Building and Leading a Team (Part 2)

*This article is derived from a webinar that occurred in 2017. Its content remains relevant to the accounting industry today. 

Clayton Oates is recognized as a thought leader in the accounting, bookkeeping, and technology industries in Australia and internationally. He’s been working in and consulting to the accounting, bookkeeping, and software consulting industries for more than 25 years. After completing a business accounting degree at Monash University, Melbourne, he joined Price Waterhouse, working in the tax division for five years. He then moved into the industry as a retail accountant for nine years with another firm. In 1998 he co-founded QA Business, a specialist independent IT consulting practice that’s focused on improving business systems, productivity and performance for small business owners and operators, and in that capacity, he has gleaned and acquired skills in leading teams.Read Part 1 of this interview here

Joe Woodard: I want to talk about the right team members. What do you do when one person becomes a challenge, and you begin to suspect that maybe they’re in the wrong seat or even on the wrong bus? 

Clayton Oates: If you haven’t had this experience yet, it’s about to happen as you build out your team. It’s nothing to be incredibly fearful about, but we need to have some strategies around actually dealing with this when it occurs. Like being empathetic: people don’t get out of bed each day to go to work to mess up your business and destroy the client relationship. That’s usually not on their radar first up. Something is going on there.  

We certainly believe there shouldn’t be any passengers on the bus. I’m not saying everyone is the driver. But they can be responsible for their own direction and actions and the cause and effect that happens with client interaction. When we’ve got team members who tend to stray from the standard there, as leaders we need to act on this. This is very important. We have a role and responsibility, not only for the business and clients that we’re serving, but also for the other team members who are on the bus with us. They expect a standard and we’re incongruent if we’re not actually acting on this. We’ve got a policy; a methodology called the Bunsen burner test. It’s like holding a mirror back up to the team member. We’ve all got these standards. They can clearly see where they’re falling down on these standards. 

We’ve had around 25 team members over the last 15 years. You’ll have that; you won’t keep people forever. But essentially, I’ve never had to fire anyone. People have left of their own accord, sometimes when it was a bit hot in the kitchen, because their own core values weren’t aligned with ours. They tended to put their hands up and realize that at some moment or some stage. We’ve obviously remained great friends with everyone. We want them to leave in better shape than when they arrived. I think that’s a role for us as leaders as well.  But there is a methodology around this: it’s being true to your values and your standards, and not wavering from those but helping people to grow through it. The Bunsen burner test can give you some strategy around this. You haven’t lost a relationship here; it’s just a call that someone else has made. They couldn’t stick to that standard.  

Joe Woodard: I’d like to get back to those first points you made so well about creating, not just a mission statement, but a set of behaviors or expectations that orbit that mission statement. If you’re armed with that, you might be much more likely to confront, and to do so in a constructive way. 

Even armed with your Bunsen burner technique, a mission statement, very specific guidelines, and a mirror, many accountants are introverted. They naturally abhor confrontation. With Type A people, confrontation is much more natural and organic to their personality type.  

Accountants have their skill set and have some competencies in how to make sure a team stays productive, efficient and profitable. They’ve led, but they wouldn’t call themselves expert leaders. What advice would you give for an accountant who wants to be a better leader, maybe even approach that expert leader status? 

Clayton Oates: We have come from that technician piece. We might have started the business off the back of an entrepreneurial seizure, seizing an opportunity. The leadership piece and building out a team doesn’t come naturally to us. But it is something that can be learned. Building a business – we’re looking at levers. How do we get leverage out of building a business? Three of the levers are people (your team), processes and technology. 

Our role is to build, coach and lead a team and look after the team. Then the team looks after the customers, clients and prospects, who look after the business. And the business ultimately looks after you. That’s the wheel of leverage and getting the results. It’s why we go into business in the first place. 

There are seven keys in how you can learn to evolve in your role as a leader: 

1) Build belief. It comes back to our why: why we’re doing what we’re doing. I went into business in order to have more time and money. That’s a bit counterintuitive: most small business owners and operators don’t get either. But you can; there’s a way of doing that: getting invested. Getting invested in your dream, your vision and your why straight up is step number 1. It leads to building belief, self-confidence and trying to master yourself. When you do, the world tends to work itself out in response to that, and you build more solid and consistent auto-responses to things. We do that by learning. Study leadership. Look at mentors. Surround yourself with those you aspire to, who have the actions, results, culture and mindset you aspire to. It’s taking pieces of people you already know, such as clients. They will all have aspects that you’re learning.  

There are some wonderful resources out there, such as Ken Blanchard’s Gung Ho, Stephen Lundin’s Fish! and Stephen Covey’s books.  

2) Set those standards. How do you define those? Take ownership. 

3) Manage expectations. Show appreciation for what you’ve got now. Focus on the good things. 

4) Open management.  

5) Building out communication. As Stephen Covey notes, “If we want to be understood, we first need to understand.” Discipline the act, not the individual. 

6) Invest in training so that your team members who leave are better than when they arrive. Instead of seeing training as creating potential competition, imagine how bad it will be if your team members don’t get training. And they may return and work with you again, so you can leverage the foundations laid when they previously worked with the team, as well as the experiences they had before they returned. 

7) How do you find team members? If you’re great at what you do and have passion and skill, why don’t you enable more people to have access to it? Building a team is a critical piece of enabling that to happen in a way that complements your life. 

Joe Woodard: You just gave a tremendous amount of information. Clayton, it is always so informative to have you with us. Thanks for joining us. 

Clayton Oates: Thank you for enabling me to share these things and helping where I can.