Owners need to identify those items that eat up a lot of time without providing value to anyone including items such as telephone conversations/callbacks, interruptions and unexpected visitors, being poorly organized and not planning the day/engagements, procrastinating on projects, daydreaming, and socializing during the core business day.

3. Spend More Time in Quadrant II: Individuals need to spend more time investing in their own future, broadening their knowledge and production capabilities.  They must spend time on long range planning and thinking how they can anticipate issues and minimize future problems so this time should be proactively scheduled.

4. Learn to Manage Email: Sam recommended that everyone read Sally McGhee's book "Take Back Your Life" which has tips on managing email as well as how to control voice mail.

5. Improve Partner Meetings: Use meeting time to make decisions, create tasks and designate accountability rather than on listening to reports or gathering input, as these items should be done outside of meeting time.

6. Set PTO Goal: Without proactive plan, you will never take time off, so Sam recommends scheduling family and personnel events well in advance on your calendar in the office.

7. Consider Partner Sabbaticals:  Sam's firm has mandatory sabbaticals and has found they are effective for recharging energy levels, providing time to take on new challenges or set new goals, and that they promote a team concept to servicing clients as the team keeps the client serviced while the partner is away.

8. Become a Master Teacher: Sam also felt it was critical to take time to teach other team members how to do what they need to do, so they are less reliant on others to get things done.  When problems arise, he felt that the role of leaders is to ask the individual what they think should be done to resolve the problem so the individual experiences the personal growth and satisfaction associated with it.

Managing the 21st Century Accounting firm

Bob Bunting started his presentation by discussing three types of leaders he sees within firms: Administrators that are superintendents to the firm, Managers that focus on controlling the firm, and Leaders that proactively direct the future of the firm.  He stated that in today's competitive environment, good leaders must implement their vision quickly in four years, compared to the ten to fifteen years that their predecessors had.  He also felt that many of today's "great" partners are regarded as such because of the exceptional business climate we have been in for the past decade.  Any downturn in the economy will most likely turn them into mediocre partners as they have not had to develop the skills to build business and manage clients during difficult times which are part of the normal business cycle.

He broke CPA businesses into two types: Consortiums and Firms.   While firms should strive to be professional businesses, many firms today are consortiums of individual practices which can be identified by the following criteria:

Bob then went on to discuss core issues impacting the profession according to the PCPS MAP Issues survey which listed "finding and keeping qualified staff" as the number one issue since 1997 and "succession planning," which has been on the list for the past eight years.  He then asked attendees who they felt was more important to the firm, your people or your clients?  While many people answered "your clients" he felt strongly that firms should take care of their best people, which he defined as those that served clients well, set a positive example to others, consistently attracted new clients and other new hires, and which he called the "guarantors of future value."  Bob pointed that your best people were not "stars," "prima donnas," or "elitists," but instead, those with good work ethic and leadership potential.  He asked the audience to think about why someone would come to work for your firm, and while everyone states they are a nice place to work, are flexible, have interesting work and provide early responsibility, the differentiating firms have a strong vision, mission, and values, and treat employees as a critical component of the future.  Bob felt it was very important for employees to have a "cult-like" commitment to the firms goals if they want to be successful.

He then went on to describe how it should be management's responsibility to recruit the best in the marketplace and ways to identify candidates.  Often times that person is the one in the competing firm that is regularly winning engagements over your firm.  When you bring in someone from another firm or niche, often times they know other people with specialized skills that you should try to bring onboard.  These people are also often those you meet at leading industry conferences, CPE courses, or that you serve on Boards with, and are probably already calling on your clients.  Bob felt it was also important to do whatever is necessary to keep great employees and to keep in touch with those "best" employees that moved away for various reasons, but someday might consider coming back.  Within Moss Adams, he found that the right  type of people would not respond to want ads, approaches from headhunters or competitive peers, or correspond with HR departments; but that they would respond to a direct approach from a firm leader.  Bob stated that candidates would respond to a firm that had a strong vision where that person could play a central role, which was more important than what they currently had at their firm.  He also said it was important to offer up recognition of what that individual had already accomplished and a better overall financial package to close the deal.

Bob then went on to discuss the importance of focusing on your "Hedgehog Clients" that are those clients that you want to work with and can pay your fees based on specific measurable criteria such as minimum volume and realization.  To make sure the partners support these goals the compensation structure is designed to reward those people that increase the number of Hedgehog clients the firm has targeted and he suggested that the firm "bang the gong" whenever a new Hedgehog client is added in a manner that everyone knows the firm is growing.  He the discussed the importance of firm metrics and constantly improving service delivery speed before concluding his session.

Roman H. Kepczyk, then closed the conference with a presentation on today's Digital Edge that highlighted digital best practices impacting every part of the practice, which we strive to share with readers at every opportunity possible.  Look to future ExSTRM Alerts to find out more.