Pete’s Blog

Top Skills CPAs Will Need In 2025

From the desk of Peter Margaritis

Horizons-Report-CoverAccording to an evaluation by MACPA  from the CPA Horizons 2025 Project, five critical competencies for the future (after the core technical accounting / financial skills) were identified:

Leadership: The ability to develop and share insights and the aptitude to mobilize and inspire others to action. Leadership is about finding possibilities and developing people, utilizing their strengths, and shaping the future.

Communications: Able to give and exchange information with meaningful context and appropriate delivery and interpersonal skills. It includes the ability to make thinking visible to others in a way they can easily grasp.

Strategic thinking: A future-minded and flexible mindset that thinks critically and creatively. The ability to link data, knowledge and insights together to provide quality advice for strategic decision-making.

Collaboration and synthesis: Being effective at engaging others and working across boundaries to turn challenges into opportunities, including the ability to consider the whole picture (past, present, and future context) and create alternatives and options for the future.

Being tech savvy: Anticipating technology changes and how they can benefit others. Being adept at standardizing data for transparency, efficient exchange, and visualization.

While I agree that these skills will be valuable in 2025, I know they are critical today.  Leadership, Communication, Strategic Thinking and Collaboration are not skills that magically emerge. They are developed through training and  behavior modeling to creating a culture that supports and rewards staff who are technically smart accountants and have the soft skills needed to succeed.

Download the full report here.

What Are You Doing?

From the desk of Peter Margaritis

Conference CallDoes your company schedule conference calls routinely? Maybe every week with remote offices or with staff who travel, or maybe even with large client groups. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a conference call my guess is that you have left that virtual “meeting” on several occasions. Whether you check out mentally or physically, most of us have learned how and when to be a conference call Houdini and make the great escape!

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review, What People Are Really Doing When They’re on a Conference Call, shares some interesting statistics that are an indictment of the whole theory that conference calls save money and time while improving communication. From doing other work (65% of employees surveyed admitted to this) to falling asleep (27% admitted to that), it is clear that participation is not critical or even noticed.

Interestingly, where you take the call doesn’t necessarily impact your engagement level, it’s more about the distraction level. Because we are all connected, clients and colleagues expect us to return texts, emails and calls immediately. It’s pretty easy to mute a conference call and go on with your regular work.  Taking a call on the beach or at the pool isn’t nearly as disruptive as a facilitator that lacks the ability to lead a quality meeting or call.

Personal interaction is the key to keeping people on the line – ask participants to be involved in the call discussion, encourage everyone to avoid the mute button, reduce the number of participants so all can be heard. As with in-person meetings, keep conference calls short, share an agenda and have specific outcomes planned.  Using web conferencing tools may help people stay engaged; it’s a bit more difficult to check out when the boss can see you.

After reading the article, review your company’s protocol for the dreaded conference call. A change in process could help you improve communication and productivity.

 

 

 

Eliminate Corporate Buzzwords!

From the desk of Peter Margaritis

61iCLTBCDUL._SL500_AA300_I have called this meeting so we can “reach out”to our customers to provide them with a “value proposition”based on industry “best practices”. The “bottom line”is that we “have to go the extra mile”to provide and “amazing”“customer experience”so we can have a “win-win”situation. I need everyone to “think outside the box”and go through the “ideation”process so we can “leverage”our position and provide efficient “bandwidth”so “at the end of the day”we can “incentivize”you on a “net net”basis. “Spitball”ideas with anyone on the team “offline.”We all need to be “teed up”on this initiative because our “stakeholders”and the company need to “be singing from the same hymnal.”Let’s do some “back of the envelop”calculations and focus for now on “the low hanging fruit.”It is important that we have our “talking points”aligned and I will “circle back”with each of you to “level set”our strategy so that this does not turn into a “train wreck.”Any questions? Good, lets all go “the extra mile”on this initiative.

Does this sound familiar? Are you scratching your head now as much as you do when you experience this at work? What happened to a simpler way of speak? Here are some buzzwords and what I think of when I hear them:

  1. 10,000 foot view: I don’t know any of the details
  2. Back of the envelope: We are out of legal pads
  3. Benchmarking: My photo is on a bus stop bench
  4. Bio-break: I am in buzzword hell if I can’t even say restroom
  5. Circle back: Circle back mountain
  6. Emotional leakage: Looks like a going concern. I better get a pair of Depends
  7. In the loop: I am going to hang myself if I hear another corporate buzzword
  8. Intellectual capital: The opposite of Congress
  9. Low hanging fruit: Going commando
  10. Space: The final frontier
  11. Stakeholders: For those who like corn-on-the-cob holders
  12. Value proposition: Negotiating with a prostitute

Let’s put the opening paragraph in a simple and understandable format:

I have called this meeting to begin the conversation of how we can improve our customer service. Everyone in this room has thoughts and ideas on this topic, and we want to hear them so we can determine which one(s) we can be implemented. The team with the best idea will win $10,000. Generate as many ideas as possible. We want quantity. We will determine quality afterwards. This is a directive from the board of directors and is a high priority initiative. As part of this process, what little things can we start doing today to help improve our customer service. I will be meeting with each team this next week to gather their ideas and then we all will meet in two weeks with our strategy. I thank you in advance for your hard work in this initiative.

We went from 185 words down to 139 words – a 25% reduction in words plus a 100% improvement in clarity! I’m starting a campaign to eliminate buzzwords at work, and you don’t even have to dump ice water over your head. Are you in?

Faster Meetings Mean Better Meetings

From the desk of Peter Margaritis

37072Who among us loves long, drawn-out meetings? No one. Yet somehow the people managing meetings seem to think that longer must mean more productive. I am on the side of less is more.  Here are my tips on how to make meetings shorter and get better results, and they center around the planning process.

Have a specific agenda that includes key discussion points.

•  Send out the agenda in advance so attendees know what to expect.

• Start on time, end on time. It’s really just another discipline.

• Anything off topic is discussed later.

• Anything that is does not involve all meeting attendees is discussed later.

• If appropriate, ask subject experts to provide necessary information to the group.

• Set a timeframe for each discussion point.

• Allow a specific time for Q&A. Any topics that cannot be answered are passed on to whoever can give the answer.

This article offers 6 Ways to Make Meetings Go Faster. Personnally, I like the last way: don’t schedule a meeting at all!  Time is so valuable that without a specific purpose, meetings can be more habit than productive.

 

 

 

What Happens in Vegas…

From the desk of Peter Margaritis

With Peter at the 2014 SAGE SummitHope that what happened at the Sage Summit in Las Vegas last month does not stay in Vegas! The keynote speakers were very high profile:  Magic Johnson, Biz Stone, and Robert Gibbs, just to name a few. Bill Sheridan, Chief Communications Officer at the Maryland Association of CPAs wrote three excellent blogs about the Sage Summit; “The Investing Media Sells Fear. Stop Buying,” “If Strategy is the Cake, Culture is the Oven,” and “Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone: Be Human, Solve Problems, Help People.”

I presented two breakout sessions and the Sage Summit (“Communicating in the Workplace”and “Business Development for Accountants”) and I met many interesting people. Steven Shapiro who is a sole practitioner from Los Angeles, is one of the most extroverted accountants I ever met (next to me). Then there was Louie Prosperi, CEO of the Institute of Professional Bookkeepers of Canada based out of Toronto, who was highly engaged and an excellent networker. And last but certainly not least, Celia Phillips (l) and Kitty Bhogal (r) with Structured Accounting Services in Toronto who were brave enough to have their picture taken with me. I hope to see Louie, Celia, and Kitty in my Toronto courses (The 8 Hour MBA, Communicating in the Workplace, and Public Speaking and Presentation Skills) on September 2nd and 3rd.