Why Adopting a Talent Management Strategy is Vital To Your Firm’s Success

Jeremy Wortman of The Growth Partnership and HRD Initiatives recently spoke to my Chicago area roundtables. Jeremy is a consultant, executive coach and trainer in “talent management.” If you’re like me, you’re not exactly sure what a “talent management strategy” is. As Wortman explains it, talent management is an umbrella term for how firms acquire talent, engage people in the firm, develop their skills and retain them.

Jeremy’s passion for talent management is founded on this principle: Culture, personality fit and morale are MORE important than technical skills to a firm’s long-term success. Firms that truly understand how to maximize their employees’ talents create a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

The member firms wholeheartedly agreed that talent management is their most critical management function. Yet only 20% had a clearly defined talent management strategy, a finding which paralleled Jeremy’s work with firms across the country. What explains this HUGE disconnect?

(1) Complacency. CPA firm partners aren’t willing or able to expend any more energy and time on talent management than they are already.
(2) You get what you measure. Managing staff effectively and impacting their growth and retention are barely recognized in partner comp systems.
(3) Lack of time.
(4) No HR professional on board to keep firm personnel engaged.
(5) Lack of awareness of how to manage talent effectively.

Wortman feels the best practice for optimizing talent management is to hire the right people from the start. The group’s members overwhelmingly identified employee personality/culture fit as more important to the firm’s long term success than their technical knowledge. If firms truly feel this way, he said, they should do a survey assessing their firm’s culture and personality, then use traits from the firm’s personality profile to describe the job. Finally, do survey assessments of the top candidate to ensure that their personality is a good fit with the firm’s culture.

Other gems Jeremy shared with us during the talk:

Engagement has the strongest link to productivity – even more than staff satisfaction. Engagement is defined in three ways: (1) Psychological – does your staff believe in the firm’s vision?  (2) Behavioral – will your staff work hard for you? (3) Emotional – are they proud to say where they work and would they recommend you?

Firms that have engaged – rather than merely satisfied –  staff significantly outperform the latter. Best engagement practices include verbal recognition (compensation and gifts only have short-term benefits), clearly defining each person’s career path and how they fit into the firm’s strategy, conflict management, team-building and leadership assessment.

Staff, not clients, should be the firm’s #1 priority. A firm that makes staff #1 will automatically take good care of its clients.

If less than 1% of new people at CPA firm’s stay through partner, why invest time in developing them? Because without the investment, (1) you won’t even get the 1% and (2) firms would struggle to attract and maintain the backbone of their firm – a cadre of good experienced staff who get the bulk of the work done.

Best practice for talent management. To manage talent effectively, firms need to survey their staff annually to see how engaged they are in the firm.

Innovative team-building exercise. Have everyone take a personality profile and post the results on a wall without identifying names. Then, ask everyone to identify who is who. Only 10% will guess correctly. We don’t know each other the way we think we do.

To train your staff in the operation of the typical CPA firm, take advantage of our liberal quantity discounts to purchase multiple copies of How CPA Firms Work: The Business of Public Accounting for your new hires and interns.