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Hello everyone and welcome to The Upstream Leader Podcast. My name’s Jeremy Clopton. Glad to be with you here today. We are talking about leadership, we are talking about responsibility, and dare I say, it’s a bit of a call-out that I may be doing just a little bit here for leaders in our profession.
I absolutely love where our profession is at in 2026. I’ve got to say there are a number of amazing things happening: We can see firms growing, we see specialization, firms moving to being advisors, taking care of their clients. Maybe they’re exploring growing, perhaps they’re merging, acquiring, taking capital partners, adopting technology. So many great things happening in our profession. But what I keep hearing—I hear it at conferences, I hear it at retreats, I hear it in one-on-one meetings—is there is still a bit of a hesitancy from existing leaders, some more experienced existing leaders, to turn over the “keys of the kingdom,” if you will, to the next generation in our profession.
And I get it. I mean, I’m a millennial. I’m an old millennial. Somebody once said a “geriatric millennial,” which frankly I don’t care for, but I’m a millennial. I get fear of the next generation. I am part of the generation that frankly so many people wanted to complain about, including our own. But when I step back and evaluate what is going on right now in our profession, for everything amazing that’s going on, I see one significant challenge that is getting in the way of so much progress. And that is leaders essentially outsourcing their responsibility to generate the next—or to develop, I should say—the next generation of partners, the next generation of leaders, to anyone other than themselves.
And look, I get it. Here at Upstream, we do leadership development. We have phenomenal—even if I am slightly biased—leadership academies. I’ve graduated from one of them when I was in public accounting. There are a number of managing partners in our profession that have gone through our leadership academies. There are a lot of other great coaches and developers of people out in the profession. There are HR departments and P & C departments and L & D departments doing amazing things in our profession. But if you’re a leader right now in public accounting, frankly probably in any other industry as well, but I’m talking to my accountants: I’ve just got to be very candid with you. If you are not taking full responsibility for your role in developing the next generation of leaders in your firm, dare I say, you are the one that is a barrier to all the great progress and growth that your firm could be achieving.
And before somebody says, wait a second, I can’t do the work for them, they have to want to develop too, let me be very clear: You can’t care more than they do. I 100% agree with that. If you care more about the next generation, and an individual, I’m talking about an individual, if you care more about that individual’s development than they do, everyone gets frustrated, that doesn’t work . So I’m not talking about making it easy and taking away all the challenges and holding their hand and pulling them along and giving them a participation trophy called leadership. I’m not advocating for that in the least. Anybody that knows me knows that is not how I operate. At the same time, you can’t sit there and say, “Well, it’s all up to them, they’ll figure it out or they won’t, but man, I just really don’t think this next generation’s got it.”
The challenge that I see right now is we’re really good at doing more work as leaders. So many leaders across our profession right now are getting caught up doing more work for their clients, and it’s well-intentioned. They’re doing a whole lot more, a whole lot faster. I don’t want you to do more faster if you’re a leader. I want you to figure out how can you use technology, how can you use leverage, how can you use all these amazing things that are creating progress in how we get work done, how can you use that to actually create more time so that you have the opportunity to develop the next generation?
We trick ourselves into thinking the further along that we get into our career, that we’re the only one that can do the work that we do. Jim Collins would advocate that we should be Level Five leaders and we should actually develop other people to do our work, do what we can do, but do it even better. I would agree with that assessment. But there is very little—I’m not going to say there’s nothing, but there is very little, generally a whole lot less than we believe—technical work that truly only one person in the firm can do. That can be delegated, that can be pushed down. We can develop the knowledge, the skills, the expertise to do that so other people can do the work. The only people in the firm that can actually develop the next generation of leaders is the current generation of leaders.
Yeah, I hope that they work incredibly hard. I hope that they have all the initiative and the drive in the world and they are pushing you outside your comfort zone to give them opportunities to do great things. But at the same time, I would encourage you, don’t offload your responsibility to find those opportunities for them, to push them, to challenge them, to help them do great things. That’s not HR’s job. That’s not L & D’s job. That’s not somebody else that, you know, does education. It’s not their job. Yes, there are resources in that, there is a ton of benefit to that. But when it comes to actually applying the skills of leadership: honing that expertise, getting in the trenches, having the experiences that truly make leaders? That starts with today’s leaders looking for opportunities to put the next generation of leaders in those situations.
Look, we can help with knowledge acquisition, but as a leader in your firm, you’re the only one that can do skill application. You can find those opportunities for them. And I get it. You’re probably thinking, “Jeremy, sounds great, love that, I’m incredibly busy right now. I don’t have time to develop the next generation.” Though I’m not going to debate how much time you do or do not have available, I would argue that if you don’t make the time to develop the next generation, the path to sustainable independence for most firms gets much, much more challenging. And it’s not the next generation’s fault. Arguably, it’s the generation that said, “We don’t have time to invest in the next one.”
And here’s the reason that I so strongly believe it is the responsibility of today’s leaders: it’s because most leaders today would say that they’re further along in their development than the current generation is at their age. There is a little bit of a bias there that I think that we all possess. What we know is that when the current leaders were developed, there weren’t all these programs and systems and checklists and efforts to develop people. Leaders in accounting firms saying, “You know what? My job is to develop the next generation. I’m going to put them in uncomfortable situations where they have to grow.” Not sink or swim. I had that conversation recently with someone: It is not sink or swim. It’s pushing somebody outside their comfort zone and being there to help them get through it when they need the help. There’s support there, there’s challenge there, there’s growth there. They’re not abandoned. If you’re a leader listening to this, you can probably name someone who has done that for you at some point in your career. I would encourage you, go be that person for somebody in your firm today. Maybe somebody outside your firm today. Maybe this isn’t just a professional thing. Maybe this is a personal thing as well. How can you develop the next generation of just awesome human beings?
And I get it: It is not necessarily the easiest thing in the world to do. People development is incredibly difficult. It is something that gets many of us outside of our comfort zone. But if you go into it caring about someone, and just deciding, “You know what, I am going to invest in them, I’m going to help them become better, I’m going to help them get closer to who they want to be,” you don’t have to be the world’s best coach to care. You don’t have to be the world’s best mentor to care. You simply have to recognize that, man, this next generation, they’ve got potential. Your generation had potential. Why wouldn’t they? Now we’ve just got to figure out how do we show up? How do we take back some of that responsibility?
If you’re looking for resources, a great book that I would recommend is The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier, The Coaching Habit. Phenomenal resource, great book. Actionable, simple, straightforward. It isn’t going to make you a world-class coach overnight. It’s going to equip you with some great questions and tools to be able to connect with people in a better way. I think there’s a lot of value to that. That’s one great thing. The other thing that I would encourage you to do, just put time on your calendar. Make time to invest in the next generation. If you don’t know who your successor is, take some time to identify that person. I tell firms a lot of times that you can’t take someone else’s job until somebody’s ready to take yours. That’s why I very strongly believe everybody in a firm, they need to know who their successor is, because until somebody’s ready to take their job and do it better, they can’t take someone else’s. And if you’re nearing the end of your career and you’re thinking, “I don’t have a job to take,” sure you do. You have the job of retirement. And the person that’s your successor, they have a really big responsibility ahead of them.
Again, I’m not advocating here that every leader makes a great coach. I’m not saying that every leader in a firm should be leading the development efforts of programs and all of these things. What I’m really saying is, before we start complaining that the next generation doesn’t have what it takes to move our profession forward, I would encourage you to take back your responsibility to ensure that you are investing in the next generation, to help them move our profession forward. We have so many great leaders, whether they’re existing leaders, senior leaders, junior leaders, up and coming leaders, we have so many great people in our profession. I absolutely hate it when I talk with a firm, or I talk with a leader that says, “The next generation, I’m just not sure,” because so often what I see is someone that’s doing a lot of work, getting a lot of things done, but unfortunately they’re not investing in their people. They care about them, but they’re not investing in them.
So that’s my encouragement to you as you leave this episode today: Find someone you can invest in. If you’re not sure about the next generation, go help them. Invest in them. Have meaningful conversations. Help them figure out who they want to be and go ensure that they’re going to be ready for what lies ahead, just like somebody did that for you early in your career.
Thanks so much for joining me on today’s episode of The Upstream Leader Podcast. If you would like to learn more, you’re welcome to connect with me on LinkedIn. You can email me at JeremyC@UpstreamAcademy.com. I’d love to have further conversations with you. If you want to learn more about legacy and hear from some amazing individuals in our profession, join us for HeadWaters, July 16th and 17th, 2026 in Chicago, Illinois. You can find information on our website, UpstreamAcademy.com. We’d love to have you there. Thanks so much for joining me today. We’ll talk to you again soon.
