LEADERSHIP LENS
Advice to Future and New CPAs Tom Sulewski Fall is here and another year end marches toward us with each setting sun. With the change in seasons, we see schools reopening and students heading back to campus to re-engage in their education journey. As many firms likely do, we recently had a sendoff event for our departing summer interns which is an event I always enjoy.
& Summer BBQs
A portion of our program was dedicated to lessons learned and experience sharing from the new interns and then some additional time was reserved for the senior partners to reflect on their own words of advice to the future leaders of the profession.
The dialogue between the generations provided a variety of rich perspectives with the following takeaways for me: Create a Legacy – As senior leaders in our firms and in the community, there can be no greater legacy than the transfer of our collective knowledge to the next generation in our firms. It was powerful to watch the senior partners speak and the interns listen. As leaders, however, we need to be at peace that the next generation will hear and absorb but may not duplicate our advice exactly as we would have. If we do our jobs right, they will take the foundational knowledge we share and make it their own with an even more rewarding result than we could have imagined. Build for the Youth – Our next several classes of interns will be approaching their career priorities with an entirely different life experience than many of the current leadership group. They
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The Washington CPA Fall 2021
will have been toughened and stretched by a global pandemic that has changed their perspectives and priorities. We should not lose sight of the reality that those same perspectives and priorities of our new employees will be representative of our future clients. Invite those new perspectives to the table so we can learn how to better serve in the post pandemic environment. Variety and Mentoring Wins – Almost without exception, each intern spoke about variety. They were motivated by a variety of different projects and responsibilities. And, they valued the people and mentors they had the opportunity with which to work. As leaders in a competitive employment market we need to keep speaking to the variety of projects and career opportunities the profession can provide. And, we need to do it every chance we can get in the office, in the classrooms, and at events.
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