Tax Firm Leadership, Culture Are Key to Success in Changing Times

A generational workforce shift is happening across global tax organizations. Newer, younger tax professionals are assuming leadership responsibilities during a time of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

This creates big opportunities and obstacles for rising tax professionals as they assume key leadership roles—which requires strong, effective, and steady tax leadership, including from key external advisers.

Tax organizations and emerging leaders can respond by fostering a high-performing culture and developing talent within. This can create high-performing teams that lead and thoughtfully manage through difficulty of continuous dynamic challenges.

Building this culture requires focus in five areas: environment, talent recruitment, capabilities, mission, and relationships, plus key elements of each. Such soft skills are seldom taught in college, advanced accounting, or post-graduate school—yet they’re critical.

First, high-performing environments are built on trust and thrive with stress management, work-life balance, embracing simplicity, and having fun. Micromanagement destroys trust; growing trust multiplies team power. Since uncontrollable circumstances can drive stress, focus on what can be controlled, and devise alternative responses for unpredictable developments.

Work-life balance is partly achieved when leaders lead by example—coaching children, attending recitals, prioritizing teacher meetings. Strive to simplify planning and operations, and frame tax-driven complexity into understandable words for others.

Celebrating your team and accomplishments—and the camaraderie that results—creates a positive culture. Together, these steps allow teams to see and experience leaders who consistently promote an environment of empowerment, personal value, and respected trust, both individually and as a team.

Second, high-performing talent recruitment starts with tax technical skills, with skills in technology emerging as needed. Self-starters who create their own professional experiences should be targeted.

Emotional intelligence matters—particularly versatility, perseverance, and resilience. Seek individuals who can handle criticism, be open-minded, listen well, speak honestly, and apologize. Compensation should be constantly re-examined to keep competitive or better pay.

Diversity in demographics and thought build a solid organization. Creating and managing a tiered leadership pipeline for key roles must follow.

Third, high-performing capabilities must be taught, cultivated, and displayed. People must learn how to quickly and flawlessly juggle and address multiple issues. Leaders must communicate well verbally and in writing, and they must know how to listen. This should be expected and nurtured.

Embrace and manage ambiguity by bringing structure to the unclear and by creatively using available tools to clarify confusion. Beyond these soft skills, a blend of interchangeable accounting, legal, economic, and business capabilities are necessary. Stay away from mindsets that only accountants do numbers and lawyers do legal; expect professionals to learn and respect everyone’s skills.

Fourth, inspirational department missions that think big drive high-performing teams, and should connect individual/team efforts to the greater organization. Through impassioned leadership, associate each employee with the goal of achieving your department’s mission and, thereby, the greater organization’s vision. This linkage creates passion and drives your teams’ labors every day.

Fifth, building partner relationships before they’re needed, including strong business and adviser networks, is critical to high performance. Key partnering behaviors include positive mindset, listening, leadership, and building trust.

Mindset drives your efforts to convey positivity, bias for action and execution, mutual ownership, and letting partners shine. Bias for action involves studying and seeking understanding of issues, bringing together and listening to multiple perspectives, then mutually developing an action you swiftly execute.

No solution is perfect; strive for better. Time is wasted trying to move from better to perfect. Likewise, look to convey mutuality—“it’s our problem, not theirs.” In success, let partners take glory; they know who led achievement.

The right to advise is earned by listening. Let speakers tell their story—beginning, middle, and end—then ask questions and avoid bold judgments. Refrain from blocking techniques such as rehearsing your answer while not listening.

Silence is a powerful tool. Human nature tends to fill voids. When negotiating or debating issues, silence causes people to restate perspectives, providing the latest information that might help in your advocacy.

Characterizing elements of the term “leadership” can be difficult. People respect the person first, then listen to their message. Leaders stand for values, ideas, principles, or missions; show consistency, clarity, and honesty in words and deeds, and reflect cohesiveness in actions matching their ideals.

Avoid being pompous—show humility, certainty in mission, and resolve to take actions necessary to achieve goals. Finally, make yourself curious, but with strong character, high integrity, humble confidence, and clear vision.

Building trust relies on credibility, vulnerability, and avoiding self-orientation. Credibility includes dependability—meaning deadlines are met, tasks are completed, calls are returned, with repeated instances of these expectations being fulfilled.

People become trusted by making themselves vulnerable first, giving someone a little piece of themselves and having that act reciprocated, followed by exchanging larger and larger pieces of each other. With each step, trust grows.

Self-orientation can be a trustbuster, as no greater source of distrust exists than a person who appears more interested in themselves than in issues or problems of others. Trust is also an intangible feeling, such as speaking your mind respectfully or making a mistake that results in learning together, both without fear of retribution. This type of trust empowers and achieves great outcomes.

Relationships require learning from multiple mentors—peer mentors, job mentors, career mentors, and mentors in personal life. No one person holds all knowledge, so learning from the best in all levels of society better serves you and your career aspirations.

Experiences, the most significant part of your current career development, accommodate developing and practicing leadership skills. No one should care more about your career or your life than you. A best practice in self-empowerment is repeatedly asking where you seek to be in five to 10 years, discerning the related skills and capabilities you will need, defining the experiences that provide those skills, then giving yourself those experiences to arrive at your desired destination.

In tax organizations, attention to environment, talent, capabilities, mission, and relationships remains critical in a world that’s always changing. Tax professionals must redouble efforts to ensure attention to each of these competencies to achieve high-performing teams and create incredible outcomes.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg Tax, or its owners.

Author Information

David Lewis provides advisory services to select clients and is chairman of the Tax Foundation. He was vice president and chief tax executive of Eli Lilly and Co. from 2000 to 2017.

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