Episode Transcript

Please note this transcript was generated by AI and contains errors including missing and misspelled words.

[00:00:08] Meryl Intro: Hi there and welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Meryl Johnston. The Lifestyle Accountant Show exists to help today's accounting firm owners build successful firms while also living a healthy, happy life without sacrificing sleep, your weekends or time with loved ones. Today's guest is Rob Pillen S. He spent ten years as an accountant in practice at PwC and then moved into operational roles in accounting firms, including a role as the General manager at Midtier Firm Pitcher Partners in Sydney. For the last seven years, Rob has been running Planet Consulting, which helps owners and managers run better accounting firms. Today we're focusing on leadership and management skills and specifically the challenges that a new manager can face. We'll run through a series of case studies and discuss how to approach these different situations.

[00:00:55] Rob Soundbyte: So underperformance is probably the conversation that people actually, at any level seem to get a bit stressed about. I'd probably firstly say to the person, look, how do you feel about this? And they'll say, Look, I feel really quite uncomfortable. And I would say, look, that's actually quite normal to feel that way, but let's walk through some ways that you could approach this that will help you. So the first thing I often say to people is, well, why will you be giving the person some feedback about their underperformance? And the answer typically will be, well, because I want them to improve. Yeah. And I go, yeah, absolutely. So this is actually a very positive conversation, right? This is a very supportive conversation around you want that person to improve and grow. And so feedback is absolutely a fundamental part of that.

[00:01:40] Meryl Intro: Today we're covering a range of topics related to management and leadership, including why accountants often do a bad job of project management and how to improve it. What to do if you have an underperforming team member dealing with constant interruptions as a manager, creating an equitable workload amongst your team while also balancing the needs of different individuals. How to effectively manage up, particularly if you have a disorganized boss. And lastly, we talk about negotiating salaries with team members. All that and more coming right up on the lifestyle accountant show.

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[00:04:02] Rob: Thank you very much. Meryl.

[00:04:04] Meryl: I think we met for the first time when we were on CA or Chartered Accountant A and Z Council together. That's my first memory of meeting you.

[00:04:13] Rob: I think you might be right.

[00:04:15] Meryl: And you stood out to me because you were willing to ask some hard questions and start some hard conversations, which I think is important to me, being on a representative council like that. That's what it's about, is asking the questions and trying to push the boundaries a bit.

[00:04:32] Rob: Yes, and I suppose you could argue that I'm almost a professional question asker. Anyway.

[00:04:40] Meryl: So, Rob, let's start with a little bit of your background. I know today we're on the podcast to talk about management and leadership for new accountants, and I know that you run a business. Which one aspect is training accountants on that, but let's go back a little bit and maybe you could talk about some of your history in the accounting industry.

[00:05:01] Rob: Yeah, so, look, I started, as many people did back then, as a young auditor at Price Waterhouse, and long story short, I did that for quite a while, including a stint in the UK, which was absolutely fabulous.

And then I finished my ten years of client work at PW as a business services manager. So I got to experience both audit and business services.

So, ten years of client facing work, and I loved it. But out of the blue, an opportunity came along to become the finance and admin manager for Pricewaterhouse in Sydney. Literally completely unexpected. And so that kind of started me on the journey I suppose I've been on ever since, which is really helping to run better accounting firms, whether it's inside the firm or outside of the firm.

After that, I had a short stint at the Olympic Games. That's maybe a story for another day. 18 months working with the organizing committee, which was amazing. But really, I spent quite a long time then in four other firms in leadership roles. Grant Thornton, where I was helping the managing partner in Sydney there drive some change and then general Manager Pitch Partners in Sydney for five and a half years which is a role that I became a little bit famous for and that was great. And then I was the CEO of two smaller accounting firms, sort of 20 to 30 person firms and in amongst that I actually did a Master of Business coaching degree which was a two year postgraduate degree which was quite fascinating and very useful.

But of course today I now run my own business, Planet Consulting and been doing that now in this form for about seven years. And it is for me all about helping owners and managers run better accounting firms. And without taking too much time for your listeners, there are four basic ways that I do that. The first is I do detailed reviews of firms. So done 27 of these. Smallest is a five person firm, biggest is 150 person firm. And I basically pull that accounting firm apart literally pretty much every aspect. I split it up into about 24 different areas and I look at what's working well, what could be done differently, and I feedback that to the owners of the firm and it involves some very private conversations with team members who often tell me stuff. That comes as a bit of a surprise to the owners of the firms, which is quite fascinating, it's quite hard work and I'm drawing on a lot of my experience to join the dots and make sense sometimes of some cryptic things. But it's very rewarding both for me in the type of work and the clients with the results. Second way I love to help people is I do some one on one bespoke coaching consulting with firms that will vary. Sometimes I'm facilitating strategic planning days or planning days. Third way is I am the facilitator of what's known as the accountants peer groups. Something that was started some years ago by a lady called Thea Foster and I took those over gosh, must be about four or five years ago. And those are advisory board type things for accountants. They're amazing groups. Some of them are just for firm owners talking about anything to do with running a firm. And those groups provide an enormous amount of knowledge for me of course about what's going on across the profession beyond some of those individual clients that I might be working with. And then finally Meryl, which is really relevant today. I guess I do get involved in non technical training and I do love that because it's know young accountants coming through or sometimes they're not so young but they may be less experienced to develop themselves and be the best version of themselves that they can be. I get a bit passionate about this because I kind of wake up in the morning thinking about how to run a better accounting firm and I go to sleep at night thinking about the same thing.

[00:09:00] Meryl: All right, Rob. Well, before we get into some of the leadership and management questions, I know you've got a lot of experience on the operations side of running accounting firms. Had the experience as an accountant in practice, but also many different roles running accounting firms. So I've got a couple of questions for you there, and then we'll dive into the leadership topics. If you look at a typical small business that's not an accounting firm, the shareholders are separate from the management team, so they're not actually really involved in making decisions. They might be able to appoint the board or the CEO, but they're not making day to day decisions. Whereas I feel like it's different in an accounting firm. The owners are getting their hands a lot more dirty on some of the minutiae of this marketing decision or that process. And what do you think is the best way to structure it, or how much input should the accounting, the owners, the partners, whatever you want to call them, how much input should they have?

[00:09:55] Rob: To some degree, it depends a little bit on size, because early on, a smaller firm probably really can't afford perhaps a full time resource with a reasonable level of skill to kind of handle some of this stuff. But I think certainly once you get to a certain size, then hopefully you've got some sort of a business manager type person. Call them what you will. There's lots of titles floating around.

But the thing is that I think by nature, a lot of accountants are a little bit detail oriented and do like a bit of control, right? And so what you need is you need people in those roles that have credibility and can build trust with the owners, who are then actually okay with letting go. Right? And so pitch partners a good example. I don't want to talk too much about that one, but because of my background and so on and some of the things that I did, the partners could go, oh, actually, Rob knows what he's doing, right, so we should, unlike, step back and just let him and the team get on with it, right? And for the most part, that happened pretty well.

One of the roles that I was the CEO of, though, Meryl, was an interesting example of what you talk about four partner firm. They had decided that they would like a CEO, and I took the role on. But what I realized was that they liked the idea of a CEO, but perhaps there were one or two people in particular who kind of went, oh, okay, now I know I really only want a CEO if the CEO does what I want or what I tell them. But you have this weird dynamic, right, where technically, individually, each of those four partners is reporting to me as the CEO, but I report to the board and who's the board. It's those four partners acting together. Right. So it's actually set up to almost fight like it's a dysfunctional kind of structure, isn't it, really? And it takes pretty special people to make that work.

So you're right. The fact that accountants tend to have their sleeves rolled up a bit and making some of these decisions sometimes, of course, I had to say, guys, look, don't worry, I'll take care of that. Just step away.

[00:12:12] Meryl: Absolutely.

I've always found that in my business we've been into hard running projects or having client facing team members deliver on projects because always the client work takes priority and then it keeps on coming and so the projects don't happen.

[00:12:29] Rob: I describe it as that sort of catch 22 where you're so busy chopping down the trees with an axe that you haven't got time to sharpen the axe. Or maybe even better, go and buy a chainsaw.

[00:12:42] Meryl: Exactly.

Something we found helpful there was hiring an external project manager to drive the projects and to keep things moving along, but also having to reduce the workload of someone. If they're going to be running a separate project or implementing a new technology, then they're not going to have the same amount of output.

[00:13:02] Rob: Yeah. And you know, what project management is, I think, is a really it's a modern day skill that we all should have. And I'm fortunate that I studied some project management postgraduate at university.

I've actually got some training that I give people around project management and it's quite eye opening for some people around. Oh, yeah, okay. Wow. There's a whole different way of looking at some of these things and so on. So I think you're right. I think project manager is immensely important skill for us to have.

[00:13:32] Meryl: I have no formal training in it, but I have an interest in it. So I've done a lot of self education about that. And something when I'm encouraging team members to work on projects, I get pushback around estimating time. And I think it's really important to try and have an estimate of how long we want to spend on this or how long you're going to allow yourself to spend on something. Because if you say 2 hours or two days, it's quite different and getting better at estimating how long things are going to take in advance. That's a skill that I really try and encourage everyone to get there.

[00:14:04] Rob: As humans, we suffer from something that I call optimism bias, where we tend to remember the shortest amount of time it's ever taken us to do something. But often that's not a realistic estimate for the circumstances that we're facing.

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Meryl: All right, well, let's jump into some of these questions. So these are for new managers and shared some questions that come up for you. I've gone out to the audience and to my contacts to ask if they've got questions, and I've come up with some questions that came up for me in my career. So I'm just going to hit you with it. I've got some opinions on some, so I'll jump with my thoughts, but a lot of them I'll just let you share your opinion. So the first one is I've been promoted to manager, so it's my first management position. Can I still congratulations.

Thank you. Can I still be friends with the people I will now be managing?

[00:16:01] Rob: Yeah, I think pretty much everyone probably goes through this, right?

Because the reality is, in my experience, I suspect it's probably yours too. We do make good friends inside our accounting firms. We're kind of like minded people and we like each other's company and so we become friends. Indeed, a couple of my closest friends remain people from those very early days in my accounting career. But I think that there's a couple of things to kind of, I guess kind of just remind yourself of. And that is, firstly, that by their nature, accounting firms are kind of hierarchical, right? Like, I know not all firms, some firms will try and get away from that a little bit. But the majority of firms that people probably that are in, that are listening to there is a level of kind of hierarchy and it's understood and it's accepted. It's like it's actually part of how the accounting firm works, right? Work gets pushed down the hierarchy to be done at the lowest cost level that it makes sense to do kind of thing. So the first thing I would say to someone who's just been promoted is to acknowledge that you're moving into a role that I'd like to think everyone kind of understands and it's part of that hierarchy and you can be very proud of making that. I remember being super excited when I became a manager at Pricewaterhouse. It was a big deal.

But secondly, then I think this idea of trying to focus on being respected, so being respected for the actions that you take as a manager.

And people often worry that holding people accountable will mean people won't like them or that delegating work to them. People won't like them, and then the friendship breaks down. My experience has probably been a little bit different. In fact, one of my closest friends is someone who used to be my boss day to day when I was younger. And so if you have the right approach to delegating and to holding people accountable, and there's not necessarily one single right way to do that, but a sensible way to do that, then I think the majority of the people that you're working with will go, you know what, of course that's how it is. I respect that they are fulfilling their role just as I'm fulfilling mine. Does that make sense?

[00:18:23] Meryl: It does. So is it still okay to go for lunch? Absolutely.

[00:18:27] Rob: Yeah. Absolutely. Do you know, it's interesting, someone who I count as a friend of mine to this day was actually an HR manager that reported to me. Right. And what was lovely about our relationship was we became quite good friends, really, in the workplace. But she understood that I was still the boss. Right. At the end of the day, some decisions I might have to make that she might not be 100% agreement with, but equally, she was quite happy one day, I remember she said, oh, Rob, don't be such a goose. Right? Like, think that through. So you had that ability to actually have frank conversations with each other. And I think for many people, a friendship can be absolutely maintained. I disagree with people who say you can't be friends with your team. I actually think it is possible, and I think it's a very healthy thing. Obviously, there's kind of friendship and there's friendship, right. And of course, there are many instances of people in accounting firms getting together with each other in more intimate relationships. I have some dear friends who work together and have been married for the last 25 years.

[00:19:36] Meryl: There was a bit of that in my video audit days. There's multiple marriages that came out of that division.

[00:19:43] Rob: Again, like minded people, you spend a lot of time with them. So I absolutely don't. Look, the more intimate relationships, I think they prove they're a bit more challenging. Obviously, I don't think that's appropriate for a manager team member type relationship.

But normal friendship, I think is a good, healthy thing. And it might be slightly moderated a little bit during that time, but often it then blossoms and goes deeper, perhaps when one of those people moves into a different firm or a different role, quite often.

[00:20:16] Meryl: Month as manager, I've been asked to guide a young team member who is underperforming. How should I approach it?

[00:20:23] Rob: Yes, so underperformance is probably one of the probably the conversation that people actually, at any level seem to get a bit stressed about. So I'd probably firstly say to the person, look, how do you feel about this? And they'll say, Look, I feel really quite uncomfortable. And I would say, look, that's actually quite normal to feel that way, but let's walk through some ways that you could approach this that will help you. So the first thing I often say to people is, well, why will you be giving the person some feedback about their underperformance? And the answer typically will be, well, because I want them to improve. Yeah. And I go, yeah, absolutely. So this is actually a very positive conversation, right? This is a very supportive conversation around you want that person to improve and grow.

And so feedback is absolutely a fundamental part of that. So we got to frame it up as a positive thing, because people often frame this, oh, I've got to criticize them. Well, no, you're going to give them some constructive feedback, right.

And this different framing puts us in a different mindset and goes a long way, I think, to having a good conversation. And actually, in the manager program, Merrill, we actually do some role plays of giving feedback. I've written some case studies which are very real, and we actually role play. And so, depending on the situation, I might know you could work with that young manager, perhaps, and have them role play how it would go. But it would probably go something like getting together in a private space, setting the scene a little bit, and then saying something like, hey, Meryl, I just wanted to catch up with you and give you a little bit about a feedback, about a couple of things I've been observing.

And would that be okay? Now, the person is inevitably going to say yes, but you've got their permission to give the feedback. Now, if they say no, you've probably got a bigger concern, right, because why would someone not want to get feedback? And then you would be explaining what you're observing, providing some specific examples. It's not much point if I say, hey, Meryl, you're always late, right? That's not particularly useful. But if I say, Meryl, did you notice that during this last week, we had a couple of meetings scheduled for 09:00 A.m., and you rocked in at 930 and seemed completely oblivious to the fact that the meeting had already started?

That's much more powerful, right, than saying, you're always late.

And so identifying and giving specific examples. And then I would say to you, as the manager, ask the person, do they remember that? Trying to get an affirmation from them that there is an issue around this? Would you agree that's probably not an ideal thing for us, and then start to work with them on, well, could we explore some things that you might be able to do differently around this to address this? Would that be okay? Yep, that'd be great. Thanks, Rob. Blah, blah, blah. And so it's a coaching type thing where you're trying to guide the person then to really come to their own answer. And you and I know, Meryl, that's so important, because if it's their answer, they've bought into it, they own it whereas if you said to them look do this, this and this they're kind of less inclined to do it than if they've come up with it.

So feedback it doesn't actually have to be a particularly long thing.

It might depend on the nature of the issue. Obviously, some of the more serious stuff there might be might be reasonably lengthy conversation. But that idea of really identifying the issue, giving specific examples, inviting them to come up with some ideas for themselves, and then ultimately reaching agreement on what the plan is going forward and then.

[00:24:28] Meryl: What would you do if they keep on having these issues? So say it was the quality of their work and they're getting we used to call them review points which was just a list of all of the things that needed to be fixed and they're just not improving and you don't know is it because they're not trying? Is it their attitude? Is it that they're struggling with some of these concepts? So you've had that chat but you've seen a bit of improvement but then it's kind of gone back to how it was then what would you do?

[00:24:55] Rob: Yeah and again, I don't think that's at all an unusual situation. I think it's actually quite common. I think there'd be a couple of things. I mean, I think I would probably initially go back to the person and again have a bit of a repeat know, sometimes I kind of go, look, I am scratching my head a know I'm struggling a little bit to kind of come up know perhaps what's going on and how we can help you. So is there something perhaps that you haven't yet told us about that might be impacting on this? And sometimes merle of course that's when maybe a personal thing will come through maybe they didn't feel comfortable to say something about that. Maybe there's some terrible health issue going on for themselves or a family member and it's really weighing them down.

So this idea of trying to find the root cause can sometimes be hard. But the other thing I would say in this situation is sometimes if a person is maybe working directly with maybe only one or two people actually getting them to work with someone else and experience maybe a different way, the work has been delegated and supervised and just see whether that makes a difference. Because I have seen time and time again people say, oh, that person's no good. And then they'll move into a different team, say, and all of a sudden they hit their straps and they're doing great.

[00:26:19] Meryl: It's funny you say that and I've been reading about this recently about how the incentives in accounting firms aren't typically to encourage senior staff so seniors managers to spend time on training and building up their team. It's more about output and tangible results not the intangible benefits of training people which might also be rotating in other teams.

[00:26:44] Rob: Incentives is a whole thing, for another day, perhaps, but there are so many instances where people have plans that have unintended consequences, and the unintended consequences are generally not good.

[00:26:54] Meryl: And I noticed that it was a long time ago when I was back in my BDO days, but I noticed there were definitely some managers that were great at training and put a lot of time into that.

They had KPIs, and the KPIs weren't related to that and so they were just doing that because they cared about it. And there were other managers that were pretty hard and they tried to pick all the best team members that had already been trained and weren't putting that time in themselves, but potentially were promoting getting promoted to partner faster because of their results. So I mean, as an accounting firm owner, how would you try and structure things to encourage your managers to put in that time to train their team?

[00:27:32] Rob: Well, yeah, this in a way comes back to values and what's important inside the firm, doesn't it? And I think if it's very clear in a manager's position description that these are expectations around developing other people and your own performance is going to be assessed on that, then I think that can go a long way. But of course, you've got to stick to it because what I've noticed is sometimes firms will fall into that trap where they go, oh yeah, look, I know that manager kind of leaves a bit of a trail of destruction behind them sometimes, but they get the work done.

But there's some casualties along the way and sometimes we seem to justify those casualties, which I personally have a real difficulty with. And I think most accounting firm owners at their heart would actually go, you know what, that's not really how we want to run our firm, is it?

So that alignment around the values and what are we really trying to do here and holding our managers accountable for actually lining up on that.

[00:28:35] Meryl: So I've got a question that ties into the flip side of that.

Again. This was my personal experience when I was a young accountant, but I remember one manager which actually was an associate director, I think, but used to had a big team, multiple jobs on the go. Did care about training people and put a lot of time into his team and could only get work done when he came into the office at 06:00 A.m.. So he basically got nothing, no actual work done between nine and five because there was a constant stream of people and meetings for the entire day. And so he'd have to get in at 06:00 A.m. To do his actual work. And then after 05:00 P.m., that's when he started again on his work.

Now, in the days of remote work, that might be helpful when you're not in the office to get some. Things done, but what would you recommend to someone like that?

[00:29:26] Rob: Yeah, so first thing I would say is you talked about doing the actual work, and I get where you're going with that, but I'd also pause and say, let's not forget that one of the critical pieces of work that a manager must be doing is to look at the team and develop the people. And it's about what the team delivers, not just what the manager delivers. So it may well be that a large chunk of a Manager's Day is actually quite reasonably and very valuably spent doing some of those things. And so maybe they're not actually interruptions, they're actually a core part of the job. So that'd be my first observation. Having said that, I've experienced this myself, so I totally get it. Right. When I was a business services manager, even when I was the general manager at Pitch Partners, I'd sometimes just have a queue outside my door. It was like, we'd have to have a number system, take a number and wait to see Rob.

Look, I think there's a couple of things that we should look at there, as I do quite often with these sorts of things I say to people, okay, well, what's really the root cause of all of those interruptions? Right?

And this is something I talk quite a lot about with people. So what is it that's really causing that? Now? One of the things that I know from my experience and in talking with lots and lots of firms and working with them, is that sometimes one of the root causes of that might actually just be that we haven't quite nailed the training for those people in terms of the sort of the work that we're expecting them to do. There's a bit of a gap there, and maybe just a little bit more almost formal type training could fill that gap. The other thing is that I often see, and this definitely does not need to be the case, is people are quite poor at delegation, and by that I mean they're not giving clarity around what's expected, when it's expected by what are the tools you get to use, are there other people involved?

When's it got to be done by and in the manager program, we role play delegation, so we actually get people. I've got a template that I use, ten step briefing for delegation, and it's interesting because people go through that and they go, yeah, that works, doesn't it? I can see I often leave stuff out, and that's why someone might need to come back to me, because I haven't been clear. This is kind of like the pre job briefing, if you like, isn't it?

So I think those two things is trying to find the root cause, and it could be a training issue, it could be a delegation issue, or maybe it's something else that we haven't yet identified. But those two, for me often come up. And the other thing is managers can start to manage the expectations of their team a little bit more by saying, you know what, guys? Look, I actually need to do my most important thing first up in the morning, so between 830 and ten or whatever the hours might be that make sense. But first up in the morning, what I want you to do is I want you to just actually give me a bit of space because I need a bit of thinking time for some of the high level. I've got to do some of that more complex stuff that is matched from my experience. So if you could not interrupt me during that time, that would be great. Now, of course, today, meryl, we don't tend to be working in offices with doors on them, we tend to be working in open plan size of spaces, and so we often used to signal, Please don't interrupt, by closing our door. I was very reluctant to do that. And what I discovered was people didn't really take any notice that they say, oh, I know you've got your door closed. But sometimes people might even have a way of signaling that they're busy, might be putting a hat on or whatever it might be, put a sign on. So I think the manager can maybe try and shape some expectations around the team and actually quarantine a little bit of time for themselves.

[00:33:25] Meryl: Yeah. So this next question is related to workload as well, but it's balancing the workload of different team members. And I can remember a scenario again as a young accountant working in audit, and so we were on a job. Probably going to have to stay there till seven or 08:00 p.m. Most nights, plan to have dinner in the office. And there was one guy on the team who played VFL So not AFL, not a professional footballer, but he could leave at 03:00 p.m. Two days a week to go to training.

And that meant that the rest of us was just expected that we were going to stay late. So any work he didn't get done could just get allocated to us because he was a VFL player, which is really important.

But a lot of us also were athletes and played other sports. But this was almost 20 years ago for me, and you can still tell, probably from my voice that I wasn't that impressed at being allocated someone else's work. Yeah, but I didn't care about staying late. I was there with the team, but that still just didn't feel fair to me. And even when I think about it now, I think that this was really annoying, that one person got special treatment and less work. That might not be the best example, but I felt like that was an example of what I considered unbalanced or unfair workload among a team. How do you recommend a manager balances workload? But also with people's different commitments and objectives.

[00:34:59] Rob: This can absolutely be a really tough one because if you think about it, one of the ways that this plays out today is often people with parenting responsibilities. Of course now as someone who elected not to have children, I have the greatest respect for parents because I think it's a really hard thing to be but comes with all these amazing benefits. But what you can see of course sometimes people have parenting responsibilities of course will negotiate something similar perhaps to your VFL player. And I think there is a whole range of is I think this is one of the harder issues to deal with. But fundamentally, I think to start with, we've got to have conversations one on one with people about what's important to them and kind of trying to understand, I suppose on what basis are we actually employing them, really?

And if you're VFL player that's part of the deal well that's part of the deal, right, that's kind of in his contract and that is how it is. Doesn't make it any easier for you, picking up some of the stuff which you would kind of say, well, he would normally be doing that if he wasn't. And I guess that raises a question around, well, knowing that maybe someone can't work full time or can't be there and put quite the same yards in should that firm have resourced that job a little differently and maybe had that extra person.

Now, of course, resourcing is a big issue often, and so we do find people that are doing more. But having conversations with each of your team members about how you're going to work with them and what's important to them, I think is a really good start. And I know it can be hard because people will have different things going on in their lives and could be employed on very different bases and sometimes that might be a very private thing as well. Someone might have some quite serious illness that maybe isn't obviously manifesting itself.

It's not appropriate to talk about, but it might mean that they have extra time off, they have to go and have a blood transfusion every week or all sorts of weird stuff that might not be immediately obvious. And I think it is very easy as a person, particularly younger people in the firms, to look across at other people and go well that's not fair.

And sometimes we have to be sort of saying to them look, we are all different, life's pretty complicated in 2023. Lots of different circumstances. Try not to look at what other people are doing. As a manager I'm working really hard on making this fair for everybody and I want to get the best from everybody but kind of try and to some degree stay in your lane with this and I'll support you to be the best person you can be.

[00:37:42] Meryl: I think that's really good advice. And now that I'm older, I can respect that. So as a 22 year old, I was just thinking, this is not fair as a parent, but also as a leader. That's what I would be trying to encourage with my team, that everybody's unique and individual and has different agreements with us as the firm. And so we're trying to provide a workplace that caters to everybody. And so there's some people that work part time. They've got children now. It's quite different. At Bnigs, we don't have separate work hours, so it's very flexible. So something like that, we're looking at.

[00:38:19] Rob: Outputs, not inputs, in terms of holding people accountable.

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Meryl: Yeah, and it's an interesting one about fairness, because I think it's important that things feel fair. But how do you make the team feel like things are fair when they're different? And that can be a bit of a challenge.

[00:39:36] Rob: Yes, there has been this idea that, well, we should treat everybody the same. And while that kind of at a high level appeals, I don't think it's realistic, and I don't actually think it's smart either. But of course, if you are blatantly doing some dumb stuff in terms of letting people run amok and not do much work or not pull their weight, well, that's a very different conversation.

[00:40:01] Meryl: So this next one is related to rather than managing a team, it's managing up. So this scenario, it's a new manager, but the manager has moved into a different team with a different director, and the director is unorganized. Everything seems urgent. So what would you recommend to the manager in terms of how to manage that relationship with the director?

[00:40:24] Rob: Yeah, so this is this idea of managing up. And when you become a manager, it's actually a really important part of your role, and it's kind of part of what makes it fun, in a way, because you're kind of managing up, down and around. Now, as a manager, you are kind of the linchpin, really, in my experience, in really making the organization. It's actually part of what I think makes the role quite exciting. And challenging, but I think in the end, the managers actually got to take the brave pill and book some time with the partner and sit with them and say, look, obviously I'm new in terms of working with you, but would it be okay if I shared my experience so far of working with you?

Because I think that would be helpful for us both. Now, again, you would like to think that a director or partner, of course, will say, yeah, great, that's a good idea, because as a general observation, I don't think we talk enough about how we work together with people. We tend to just get in and do it rather than saying, well, how do you like to be communicated with and what's important to you? And so on. There's a stage in my career where I had some Pas and if I got a new PA, we would always talk about, well, how are we going to work together? What's the rhythm for us working together? Because some Pas liked working different ways and sometimes they had good ideas, which I went, Actually, that's a good idea. I'd not thought of that before. So we're with the director and we're saying, look, can I give you some feedback around us working together? And then I think you really just have to say, look, it feels to me like everything is urgent, right? So let me give you a few examples. Again, you got to go back to the specific examples, this and this, and for anyone on the call who's familiar with the Eisenhower importance urgency matrix, I'm not sure whether you're familiar with that one, Meryl. It was made famous by Stephen Covey. But we talk about quadrant one is where everything is urgent and everything is important, whereas what we want to do is we want to be in quadrant two, where it's important, but it's not urgent because we're doing it in accordance with a plan and a schedule.

And so this director is living their life in quadrant one. And I do see that on a pretty regular basis, but it's a very uncomfortable place to be, and we don't do our best work there because mistakes get made, we're too rushed. So it's kind of giving those specific examples to the director and saying, look, this is what I'm seeing. Can we talk about how we might be able to change this? And because you're kind of going up the chain, ideally, you'd still say, look, have you got any ideas? But they will almost inevitably be pushed back to you as well. So you probably want to come with some ideas. And some of those ideas might be, well, we haven't really been doing any quarterly or monthly or weekly or daily planning type stuff. Can we get into some sort of a rhythm where we're looking ahead? This is a big thing that I often work with people on. I actually like to start it annually and then go annual, quarter, monthly, weekly, daily, and it gets more granular as you go down. But could we at least maybe on a monthly basis, you and I look at what's coming up in the upcoming months and start to map this out and see if we can't plan a bit more in advance? Now, I'd like to think most directors would go, you know what? That's a really good idea. Can you help me with that? And if they've got a PA, then they should be a part of that conversation, obviously. And the PA, if they've got one's, probably been pulling their hair out as well. So I guess that would be the sort of thing, again, you've just got to have the conversation, work on what's causing this and how could we work together to solve it.

[00:44:15] Meryl: So in the early days of Beanonders, I think I could be a bit hard to work with because I just had so many ideas, let's try this, let's do that, let's do this. And I had a great operations manager, Fiona, and so she always handled me very diplomatically, but she would say, well, if you want to add this new project on, I can remove this one or this one.

And that would make me stop and think, oh, do I actually want to stop one of those other projects that's already in progress, or am I okay waiting? And maybe this wasn't as urgent as I originally said, so she very diplomatically handled me. And then also we implemented Traction EOS, the entrepreneurs operating system from the book Traction in the early days of Beignages. That got us into more of a rhythm with the annual quarterly planning, too. So that was helpful.

[00:45:10] Rob: I do think, as a dangerous generalization, I do think accountants undervalue the idea of structure. We're all smart people. We know what we're doing. Please don't fence me in with some structure. But I genuinely believe, based on my experience, that a bit of structure actually sets you free. It makes it work so much better.

[00:45:32] Meryl: Great. All right, last question for you. This one wasn't actually on the list, but as we've been talking, I was thinking about what have I found most challenging being a leader at Beaningers, running my own firm. And one of the challenges I have is conversations around salary and trying to keep the tiers within the firm consistent, because I don't want one senior to be paid significantly more than another because they were a good negotiator.

The overall perspective on salaries, but then also making sure that everyone's compensated at a market rate or above. But then they also need to believe that, which some people do, some people may not. So it can always be a bit of not always. Sometimes it can be a challenging conversation. So what are your thoughts on how to handle those conversations and also how to figure out what somebody should should be paid?

[00:46:26] Rob: Yeah, actually, this is something I have quite often been asked about and have actually been invited into some firms to literally work through what they should pay people. So it's certainly a topic that I'm familiar with, and I think my view has always been from pretty early on, that there are a few things that really determine how much someone gets paid. Firstly, there's the role itself, right, a manager gets paid more than a junior account. Like different roles have different things. There is the market that then attaches to that role. And some roles may be a very different market. So, for example, if we are in a multidisciplinary firm, we could have a very different market, maybe for financial planners versus accountants or some of our support team members might be in a very different market. But I think the market, of course, is an important thing. The next thing is performance. So if I have two people who are at the same level and doing the same role, if one is clearly performing at a higher level than the other one, then there should be some difference there. That to me makes complete sense. And then fourthly, sometimes there are kind of firm specific circumstances which we kind of would prefer to live without, but we probably just have to put up with. And that's something like we might have a particular person who is really fundamental to our business and has a pretty unique set of skills, and if they maybe left us, we would kind of go, that would be really bad.

And in some cases we might end up going, you know what, we're going to maybe pay them a bit more because of that. It could be the other way, of course. It could be. Actually, we're not making any money in our accounting firm right now, and so we can't actually afford to pay people more.

Now, that's a whole bigger conversation, obviously, about how did we end up in that situation. And it's not particularly common, but there might be some unique situations if you're in an unusual geographic area. For example, for example, if you're an accounting firm in Kuma right now, you're competing against Snowy Hydro Two, right, and they're paying silly money. Or if you're in Canberra, the Australian Federal Public Service, a lot of people go, just go and get a cushy job in the public service. So there could be some unique things that a firm is dealing with that might drive that. But the role, the market performance really are, in my world, the three things that are going to drive those, unless there's something unique. And so what most people, of course are doing is they're doing the research out in the market. They're looking at the Hayes Salary survey or some other surveys that might be there. The Hay Salary Survey seems to be the one that a lot of the team members look at because it's an easy one to access and so on. Is it perfect? No, but it is something a lot of people will talk about and there's a few others, but perhaps team members that might not have access to.

So you want to look at that, you want to look at the position description of the person and of course, again, detailed topic, for another day perhaps, but this whole idea of how did the person go against the expectations that we set for them? And so if they performed well, then presumably we want to give them an increase and what's the market doing? Well, actually, sometimes what can happen is maybe someone's actually hit the limit for their role in the market.

And Meryl, this is something I've seen on a few occasions. I've actually seen my reviews of firms, for example, or even just talking to owners of firms. They might end up with someone who's been in their firm for a long time and they give them the kind of the CPI every year, right. Often it's a bit more than the CPI, it's a bit more generous. Right. But the person's role basically hasn't changed for like ten years. So all of a sudden, I've just seen a few cases where actually someone is not really maybe doing a manager role. They might even just be basic bookkeeper, but they seem to be paying a very attractive manager's salary and there's a real mismatch there. So sometimes it is going to be about, well, if a person wants to increase their salary, what more are they going to be doing, what more value are they going to be adding to that? And often people will say to me that conversation when they say to a team member, look, I'd love to pay you more, let's talk about how you can add more value and that might allow me to pay you more. And again, most sensible accountants kind of get that notion of the connection between, oh, if I can add more value, then maybe I can be paid more. There'll be a few who don't get it and maybe they need know. As one of my mentors used to say, it doesn't make them a bad person, it maybe just makes them somewhere else.

[00:51:17] Meryl: I like it.

[00:51:18] Rob: Yeah, because they're not going to be a fit for you, perhaps.

[00:51:22] Meryl: Awesome. Well, Bob, this has been amazing. We've covered a whole range of different topics related to management and leadership. Did you want to share any parting words around that topic and then also where our listeners could find you if they were interested to reach out?

[00:51:40] Rob: Yeah. Thanks, Meryl. Look, I think my message would probably be twofold as leaders, look, whether we're directors, partners or managers, people do look up to us. And so you've got to remember that you're always on stage, right? And how you behave and the language that you use is what they're going to do too. So if you're a nurturing, caring kind of and you're developing your people, they will follow your lead. If you stand up in the middle of office and yell at people and call them names for underperformance, that's probably what they're going to do. So don't underestimate this idea that you really are a role model. You're kind of in the fishbowl and they're looking at you and they will follow your lead. And it's a really powerful thing.

And I think fundamentally, as a leader, talking to your people and that communication piece is just such an important thing sometimes it's like, yeah, well, let's just talk about it, right?

So that's kind of probably my tip in terms of where people can find me. My website is planetconsulting.com. Dot au or Rob@planetconsulting.com au. And like many people, I have the thing on the website where you can book a know no obligation chat if someone wants to just explore a few ideas. But I love talking know accounting firm owners and managers, that's my, you know, always happy to chat to people.

[00:53:16] Meryl: Amazing. Thanks so much, Rob. It's been great.

[00:53:19] Rob: A pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.

[00:53:26] Meryl Outro: I really enjoyed chatting with Rob today, and something that stood out to me was hearing Rob describe how he would handle each situation and what he would say. What I took away from that was to ask lots of questions, be very specific with examples if you're wanting someone to change their behavior or improve at something, but also give them the space to come up with and suggest potential solutions. And I actually noticed some parallels to parenting, except that my toddler is much less reasonable than the team members that we'd be dealing with here. I also reflected after the interview about that feeling that I had of unfairness when I was in my early twenty s and one young accountant, it seemed like he was getting special treatment to go off to his football training, and the rest of us didn't have that option. In hindsight, that was probably something that he negotiated directly with management. And if some of us had asked for that, we may have had that opportunity too. That didn't take away from the feeling of unfairness that I felt at the time. And so it made me reflect that as a manager and at Bean Ninjas, we're trying to encourage balancing the needs of each individual and their personal situation. But it made me reflect on how can we do a better job of being clear that everybody has that option to adjust their hours or their work conditions to fit with the rest of their life, and repeating that message over and over. Because if we don't, maybe there's some team members feeling the same way that I was, that these special flexible perks are only available to some team members and it doesn't feel fair. Lastly, something I was chatting with Rob about before we started recording, so I didn't make it into the episode today was that Rob has structured his consulting work so that he can spend extended periods of time overseas each year. So he works hard in sprints and then takes time off to go traveling with his partner. And I always love hearing examples of people who love their work, but they've also structured their work in a way that fits with their life. So I thought I'd mention that because that ties in with the theme of the lifestyle accountant as well.