Episode 79:

Hello everyone, and welcome to The Upstream Leader. We have got a fun conversation today. As so many leaders in our profession and really in all professions know, we need people to act like professionals. And for whatever reason, it seems like it’s a bit of a challenge sometimes to find those individuals that just roll right into the firm and understand how to be a professional day one. So for this conversation, I have with me the managing partner of SKC & Co., Sarah Krom, and she is passionate about this topic. And Sarah, I’m glad to have you for this conversation.

Hi, Jeremy. I’m so happy to be here.

It’s going to be fun. It’s funny, we were just talking before we hit record that it doesn’t feel like we used to have to teach this, but here we are talking about, how do we teach people to be professionals. Before we do though, I’m going to start off with a question that I start every guest with and that is, how did you become the leader that you are today?

So many ways I could answer that question. I guess the simplest way to answer it is I never really gave up, and I never really accepted no as an answer. And so just to provide a little color to that, I knew very early in my, I guess it must’ve been my high school career, that I liked being a big fish in a little pond, because that obviously impacted where I decided to go to school, for college, and, you know, ultimately where I worked as an intern and ultimately where I landed, you know, my first job after graduation.

So I guess that realization sort of set me on a path of where to go. So I went to a smaller school, you know, I went to a couple of smaller firms as an intern while I was in school, and I landed at a 25-person firm right after college, one of the firms I had interned with. And I was very passionate about the profession and about growing there. Their model was a little bit more growth by acquisition than I was excited about, I guess, in my early 20s because, you know, right out of the gate when I graduated with my degree in accounting and passed my CPA exam, I was on the path, I wanted to be a partner. I knew that very early on. And when they started to acquire firms, you know, I was there for six years, and by the time I left, they went from being 25 people to 75 people, from being six partners to being 13 partners, and for me, I looked around at that point, I was in my late 20s and I thought, well, there’s less and less room for me up at the top at this point.

So that was part of the reason, you know, why I left and looked around for a while and ultimately landed 15 years ago now at SKC, where I am. And so I started here and it was very much, I guess, an interesting sort of journey to get to partner. I had met with our founder as a 90 day check-in after I started and I told him I was bored.

Always a fun conversation starter!

I don’t think anybody had ever said that to him, but you know, the typical 90 day check-in, how’s it going? You know, what are you experiencing? Any feedback? And my feedback was, I was kind of bored. So he, you know, he had to process that, and he came back to me a couple of days, maybe a week or so later, and asked me how I felt about, you know, taking over some of the operations of the firm, some of the IT of the firm. Of course, again, my degree is in accounting, I know nothing about IT, but I didn’t want to say no. So I said yes to everything that was offered, and you know, managed my way through it, learned a lot, figured a lot out on the fly, made mistakes and learned from those as well.

Ultimately, I, I guess ascended to the director of operations role here. And in 2015, I made partner. In 2016, I made managing partner. You know, people refer to things sometimes as a grind and it was not that at all. I mean, for me, it was a journey and an experience and I loved every minute of it to get to where I wanted to be, which was, you know, partner of a CPA firm, let alone managing partner. So now it’s been almost eight years, nine years, maybe that I’ve held this role and the journey continues, and I still love it every single day with my two other partners that I have now.

That is so awesome. And I want to point out for our guests, Sarah said that she is a big fish in a little pond. Let’s be honest. You’re also a big fish in a big pond, because Forbes named you one of America’s Top 200 CPAs and that’s a big, that’s like an ocean of individuals to be selected from. And that goes, I would say largely to your drive and ambition. You said right out of the gate, you knew what you wanted to do, and you wanted to make a difference. And I think that is so awesome that, you know, taking that approach of, I want to be, you know, the big fish in the little pond and I want to keep making a difference and seeking out small firms with which to make that difference, yet you’re up there at the top of the profession. And that is really a testament to the fact that it didn’t feel like a grind, but it feels like an awesome journey that you’re on.

And I would say that that journey probably explains why we kind of joke around sometimes, it doesn’t feel like we should have to teach people how to be professionals because. You know, I was similar, right? I got into public accounting, like, all right, I want to be a partner. And, you know, you say that, or you’re bored that early on in your career, and people are like, “Oh boy, one of those.” And it’s like, no, like, this is a good thing. We can harness this. This can be positive, and you can get to somewhere great.

So as you said, managing partner, you’ve got two other partners and your firm is one that really is, I would say progressive in the fact that you want your people to be advisors. And in that, you’ve got to teach people that aren’t necessarily day one saying, “Hey, I’m,” or day 90 saying, “Hey, I’m bored. I want more. I want more. I want more,” how are you addressing that? And I guess, when did you realize, man, we’ve got to teach professionalism instead of just saying, why can’t we hire more people that are professionals? When did that—what happened?

So. I don’t want to, I mean, I guess I’m going to do this anyway. I really don’t want to blame it on COVID, but I feel like that’s where it started from, or maybe that’s where I noticed it from, you know, when we had a couple of classes of interns and entry levels come through in the last maybe three to four years, which of course, you know, encapsulates the COVID timeframe, we were just realizing from, you know, an office functionality standpoint that there were some, you know, key as we’ve typically termed “soft skills” that were missing. And historically our hiring practice has always been find the right attitude, right? Find the person who is the go getter, find the person who is passionate, find the person that is going above and beyond and not just  in school doing coursework, but also volunteering or also doing community service or work or sports or what have you. You know, we can teach the technical stuff as long as we’ve got somebody who’s a superstar, a rising star, with a great attitude, we can teach the technical.

Well, as much as that’s still true, what we found with some of the last new classes of interns and entry levels is that now we also have to teach some of the basic, I call it basic office skills. I sarcastically call it how to be an adult in an office.

Which I love.

Well, I’m glad you do. I don’t know if everybody does. And you know, it’s just, it dawned on us that, all right, well, we can choose either to remedy this somehow, as an organization, as a firm, or we can choose to continue to keep complaining about this generation, COVID, the schools, the curriculum, the profession, whatever you want to blame it on. And we just got to the point where we said, all right, what is our solution going to be to this for the people that we bring in, because this may not go away, this may not just be a byproduct of, you know, colleges that were remote during COVID or high schools that were remote during COVID. This could be sort of a new thing. I don’t know. Maybe it’s related to technology and our shorter attention spans or what have you. Lack of communication face to face with, you know, email and even, you know, texting and instant messaging and all of that.

But you know, we wanted to take a different approach and say, we’ve got to solve this for us because we’re going to have to continue hiring interns and entry levels. And we got to have a framework around what it means to be an adult in the office beyond just being able to do the technical accounting work.

Yeah. How did you get partners and more experienced folks in the office on board with this, and the idea that we’ve got to teach the basics rather than just, well, they should just do this? How did you get them on board with that? I would imagine that took a little bit of effort to convince them.

You know, we had had so many—so many, I mean, we’re a firm of 25. So we had three or four instances of individuals that came through that just had various deficiencies in some of the basic office protocol that it was not that hard of a sell internally.

Fair enough.

As part of the process, we solicited feedback from our more experienced staff or our staff that has been here a little bit longer about what some of the competencies should be that we focus on in this framework. It was not so much of a heavy lift to have some buy-in.

Yeah, I would imagine so. So you’ve got a framework built out. Is this, thinking through it, is it just for your new hires? Is it just for interns or does this go further into their career and help them if they got the basics, help them then figure out, okay, well, what’s next past that? Talk a little bit about the framework.

Yeah, so we have two. We have a technical competency framework, which for us is broken down into accounting, tax, and consulting, which is fairly standard as you know, different levels across the top, different competencies in each of those three areas. Built into that is also experiences and opportunities that the individual should go through at each of the different levels, coursework that they should do, outside classes they should take, that type of thing on the technical side, which is fairly standard, I think in our industry.

But then we realized the need to build out this professionalism, if you will, or this behavioral, what we call the behavioral competencies, to really sort of cover this issue that we were seeing, you know, with people not necessarily knowing what was expected of them in an office environment, in a professional environment. And I say, I guess I should caveat this. I say in an office environment, I mean, we are hybrid, so it’s not that we’re expected to be in the office every day, but it’s basic professional etiquette, if you will, that we’ve built into this framework.

So having it built out is something that the entire firm goes through, right? So we use it, we do reviews twice a year. We use it in our mid-year review in June. And we include the technical competencies and we include the behavioral competencies. The individuals rank themselves, firm management ranks them, we have a conversation about the differences and the experiences and the coursework that should be done in the next six months, but it is not something that is just for the new hires or the entry levels or the interns. It is a culture-based, firm-wide initiative that everybody’s held to the same standards, honestly, partners included.

Awesome. And such an important point to make is that everyone has to follow these. It’s not just the, you know, the kids these days or the next generation or the whatever. It’s everyone needs to adhere to these behavioral standards from a professionalism standpoint. And frankly, there are probably some partners that could benefit from this in some firms across the profession, because maybe they get by with some things because maybe they’re a really high producer, right? They bring in lots of revenue. So they get by with some of the lack of professionalism, which is, “Oh, it’s just who they are.” But then we expect other people to be held to a different standard. So I love the fact that you hold partners to the same standard that you do everyone else in the firm from a behavioral standpoint.

How do you go about teaching these skills? Because it seems like maybe, don’t get me wrong, I love a good book. I love a TED talk. You and I talk about this frequently in various capacities. I love to learn. But it seems like a lot of this stuff, I could read about it all day, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to get better. So how do you actually teach some of these things?

So, we had to really define the competencies first, because, you know, just as an example, communication is one of our core behavioral competencies. That could mean something very different to everybody in our firm, right? So we had to clearly put definitions to what each of, and we have seven of the behavioral competencies, to what each of them mean. Once we were able to do that, and that’s part of the whole framework, then we could go through the different aspects of the definition—we have a ranking of one to five on the framework. You may have a ranking of three, which means, you know, you’re doing your job. You’re kind of average, you’re doing what’s expected of you, but we could dissect some of the components of that as an example, the communication definition and say, you’re really great in three of these, here’s an area where if you really buttoned this up, you would get to a four, you would get to a five.

And so there’s different ways, depending on what aspect of the definition is to really teach those, right? So we’re huge on shadowing. We’re huge on, you know, observing real life examples and having that be part of the conversation at the review. We’re huge on, we are huge on TED talks. We are huge on reading and podcasts and things like that. But we try to frame out our mid-year reviews in a coaching format. So when we go through the process of analyzing the different areas in the behavioral competencies, we’re talking through, let me give you an example of this area where you were less than, you know, where you were expected to be and why that was. And let’s talk through how that could have been done differently. Let’s talk through why it wasn’t done, you know, differently than how you came at it. Why did you come at it the way that you did? Do you see how this doesn’t really align with our expectation internally and where we could make improvements in the future?

So we really try to talk them through what they can relate to, because you’re not necessarily, you’re certainly not looking at a tax return and saying, this goes on this line, that goes on this line, you know, boom, we’re done. You got it, right? No, I mean, it’s much more nuanced. It’s much more, you know, there’s a much longer runway of needing to, again, make mistakes, but learn from them and move forward. And so we keep that dialogue open and I do check-ins very frequently with our team members throughout the year to keep up on things like that. And we’re fortunate to do that because again, we’re a pretty small firm at 25 people, so I have that ability to have the pulse on most of how people are doing on maybe not a day to day basis, but a week to week basis. We do provide recommendations for coursework in certain areas, depending again, on the aspect of the competency that may not be up to the standard that we have. So there’s a coursework component, there’s shadowing, there’s observation, there’s coaching dialogue around it, and there’s those real-world examples.

Yeah. I’m thinking that if I’m a team member, maybe relatively new, or even with a little bit of experience in these behavioral competencies, probably a little bit scarier than the technical. I mean, where does it go on the tax return feels way easier to me than, hey, you need to communicate in front of a group that you’ve never communicated, and by the way, you need to be comfortable with it, or confident in that, especially coming, you know, for a professional, traditionally, most folks that go into our industry, getting up in front of a group, not their jam. That’s not where they’re like, you know, that’s my happy place, right?

So, where you have some of these competencies that get someone outside their comfort zone? And the professionalism side of the competencies and the behavioral side, especially when it’s something that somebody has not been in that situation before, and you’ve got to get them in that situation, whether it’s shadowing or whatever, to really experience that. How do you help them get ready for the fact that it may not go perfectly, you may make a mistake, you may not be super professional and it could be uncomfortable for a minute, but that’s okay, because it’s not life or death, it’s just uncomfortable. How do you prepare somebody for that so that they’re actually going into that with an open mind of, I’m ready to go learn?

So I can give you an example of another one of our behavioral competencies is strategic thinking, right? And as you know, we’re a pretty advisory-centered firm, very consulting-oriented. And so, often when people come out of school, they’ve learned where something goes on a tax return and how to do a bank rec, but not necessarily, how do I talk to a business owner about their business? And how do I advise on some of those operational areas? So strategic and critical thinking as a competency, we role play, right? We typically start with shadowing an existing meeting, whether it’s a client that you work on, shadowing the partner or the in-charge in that meeting. So you get the flow of conversation, you get the different topics that are covered and you are, you know, very much a silent observer because typically that’s the first stepping stone into this area.

Then we do some role-playing. So then we do sort of a mock meeting as if I were the client or another partner were the client, and we walk through what that would look like if this individual team member, we’re running a strategic conversation. That gives them a little bit more comfort, right? I’ve now observed something, I’ve now practiced something in a safe environment. And then the other piece of it, which is what you talked about, you’re going to make mistakes, you’re not going to hit it out of the park on the first time, most likely. And that really speaks to the culture of the organization. And if you’ve set that tone at the top and you’ve set that expectation throughout your culture that you’re going to fail, and that’s going to be okay, we all do it, partners do it, everybody through the rank and file does it. It’s just a matter of how you handle it and where you take it and what you learn from it. And so as long as that is sort of pervasive in your organization, there’s a pretty good safety net there for people to feel that they can go through with what would then be step three, which is actually having and conducting a meeting with a client themselves.

Okay. Very good. Sounds like your leadership team invests a lot of time in your people. If you’re doing role play and all of that, on average, and I’m going to ask you for a number off the cuff here, how much time do you think you or other partners are investing in your people, say on a weekly basis? Or if you know annually? Just out of curiosity, how much of that time are you investing?

I could probably answer that better annually and across the three of us as partners, we’re probably, I’m going to give you a range—we’re probably 750 to 850 in hours in a year dedicated to the team.

Combined across the three of you?

Yeah.

Yeah. So, on average, you’re looking at probably 2-300 hours per partner investing in the team on an annual basis. And that’s incredible. I’ve gotta say, and I know you said a couple of things earlier where you said, well, you know, it’s kind of nice, we’re only a firm of 25. But you’re only a firm of 25, and you’ve got partners that are investing 2-300 hours a year in developing people, not serving clients, not being billable, developing people. And you’re profitable. You’re making good money. I don’t think anybody’s complaining about the money that you’re making, at least I’ve never heard you say that, right? You’re comfortable with where the business is, right? It’s going well.

That’s an important point that I think partners at all firm sizes need to understand is you’ve got a three-partner firm, yet you’re still investing that much time in people. And if you can do it with only 25 people and three partners, and you can commit to investing that much time and still be financially successful and achieving your growth targets and all those things, I find it hard to believe that a firm of 25 partners can’t figure out how to invest in their people as well. And that’s a point that I think is important.

Now, a great number of those hours are probably skewed towards me as the managing partner, but if you look at, you know, my other two partners, their hours are spent obviously in training on technical things, but again, taking people to meetings, allowing for those shadowing opportunities. Yes, they’re experiencing whatever’s happening in that billable meeting with the client that’s valuable, but you’re also with them in the car ride to the meeting and the car ride back from the meeting. And that’s, it’s, you know, an incredibly intangible moment that a lot of learning and sort of that exchange of knowledge and wisdom happens. You know, it’s not off the clock, right? It’s part of our day, but it’s still time that was spent one-on-one with an individual on the team, really helping them get to that next level, whatever that may look like.

And that buffer time is so valuable. I remember early in my career. It was my very first client presentation, and I’ve shared this story, so I’m sure others have probably heard it at some point. And it was for a city council on a fraud prevention and risk mitigation project. The city manager didn’t want us there to start with, which, by the way, that’s a red flag, but we won’t go into that. I didn’t lead it. I don’t even know if I was a senior yet. I think I was still a staff, but I did not lead the project. A partner led the project, but they had some other commitment, and they said, well, Jeremy, you’re going to do the presentation to the city council. And I remember my managing partner sitting in the audience, which I didn’t even know city council meetings had audiences at that point, right? Closed circuit TV, cause they’re so exciting. And she said, if you need saved, I’ll save you. Otherwise, you’ve got this. And I remember at one point she kind of acted like she was going to stand up, and then I saw her sit back down. I’m like, okay, so it didn’t go well, but it could have gone worse. So I’m going to keep going through.

But it was a 30 minute ride from the meeting to the airport in the cab. That was the most valuable to where we can talk about, here’s what worked, and there were some things that worked. It wasn’t horrible, but here’s what could have gone better and how to prepare for that. And like you said, it’s that buffer time there, that it’s an intangible learning moment that is so critical. And in a hybrid environment, it’s important to, you almost have to build that into your calendar: Hey, if this is going to happen, build the car ride back into your calendar. Even if you’re not driving anywhere, you’ve got to have that little 30 minutes on the backside to where you can talk about that, because it’s incredible how much learning occurs immediately after that experience.

And it’s the thought process, right? Cause I’m sure you’ve heard it too. We don’t have time for that. And yeah, we could fall under that trap too. And we could stay in the daily grind, you know, cranking out billable hours and, you know, having that tunnel vision. But if you’re committed to the long-term investment, you know, which the three of us all are, because we’ve got longer runways, you know, you can’t afford not to invest in the team because it’s only going to make the firm better, it’s only going to make our lives as partners better. And, you know, having that short-sighted mindset of, I don’t have time for this now, you know, well, you’re not going to have time for it ever then, and it’s never going to happen.

Well, we’ve got plenty of time to complain about it.

Well, exactly! And it’s that analogy that if you hear it on the health and wellness side, it’s the analogy of, well, I don’t have time to exercise, or I don’t have time to meal plan and eat right, well, then you don’t have time to be sick. And so if you’re not doing these precautionary things of exercising and meal planning and all of that, you’re ultimately going to end up sick, and then you’ve got no choice, but to deal with that. So this is kind of the same thing. If you don’t have, you know, the time and the investment and make the effort to do it now, you’re going to be in a much more difficult situation down the line with, you know, what’s happening in our profession with the pipeline and, you know, offshoring and all the different things of the capacity of firms and, you know, technology implementations, it’s just, you’re not—if you don’t have good, solid, strong people that you’ve invested in, it’s just going to hurt more down the line.

Yeah. And there’s, when it comes to people and perhaps this is too strong, but I’ve shared it and I adamantly believe it. If you find yourself complaining about people, I find that one of two things isn’t working. And I’ve yet to come up with a third item. It’s one of two. It’s either you have the wrong people or you failed them as a leader because you haven’t taken the time to invest. And I’ve had people push back and say, no, it’s the fact that they aren’t taking the time to learn. Well, then you have the wrong people. If they’re the right people and you’re investing, they’re going to get where you need them to go, right?

When we launched this, right, and we launched it in May of this year, that’s our competency frameworks and the behavioral frameworks, one of the sort of closing statements that I made to the team was, okay, we’ve now given you this roadmap as a team member of how to be successful, what you need to do, not only what you need to achieve, but how you can achieve them through these courses, through, you know, these experiences, through these opportunities. We can’t care more than you do. So you’ve got to be as invested, if not more invested in your career and its trajectory and its success, because we’ve now given you the roadmap. You need to drive the car.

And if you care more than they do, it never works.

Right. And for some people that can be an eye-opening statement to hear from, you know, your leadership team.

Yeah. Well, and it should be empowering, right?

That’s what we’re going for!

When a managing partner says here’s the roadmap for your career, I just need you to get in the driver’s seat and start driving, what a great gift that is as a young person in the profession to be like, wait, I can control my career? I can achieve what I want to achieve? What an awesome experience that can be.

So we’ve talked about this a lot from the leader’s standpoint, developing the competencies, developing the framework, investing in the people. Let’s flip this around and say I’m an early career professional. Maybe I’m listening to this right now and maybe I’m a senior in college. Maybe I’m, you know, my first couple of years at a firm. What’s my responsibility in all that? What should I be doing, if I don’t feel like I’m as successful as I could be from a professional standpoint, maybe I’m not getting the, you know, the opportunities or the reps to go develop that, what would your advice be to those early career professionals on this topic?

Such a great question. I mean, part of me, and I will probably do this, is to, I want to just give you the seven areas that we focus on as far as the behavioral competencies go.

Great.

Because I think sometimes when you talk about it a little bit more generally, it doesn’t really resonate with people, so I’ll start by just sharing what those seven areas are, what those seven competencies are, and we talked already about communication, you know, as the key one. Operational effectiveness is another one. Professionalism. Judgment and decisiveness. Teamwork and collaboration. We talked about this one as well, critical and strategic thinking. And then for us, the final, seventh one is client service. Again, general words, general topics, we’ve added definitions, very clear definitions around each of those seven competencies. But evaluate yourself, right? Whether you’re still in college, maybe you’re in the profession already, but evaluate yourself around those seven areas.

Now, I don’t think we’re that out of the box in picking those seven areas. I mean, we could probably add or subtract a few depending on a different firm, but generally in any profession, I think, those seven are pretty good, pretty solid ones. And so evaluate yourself on them, you know, do some research. What does it mean? You know, what does it mean to be somebody who acts with professionalism? What does it mean to be somebody who’s a collaborator and really good at teamwork? And start to look at how that manifests itself in your coursework at school? How are you on team projects? You know, those types of things. How are you on communication with your professors? This goes back, I mean, you could probably even go back to the high school level when you talk about implementing, you know, some of these things into your life.

And again, you know, we go to college and if you’re an accounting major or a business major or whatever your major happens to be, you’re probably doing very heavy technical coursework. You may be taking a course on public speaking. You may be taking, you know, a couple sort of softer skill courses. But for the most part, nobody’s teaching you how to show up to work every day and behave in a way that’s going to make you, you know, appear like you’re a professional, appear like you’re put together, appear like you’re here, ready to play, right? And so having that as part of what you need to be looking at in college, I think is really important. You know, even when you meet with some of the career counselors at your schools, they’re probably not talking about these things necessarily. They’re not talking about, you know, you need to respond to an email if there’s a question in it that someone has sent you. You can’t just, you know, take care of it and assume that they’ll know that it’s taken care of, right? We need that responsive communication back. So kind of diving into that on your own, because I don’t think it’s mostly in typical coursework in college, I think is really important.

And again, when you first come into the profession, a lot of the emphasis is on passing the CPA exam and focusing on the technical aspects of your day-to-day job. It’s very little on professionalism and the behavioral competencies. And so just, you know, researching just those seven areas that I talked about earlier that are on our behavioral competency framework, I think will be really, you know, something that really will set you apart when you really get them under your belt.

I appreciate you sharing those seven, and you’re right, so much of what we focus on in college, in the early part of someone’s career, it’s still compliance-based. It feels very heavily compliance-based. Can you do the things and check the boxes? Can you complete the tasks? And so many of the competencies that you mentioned from a behavioral standpoint are the things that partners wish their people had. You hear it all the time, but it’s not taught at the university level. And there’s a really interesting book that I just read called The Learning Game, and it talks about how people are really good at playing the game of school, right? They know how to check the boxes, get the things done, but they aren’t really great at learning how to learn.

And what I would encourage is if somebody is listening to this and they’re thinking, yeah, I need to do that, but I’m not sure how, find somebody that genuinely cares about you and your development, and has compassion is what I would call it—somebody that will lead with compassion. And tell them, hey, I want to improve in these seven areas. Can you help me help hold me accountable? What would you recommend? Find a guide, find a mentor, find someone, you know, cares about you. Maybe go back to a college advisor, and just say, hey, I’m trying to figure out how do I become even better in the profession? I’ve got the technical stuff. I need somebody to help me through this. You’re going to find resources out there. You’re going to find people that care and want to help you get to where you want to be. And whether they’re in your firm or outside your firm, they can help guide you. These seven areas, Sarah, such a great starting point. I appreciate you being willing to share those with everyone.

Absolutely. And the way that we frame it with the team is the technical competencies dictate what you do, right? The tax, the consulting, the accounting. The behavioral competencies guide how you do that. So it’s very important to understand that they are interrelated—they’re not really, you know, two separate checklists, if you will, that you need to complete or that you need to master. It’s what you do on the technical side, guided by how you do it on the behavioral side. And it’s very much an integration of the two. And I think, again, as a profession, we tend to focus a little too much, if not entirely, on the what you do, and far less, not nearly enough, on the how you do it.

Yeah, we don’t focus on it, but we do care about it a lot.

Well, I think we think it’s implied. I think we feel that it’s something that people should come out of school with or should just know it. And that’s, you know, again, you and I talked about this—I’m not sure if we knew it when we came out, but you know, it sort of seems like maybe we did? But maybe we just were in the office more and there were more people around and it was a little easier to hide in the beginning. I don’t know. But I can’t imagine it’s that drastically different than, you know, 20 some years ago, but when I first started.

No, and there are plenty of students coming out of college and early career professionals that do have these things, and they do have that drive, and it’s figuring out how do you help those that are maybe they just don’t have it all yet, and they want to get better. Maybe it’s a blind spot for them. And it’s easy to paint with broad brushes, right? Broad strokes, and say, well, nobody has it. It’s just not true. There’s plenty of people. It’s just that those that don’t tend to frustrate us more than those that do make us think, okay, well, we’re in a good spot and it’s just recognizing: If you got the right people, you can get them where you need them to be. Because the right people are going to care and they’re going to want to improve, whether it’s behavioral or technical, they’re going to want to get there.

Absolutely. And what we found before we created this was we had our own expectations of people’s behavior, we just never told them what it was. So until we created this behavioral framework, we could slide a piece of paper across the desk or send them a PDF of it, and clearly in black and white, they see what the expectation is. Prior to that, we would have reviews and say, well, you don’t communicate enough and you don’t do this enough and you don’t do that enough. Well, we never told them they had to do that. We just assumed that they would. So now we actually have the behavioral expectations and that goes a long, long way in really getting people on board at a very early stage.

It’s much easier to hold people accountable to expectations they’re aware of. It sounds silly to say, but we do it all the time! We try to hold them accountable, like, I didn’t know I was supposed to do that. Oh yeah. I guess you would need to know that information.

Right!

So Sarah, as we’re winding up here, you mentioned courses, books, TED talks, someone that’s trying to figure out and maybe take it from a couple different angles. Somebody that’s trying to figure out, how do they overcome some of these challenges in their firm, how do they lead their team better to be more professional, to be better adults in the workforce, right? As you said. Resources for them, or even on the flip side, somebody that’s early in their career, a good resource for them that you think would be a great resource to get them started.

Okay. So I’ll start with the, you know, the leader or the manager at that level who’s trying to lift up, reach down, and pull up some of their team members, right? And this is a book that I finished not that long ago, and it’s called The Coaching Habit, and it is by Michael, I’m sure I’m not saying this right, Bungay-Stanier.

Yup.

Do you know it?

A great book.

It’s a quick read. It’s a fantastic book. The whole title is The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More, and Change the Way You Lead Forever. You know, I read it in the last month, it’s fantastic. I can’t recommend it enough to people. And it really changes how you interact with your team in a way that is much more coaching, and much more leading them on the journey together, than it is sort of that review mentality of, you know, you need to improve in this area, you did great in that area kind of thing. It’s a much more satisfying conversation, how it’s framed in this book. So that’s definitely my recommendation on the leader, the manager side.

With respect to less experienced professionals coming out of school or in a firm, I mean, I am a huge fan of podcasts. I adore The Upstream Leader podcast. There’s some really great ones just that are accounting profession-specific, but also there’s TED Talks. There’s lots of TED Talks that if you can just search through TED Talks on soft skills, on professionalism, on communication. There’s a lot on that as well. And those are quick, you know, 15 at most, probably 20-minute bites of information and nuggets to take away.

I’m also a huge fan of Masterclass. There’s some great courses on there that, you know, I think it’s $300 for an annual subscription to Masterclass, and you get all of the courses that are on there and they’re constantly adding them and updating them. You can get a lot of some of the seven areas that I talked about earlier, some background and some coursework on that as well there. So those would be sort of my key takeaway recommendations.

I really appreciate that, Sarah. All great recommendations. Thank you so much for those. And thank you for joining me today on the podcast. It has been an absolutely enjoyable conversation. I’m hopeful that the leaders and, you know, new folks to the professional life, whether they’re in accounting or even outside of accounting, they will be able to use something in this podcast to help them become more professional or help get their team where they want them to be. So thank you for taking the time to chat with me here today on The Upstream Leader.

Absolute pleasure, Jeremy. Thanks for having me.