The 10 C's of Great Leaders: Allan Koltin, CPA, Details What the Best CPA Firm Leaders Have in Common
Our firm works with the majority of the 200 largest U.S. public accounting firms. We talked to many of those firms' CEOs and other leaders in the accounting profession. Our quest was to discover the common traits of great leaders in our profession. From that research came what we call the 10 C's of Great Leaders. THE FIRST C: COMPETITIVE SPIRIT All of the great leaders in our profession seem to have a will to win. More importantly, they have a will to win by doing things the right way One of the leaders we talked to said, "When it's a question of making money versus doing what's right, integrity should always trump economics." What we found is great leaders always want to improve and be the best. I think this drive comes from a deeply rooted belief that if you stop growing or bettering yourself, you die. THE SECOND C: CLUTTER To understand the second C, it helps to know the three parts of leadership. Administration. This is the lowest rung on the leadership ladder. To us, administration is about keeping score. It's doing things that need to get done but don't involve persuading people to change their behavior. Management. This is a much higher level than administration. By our definition, management refers to producing results through others. It's about getting people to a place they probably could not reach on their own. The question I always ask firm CEOs is, "Is the firm managing the partners, or are the partners managing the firm?" Great CEOs also are great coaches. Leadership. Not one of the CEOs of the 200 largest firms ever had a high school, college, or even graduate school course in visioning and leadership. The visioning skills most of them learned came from the school of hard knocks. What are visioning skills? They are the ability to look at the business, assessing where it is today and where it needs to go to become successful, and then fiercely driving the ship in that direction. This is a rare skill set. Getting back to the second C, we found that some CEOs are busy with what we call clutter--things that are in the bottom level of the food chain, administrative tasks such as getting monthly reports out, planning the holiday party, and sitting behind their desks. CEOs who can cut through the clutter to focus on the most important, most strategic issues have a competitive advantage over those CEOs who become bogged down in busywork. THE THIRD C: COHESIVENESS Cohesiveness refers to the leader's ability to gain the support of the partners and to get everyone on the same page without wielding a big stick. Great leaders lead not because of where their name is on the org chart but because partners want to follow their lead. Leaders who excel at building cohesive partner groups know how to sell ideas to partners. Perhaps more importantly, these leaders know which partners will need convincing and what they will have to do to get each one on board with the plan. THE FOURTH C: CANDIDNESS This skill is the one we found least often among the CEOs in our study. Another way to describe this skill would be with two more C words: constructive confrontation. When a partner or partners are not performing up to par, a candid leader possesses the unique ability to tell them face to face what they are doing wrong and what they need to change or improve. The leader does this without waving a finger and saying, "You have to change right now." The candid leader can deliver a brutally honest message in an adult-to-adult manner that shows respect to the partner. One of the leaders in our study says he always starts off a conversation with a partner about a delicate issue by saying, "I love you, but ..." He then addresses the problem by asking the partner to "help me with this." Another CEO said that whenever he tries to change the behavior of one of his partners, he goes through an exercise in which he says, "Let's reverse roles here. …