Today on The Unique CPA, we’re talking about something that many accounting firms struggle with, and that is the transition from technical expert to effective people leader. Our guest today, Annette Wehrli, is an expert in helping business owners and leaders align their business strategy with their people strategy—which obviously is a very passionate topic I like talking about—creating a high-performing team and a healthy results-driven culture. Today, we’ll kind of see where this conversation goes, but I think we’ll delve into talking about what makes a great leader and different leadership styles even, and how firms maybe can build a strong leadership bench for long-term success. Annette, welcome to The Unique CPA.

Thanks for having me, Randy. I’m glad to be here.

Yeah. Not putting too much pressure with so many things that I mentioned there, but we’ll see where we get to today. It’s always just a conversation. But why don’t you give us a little bit more, like your firm name, your company name, what you’re doing, and why don’t you do an intro yourself?

Sure, thank you. So I cut my teeth in one of the big consulting firms and then spent the majority of my career really as a consultant and a coach to small business owners and leaders in the service industry, sales industry. Did some training in there as well, and a whole myriad of things, but it’s really around coaching and helping leaders get better on the people side of their business. And this is my passion, so yeah, you created a long list for us to cover today, but I will say, that really is my passion, it’s what gets me out of bed every day. So I’m excited to talk about it today.

Well, me too, actually. You and I talked a few weeks ago and I came out of that conversation with some new knowledge that I’ve actually been sharing with others as well. In fact, we talked about it on an episode that we recorded earlier today, where you and I talked about leadership and how I didn’t see myself as a leader, and you corrected me, I guess, on that. But it was an interesting conversation, so I appreciate that. 

Yeah!

Let’s talk about it because I think this is an issue in public accounting. We have a lot of issues in public accounting. Public accounting is a great profession, and it is amazing. We have a perception issue in the profession, and actually a little reality issue with what we really are. But one of the things I think we struggle with is we build, create, reward  technical expertise, which is fine. We are a very technical profession. But then as people come up, you know, they have this technical knowledge and that’s what we see as most important, but we don’t spend a lot of time cultivating the leadership skills that they need. I don’t know if you’ve seen this at all, but how would you suggest we address this? Going from a technical expert to a people leader or whatever the steps are in between there?

Yeah. That’s such an important distinction, and I don’t think accounting is the only industry—well, I know accounting is not the only industry to fall into that trap. I come from service and sales backgrounds and companies, and the sales industry is notorious for taking a high performer who knows how to sell and close a deal and negotiate and fill in the blank. All those I-N-G words that we need to do, and we say, “Gosh, John is such a phenomenal salesman, closer, or whatever, we should make him a team lead.” And you know how that goes.

Oh yeah. We did that ourselves, actually.

Yeah.

So I’ve seen it and I know it’s not always the right decision. So go ahead.

So like you said, we reward based on technical skill—no matter what you’re doing, what industry you’re in. You’re a good widget maker, and so we say that you should move up and manage people. And an accountant, a widget maker, or a salesperson may be phenomenal at what they do, and—both and—they’re not good at managing people, they’re not good at leading people, and they have no desire for that. And so you just asked, you know, how do we remedy this? I really think we have to take a step back and as leaders really force ourselves to say, wait a minute, what is it that we’re looking for in the role, and what does the business need? You talked about me helping people align the business strategy with the people strategy, and it’s saying, I know we need a team leader or a manager, or whatever the role is, but what kind of person do we need? How does that align with our values? What are we trying to accomplish from a business standpoint, from a people standpoint, and is this the right person for that role? Do they have those competencies? Do they have that heart for people, etc.? And I think that’s by asking ourselves those reflective questions on the front end, now we have a rubric, if you will, to consider people that would be candidates for that promotion or that opportunity within the firm. That’s a starting place.

Yep. And when we’re looking at that, because this is one thing I’m very passionate about too, is allowing people to delve into their strengths. And so if people don’t have a leadership strength, is this something that you suggest we work on? Is this something that you see there’s opportunities for people to strengthen these leadership areas, or, this is something we can talk about, there’s different leadership styles or personalities or whatever? Do we need to identify where their leadership style is and then see if there’s a way to try to enhance that even further through some kind of education or programs? What do you see? When you bring up leaders, do you, is there just a hey, cookie cutter, this is what we’re doing and this is how you have to become a leader? Or how do you see the best way to develop leaders?

Yeah, I don’t think there’s a cookie cutter. There is no conveyor belt that we can put people on a system. I believe wholeheartedly in training—I’ve led those kinds of programs, I’ve built leadership development programs over multi months and years—so I absolutely believe in coaching and training to skill sets and competencies. You can go to places like Gallup or Korn Ferry, or the big consulting firms, or the Center for Creative Leadership. We know what many of the competencies of leadership are—sure, a lot of curricula for leadership development include communication, empathy, listening, decision making, handling stress, you know—all of those components. But I don’t believe that there’s a cookie cutter way to lead, because one of the things that you and I talked about a couple of weeks ago was that accounting and numbers are predictable, and they do what you tell them to do. Humans do not. To say that there’s one way to lead, or this is the only thing, it is just absurd. So it’s very human, it’s very, even culture-based, it can be company-based. But sure, there are some mile markers and some milestones that we look for when we are developing and coaching. It can be anything from going to classes and courses, it can be certain leadership events, it can be mentoring, it can be coaching, a wide variety of options. But it starts with us saying, what is it that we really are looking for from a leadership standpoint, from this person? What kind of firm are we? What kind of culture are we trying to create and what competencies are needed for that in addition to having subject knowledge of all of the accounting principles that are really important to be able to manage the specifics of day-to-day?

So in that then, we’re identifying somebody, we want this person, we see the opportunity for them to lead. Because you mentioned a few things with Gallup and Korn Ferry and the CCL. I think you and I, when we talked last time, something that we did as an organization was the Clifton StrengthsFinders, which was a very impactful thing for me just to see that. And then you see people have different skill sets—in there, they broke us into four different areas, and I know nothing about developing leaders in that you’re the expert here—but does it make sense to do some kind of, I assume that’s what Gallup or Korn Ferry might do, is to identify the strengths or the leadership style that this individual has, and then when we are doing training, that’s how we’re going to lean into it?

Yeah. There are a myriad of assessments that you can look at, more than you would possibly need. Assessment is a very important component, and there’s a lot of difference in assessments. Some of them are leadership style, some of them are social preferences like the DISC: what kind of personality are you? That’s not leadership; that’s your personality. How do you work in the world? And then there are very specific leadership assessments. There’s 360-degree surveys that you can do where you get manager, peer, and direct reports. That’s an exhaustive list for sure.

Assessments are a great place to start in understanding the person that you’re bringing in on a holistic level, and then from there you look at, Let’s talk about what are your passions, your heart for people? What do you wanna do with your career? Do you want the pressure of being a partner in an accounting firm? Do you want to be a manager? Do you really wanna be an individual contributor who just really loves to do great diagnostic work with clients? All of that is okay. It’s just making sure that we’re doing a deep dive into a wide variety of asking ourselves about the person and what the business needs and making sure that that aligns—as opposed to, “Hey, Steve got promoted, we need to move someone into that spot real quick because tax season is coming. Let’s move Jane into that role real quick so that we can have someone in the seat,” which is what most of us do because time is money, right?

Well, yeah, too often time is money in the accounting profession, because I think we value ourselves on time rather than on the value we’re delivering. But that’s another story probably for a later time. 

It is, it is.

Let’s talk about then, if we’re doing an assessment and we’re finding out what types of leaders there are, you know, categories we can maybe put leaders into?

Sure. I’ve been doing this for about 23 years, small business, big consulting. I’ve seen a whole bunch of different things. If you ask four different people that question—Randy, I know you already have—you’ll get four different answers. But my observations, this is how I kind of bucket the people that I work with and how I think about leadership: I have found there are four types that I really see, or four ways of leading. The first would be some people lead with vision and strategy. They are directive, they are future-looking. They see things most of us don’t see. They’re looking at trends, etc. The second type that I see, or the expertise in leadership, if you will, are thought leaders or leaders who love to educate. I think, Randy, you are one of those people. You’re visionary for sure, no question, obviously, you have a podcast, you’re bringing all sorts of unique thoughts into the industry, and you’re bringing topics that are not necessarily technically related, right? And that’s what thought leaders do—they educate.

Yep.

The third category would be people leaders. When we use the word “leader” in social media or in public or in conversations with people, that’s kind of the assumed leader that we’re talking about is a people leader. But there are a lot of people out there who are not people leaders and they shouldn’t be people leaders. But we assume that’s what people mean when they say leader. The fourth grouping that I would put in there would be process leaders or technical leaders. It’s pretty self-explanatory. So you’ve got vision and strategy, thought and education leaders, people leaders, and then process and tech.

Yeah, and honestly, when I look at that, that’s very similar to the four corners that we did when we were doing the Clifton StrengthsFinders. We had relationship builders—maybe that’s people. We had the strategic thinkers, which obviously falls into one. We have the influencers, which is probably the thought leaders, and then you had the process and technology, which is the “doers” more so. So I can see the, okay, so that’s pretty cool. I can relate this to something I know every day.

You can, you really know that Clifton tool.

Yeah. It was so impactful to me. It’s something that I speak about a lot when I’m out doing my presentations on culture because it meant so much to me. So, in those four categories we just talked about, my perception, the way I see things, is that probably a majority of the leaders in the accounting profession are the process and technical type leadership. Can we function as an organization with that alone? I can’t imagine we could, and if not, what do we do? How do we identify? What’s our next step to make sure that we have leaders in all these areas?

That’s a great question. Something that I like to say when I talk about these categories is it’s very unusual to find a single leader who can cover all four of those components. So we need to have all of those types of leaders within a firm and/or within a team, depending on how large your teams are, your divisions are. We really need to look for variety and breadth of types of people and what you’re leading—that’s what I call this, is what do you lead? Do you lead vision, thought, people, or process? They’re important at every level. We need all four types in order to function. That’s where some of these assessments can come in, but you don’t have to pay for a fancy assessment. You can a lot of times, look and describe your experience with that person, and it comes out pretty clearly where they’re leading. 

So what we do with all of this is one of the things that you said a couple of minutes ago was people don’t always have the opportunity to use their strengths at work. That’s really what we want to hone in on, is what part of this is your strength? How does that fit within the firm? And from a business strategy, what is it that we need in place in order to grow, stretch, or morph the business into what it is that we’re looking to do and add more value to our clients? That brings me to a topic of culture: How do we ensure that we have people at every level in the firm, in every role in the firm, that are modeling our culture and building up our culture? 

I’ve heard you—I listen to your podcast, obviously—and there’s a lot of conversation with previous guests about who’s coming into the industry, and a concern about either lack of people that are coming in or a slowed pace of people that are coming in, of newbies if you will, coming into the industry. When I hear that kind of commentary—and I link it to what we’re talking about here, I’m a very curious person, as a coach and a consultant, my job is to ask questions—so what comes to my mind when I hear that is, yes, we need to work on education and advertising, and working on schools and what they’re teaching. 100%. And firm owners who are listening to this need to also ask themselves, what am I doing? What are we doing as a firm as a value proposition to potential hires? What is it that we have to entice or appeal or attract the type of people that we want for the firm with these varying types of skill sets? I’d be curious to hear your thoughts about that.

For me, it is the fact that I think the reason we are having an issue with people in the profession is because the process and technical end is what we highlight, so often, that it is not this vision and strategy and impact from a thought leader standpoint, going out and showing the impact that we’re having on the clients we work with. We’re impacting them as a business owner, but we’re impacting the people they work with, and we’re impacting the future of many lives that are tied to this organization with the knowledge and the expertise that we have. We can see that and we can show the value of what we’re doing, which gets me into that hours, which you talked about earlier. But we can show that we are super important. Honestly, I have a friend of mine, Jennifer Wilson, who said, oh, how did she put this? “As accountants, we are guardians of the galaxy’s economy.” If you look at that way, we’re superheroes out there.

We need capes, I was just going to say! You need capes.

Yeah. If we start showing that rather than showing that someone sits at their desk for 80 hours and pumps out tax returns all day long, that’s going to show a different story in this profession. And I think that’s part of it, from a leadership standpoint, we have to show a different story.

I think that’s the magic word. As you were talking, I was thinking, this is storytelling. If I bring us back to these categories, if you will, buckets of leaders, of what are you leading? I’m wondering if the people that are telling the stories, or trying—or not telling the stories, right?—are technical process, are technical excellence leaders that are trying to attract this new generation of accounting professionals into their firms, but because they are process and technical, they’re oriented with technicalities—I’m having a hard time saying that—there’s lacking the leadership and the visionary storytelling that creates a picture of what this industry can do for your life.

Yeah. I can see myself in the visionary and the strategy, not the strategy as much as the visionary and the thought leader, but the other parts I can’t see myself in. So I can go out and say what we’re doing, what we should be doing, and how this could be an awesome profession. But I can’t then put that into practice in the profession from a standpoint of, let’s do the process and procedures and KPIs to make sure we’re being as efficient as possible. But that’s super important. We just have to make sure the right storytellers are out there from a leadership standpoint. Actually, to be fair, I have a positive outlook on this profession. We saw just recently where there was an uptick in enrollment in accounting—this just came out this past year—and we saw, I just saw this today for the first time, an increase in salaries and people coming into the profession, not even just the universities. So somehow somebody out there is showing that vision, and it may be making a difference. I’m very excited to see that this could be where we’re heading in the future. It’s a small sample size right now, but at least it’s a positive trend.

That’s exciting. That is very exciting to see the uptick. Bravo to whoever is doing that work out there. And I think, Randy, I know you’re part of it.

I was going to say, it’s all me. 

I love it!

It’s not all me, it is not all me. 

But there’s a lot of good things happening out there. Here’s something I would encourage your listeners to think about. Take out a piece of paper or get your phone out and really think through, what is our story? What is the story at our firm? From someone who comes in either as an intern or an associate or whatever your entry-level role is, or even a mid-level person, what kind of stories can we tell about the lives that we change for the employees? I’m talking about an employee value proposition. 

Yes, yes. I love that.

And how do we help them professionally? How do we help them mature as a human? How do we manage and lead them in a way that they receive and they want? How do we help them dream? Do we build careers? An old client of mine—this is one of the most moving things I’d ever heard—the guy would tear up about it when he would talk about it. Sales industry and recruiters, was the office that he had. He would say, when people come to interview with me for an AE, an account executive recruiter role, and I say, what do you think we do here? The candidate would say to him, well, you make placements and you do this and you do that. He goes, yeah, we do that for the people outside the firm. For the people inside the firm—and he memorized this, Randy, he knew it by heart because it meant so much to him as the business owner—he’d say, we’ve put 15 kids through college. We’ve purchased, I don’t know the number, whatever, a hundred pairs of braces. We’ve bought new bicycles. We’ve done this. And he talked about how he changed the life of the people that worked at the firm. 

Now there is nothing overly exciting and nobody wakes up in the morning and says, I wanna be a recruiter. I don’t know if anybody wakes up in the morning and says, I’m a 4-year-old who says, I wanna be an accountant. Maybe a lot of people do that. But when they hear that story, they go, wow, I wanna be a part of this organization that is changing lives, and I want my kids to go to college because I work at a stable firm that’s going to give me the income to put them through school, right? That’s storytelling about why accounting matters on both sides for clients and for the team itself. So for your listeners, what’s your value prop for candidates who want to interview at your firm? Holistically, how do you change their life? How do you prepare them for a career in leadership and whatever? It’s a real good question to ask yourself and say, gosh, if I saw that on a piece of paper, would I wanna work here?

Right. Right. What you just said was giving me goosebumps because I just had a very similar conversation yesterday with Ron Baker. Many of our listeners know Ron Baker, but we were talking about the progression of economic value and what it used to be and now what it is today. Before you even said it, I was thinking, yeah, the story is, we save this company tax dollars. Okay, no, we put X amount of dollars back in the business, and they were able to use that to “do this,” and I was thinking, “send 10 more people to college.” So, yeah, that’s a much better story to tell. It gets people more excited and allows you to know that what you’re doing is having an impact. So that was great.

But both stories matter. Absolutely, you’re in business to help your clients get better, right? So you definitely want to talk about the savings and all of the benefits business-wise, but there’s two sides to the story of why you should come work for me, for us, and candidly, some clients will make choices because they want to make sure that they’re working for a firm that cares about their people. So telling that story on both sides is appealing to both sides at times. That’s where some of this gets into the bigger issues of culture and the opportunity to really build a practice that has a legacy.

You and I need to talk more, I think at some point. I’ve written a culture code for our organization, and in there, I talk about what our promises are to the people who work here. That’s a story we tell. But we live it. I don’t know if you and I talked about this before, but in 18 years, we’re at 80 people now. We’ve had nine people leave. Having that story out there and communicating it so people know it and, but then living it, that you can’t just say the words, you have to live the words. It makes a difference. 

So, great conversation so far, and I don’t want to end it, but I want to go kind of back to where we started a little bit with this whole technical expert becoming leader at some level. So what are the roadblocks that come into play? How do we get past that? How do we get to where it’s beneficial to the person becoming the leader and the firm itself?

Yeah. So we talked a little bit about first identifying what the firm needs, then looking at values and how all that stuff aligns so that we’re choosing the right people. Then when you see, let’s say that some of your listeners, they need to promote someone into a team leader or a manager or a senior manager or whatever kind of role through the ranks, if you will, of leadership, and they have someone in mind, and that person is a really good technician. They’re a really good CPA or accountant or whatever their function is in the role. Like, what do we do then? A starting place for that for me would be to call me crazy, but have a candid conversation with the person.

Oh, that’s good!

It’s just saying, hey John, we’ve seen this about you, we have a need, and we’re wondering, are you interested? What do you think about it? Have you ever considered it? What do you want to do? You know, there’s so many ways you can go with that conversation and just test it and find out, honestly, do you have a heart for people? Do you prefer tech? Do you just want to stay in an expertise role, which, gosh, we need that, but we also need this, and we’re just tapping you to see, hey, are you interested? 

If they say yes, and they want to move forward, I’ve seen literally hundreds of people struggle with letting go of that identity as an expert technician, and embracing the new identity of, I’m still really, really good at that, and now my attention needs to shift to influencing other technicians to make stronger results. Now my job is to influence through others, versus being the technician myself. So it’s a mindset shift, and then there’s also skill sets that need to shift. Oftentimes letting go of control and trust—learning how to trust, learning how to delegate, learning how to communicate and understand, ask questions rather than telling how to do things—that’s control. So it usually starts with coaching or training or mentoring from someone else within the firm who has those delegation, trust, relationship, listening, and letting-go competencies to really help that up and comer, if you will, experience it, get some tactical training on it, and then setting up mentoring or scenarios, low-risk scenarios in which they can begin to practice that without breaking the house.

Great advice. I was living my life, what you were just saying there, because there’s skills I don’t have that I always thought this was who I was, and it took me a mindset—what you just said, a mindset shift, a mindset change—to realize this is where I needed to be. The one was managing partner—I wasn’t, I really shouldn’t have been. I didn’t have the process and the technology skills to really manage a growth firm. I had the skills of a visionary. I can start a firm, I can get it going. I think that’s the one thing that maybe sometimes we miss is that we can look to those technical experts as the leadership, but in reality, there’s somebody that may not be that technically sound that has great leadership skills somewhere else. 

So as leaders ourselves in an organization, we also have to have this mindset of, yes, make sure we’re open to the skill sets that everybody has. And even though they may not be the most technical expert in their organization, we still, if we can identify those other skills that they have that could show that leadership is there in an area we need, I think that’s one of the things. You asked me earlier about some things where we may be lacking or may not see through the clouds—I don’t know if you put it that way. But that’s, I think, in every organization, not just accounting, where we sometimes probably miss potential great leaders because they weren’t great at their current job.

Yeah, you’ve said it well, and I do want to—and I hope you won’t edit this out, but I do want to really say bravo to you because the humility that it takes, the confidence that it takes to realize I’m not an MP, a managing partner, that’s not what I want. I need to move in a different direction and look what it’s done. It’s created this podcast and your conference and the way that you are being a thought leader and a strategist in the industry to kind of shake things up a little bit. That’s exactly what we’re talking about, Randy, is that when people are able to make that kind of a decision and have that awareness about where their expertise is in the leadership role, really phenomenal things can happen once they feel the freedom to make those decisions or be challenged into a role. We may see that someone has a lot of potential, but they’re terrified. If we just affirm them and say, gosh, I trust us, we see you’ve got this, we can encourage someone into that, and we can also watch someone do what you did, which is to have the humility and the confidence to say, no, I need to move in a different direction and make my impact this way. Bravo to you, and I’m certain that you’re an inspiration to other people to think differently—mindset—about themselves. So well done.

Well, thank you. I get, I don’t know, blush when I hear that kind of stuff, but I did want to say, there’s been multiple people out there where I knew they had a voice that was hidden inside them that they were afraid to let out. I almost feel like I, and I didn’t, but it almost feels like I forced them to be on the podcast, but I did because I knew that they had important things to share. And I’ve seen it more than once where, not that I’m saying I did this; they did everything, but I just gave them that platform to do it. But I could just see a light bulb went off in them. They were like, yeah, I can go out and I do have important things to say, and I can share it.

So alright, well, enough about that. Let’s move on because that was so fun. Alright, we’re going to have to wrap up—I could keep going on this forever. I never really realized I would enjoy talking about leadership so much because leadership, as you and I talked offline, leadership was always a scary word for me. I didn’t even realize that until you and I talked the first time, but this is such an interesting subject because leadership is not what I thought it was, even two weeks ago. It’s a lot different than I thought it was. So thank you for educating me on this. 

But before we wrap up, there’s a couple of questions I want to ask you. If you listen to episodes, you know this is coming, I suppose. So we talked about all this leadership and what people could do and the opportunities there, but when you’re not talking leadership, when you’re not out inspiring people to find their leadership style or what kind of leader they are, what do you do? What’s your outside-of-work passions? What do you enjoy?

Oh gosh, well, a bunch of things. We live in the Midwest. My husband and I love to get out into the woods and walk and hike. Get our boots on, lace up the boots. The rougher the path, the better for me. I don’t like to walk on paved paths, I like rough stuff. We love to do that. We’re getting into spring here soon, so we should be able to start doing that. I have a very significant number of food sensitivities. I’m a total geek on healthy cooking, allergy-free cooking, and I love to cook and try to feel like a normal person with making food at home. So that’s a big part of my life—healthy eating and trying to get outside and be healthy.

Alright. And then, last couple of things. Before we went live—I guess it wasn’t live, it was recorded—but before we started recording, you told me you had an offer to give. So let me let you explain what that is.

I do, absolutely. I would love to help anyone who’s listening think about their own leadership bucket or type or category as we talked about those four things. So I’ve got a real easy one-pager giveaway that I would love to share with you guys. You can find that, the name of my company, which is Effectivity Consulting. I know it’s a funky word. You can find that at www.effectivity.consulting/unique.

We’ll put that on the show notes too, so yeah.

You can download that and just kind of think a little bit through your own style and where your strengths are.

Okay. And then, obviously, they can get to the website, pretty much the same address without the slash.

Yep, effectivity.consulting. There’s no .com, it’s .consulting. I’m also on LinkedIn, so they can find me there.

LinkedIn as well. Alright, well, this is great. I hope people do reach out and look and see what’s going on because it’s an important thing, especially in all professions, but I’m passionate about accounting and especially in our profession. I’m looking at that. So thank you so much for being here today.

Thanks for having me. Randy, seriously, just bravo for all that you’re doing in the industry.

Thank you.