Leadership Academy: Applying What We Learned

LEADERSHIP ACADEMY

DISCOVERING GROWTH AT HOME

BY MACKEY SMITH

BY BARBARA M. SMITH, CPA, CIRA, CDBV, CFF

We’ve all been there before — you have just arrived back at the office after an engaging workshop, filled with ideas of how you can transform yourself and your team. As you reflect on what you learned, you open your laptop and realize you have over 100 unopened emails and 10 new client requests that need addressing. You also realize that while you’ve been gone, your team is stuck on a task without your technical insight. Now you spend the next week playing catch up, promising to eventually review what you learned and apply those lessons to your work.

We all know what comes next — business as usual. This is nobody’s fault. It’s simply the nature of our profession. This scenario highlights perhaps the two most important, yet simple, criteria for an effective workshop or retreat:

1. Attendees must learn something new about themselves or their teams

2. Attendees must leave with a plan of how they will apply what they have learned

Keeping these criteria in mind, the UACPA hosted its annual Leadership Academy in November. The 20 attendees stand out as leaders and rising stars in their organizations, and it was truly an honor to befriend them and help facilitate the retreat.

At the retreat, these leaders dove headfirst into a wide array of leadership principles: identifying and leveraging strengths to compensate for weaknesses, the sources of influencing human behavior and how to get someone to do something, and effective goal setting. They also engaged in a strategic discussion on the emerging trends and opportunities for improvement within the accounting profession, identifying one initiative that they can take back to their organization and implement. Each topic was discussed in practice, with participants breaking out into smaller groups to share how their respective teams could benefit from the topic at hand. It is our experience from the Leadership Academy that unless you allow people the safety of exploring their thoughts and ideas in smaller groups, then much like most meetings you attend, the extroverts can easily take over and dominate the conversation. As an extrovert myself, I know too well how easily this can happen.

Perhaps the highlight of the retreat came in the form of a motivational speaker, Braxten Nielsen. Braxten shared, in intimate detail, his experience as a former rodeo star who was paralyzed and given a 2% chance of walking again. Sharing his journey to accomplish that 2% certainly created a shortage of dry eyes in the room.

As enlightening as these conversations were, we were impressed by the attendees and their commitment to following the second criterion listed above. They formed specific goals and initiatives and brainstormed the likely hurdles that could prevent a successful implementation. They identified peers and mentors who they could solicit for buy-in upon returning to the office, and set aside time in their calendars to begin implementing next steps, helping stave off catch-up mode from taking over and nullifying what they learned. Based on the plans of action they set, we are excited to see the improvements made in the organizations represented at Leadership Academy.

For this issue of The Journal Entry, the UACPA is diving into effectively engaging the talent pool. I would argue that offering your team members the opportunity to develop soft skills in addition to technical skills demonstrates that you genuinely care about their growth. And not just as an accountant, but as a person too. Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, once received this confession from a team member, “For 25 years you paid for my hands when you could have also had my heart and mind for free.”1

When we invest in the growth and development of our teams, we engage them in ways that lucrative bonuses or tasty break room snacks never can. We make them feel valued and appreciated, more than just another cog in the machine. With all the challenges we face in today’s labor market, I invite you to not undervalue the impact an investment like structured leadership development can make in your organization. n

1 http://character-education.info/money/books/Jack_Welch_Winning.htm.

Mackey Smith is the head of strategy consulting & planning at Tanner LLC and worked with the UACPA on its strategic planning committee. He graduated from Brigham Young University with a bachelor’s degree in strategic management, summa cum laude.