Coaching to Achieve a Common Goal
Let’s face it: being an accounting firm partner is hard work. Not only are you providing high-level advisory services to clients, but you’re also handling firm administrative responsibilities such as carrying out the strategic plan, coaching the rest of the team to keep the firm growing and handling internal conflicts as they arise.
Partners wear many hats, and it’s very difficult – if not impossible – to always excel in each area. Maybe a partner is struggling to embrace or achieve the development marks set forth in the firm’s strategic plan or simply having issues embracing the new responsibilities and requirements of ownership.
That’s where a mentor or coach can help. Working with an independent coach can help partners look at the firm and its operations from the outside in to gain a different perspective and provide an impartial view of ways to strengthen a partner’s skills. Possible outcomes include:
- Better communication with leadership team and direct reports
- Clearer understanding of partner responsibilities and how to balance them
- Greater confidence and executive presence
- Stronger understanding and acceptance of business development role
- Better ability to address challenges head-on and create solutions that are in the best interest of the firm
Having spent decades in public accounting – most of them in leadership roles – Carl George has overcome many obstacles himself. As a mentor, Carl listens to a partner’s circumstances with empathy and understanding to help them find a path to become more aligned with, and support, the firm’s overall strategy.
He pulls on best practices from his work with hundreds of firms. Asking questions and challenging a partner to consider alternatives and create innovative solutions, he offers advice and counsel based on his personal experiences and intuition. What’s important is that the partner leave the conversation with clarity about the firm’s approach to – and his or her role in – the issue or opportunity.