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Accountability in a Remote and Flexible Environment

Here's a bold statement - most firms, team, and leaders aren't clear about expected performance. When expectations ARE clear, projects run smoothly, and teams feel "in sync" with one another. When expectations AREN'T clear, everyone involved feels out of touch and uncertain about whether they are on track. This applies in any environment - in-person, remote, or blended. However, when we work away from one another, establishing clear expectations is even more important. In this session, you will:

• Recognize elements of an environment of clear expectations, including fundamental leadership behaviors and strategies that will create more clarity and accountability
• Identify old norms that hold your firm back from creating a more count-on-able environment and new paradigms that fit the more remote and flexible work world you're operating in today
• Summarize the fundamentals of delegation and best practices for handing work off to any team member, along with specific strategies for collaborating with remote and asynchronous team members
• Implement communication models that will facilitate more intentional and consistent connection in a flexible environment

Leave this session prepared to create a more accountable, functional, effective, and motivated team, no matter where or when they're working!

Avoiding Common Remote and Blended Work Pitfalls

Want to ensure that you firm's remote or blended work strategy is a viable, long-term solution for your firm? Join this interactive discussion facilitated by remote-work experts from ConvergenceCoaching, LLC. Together we’ll prioritize and address the common pitfalls that impede the move to a more-remote environment. After completing this course, you will be able to:

• Identify the mindset and strategies that allow leaders to manage a team they can’t always see
• List common misconceptions about productivity and recognize the importance of creating new measures
• Recognize the strategies that will accelerate learning and growth in a remote or blended environment
• List specific approaches that will protect your culture and have your people feel connected to one another no matter where they work

Attend this session to expand your ability to overcome the common remote and blended work obstacles!

Becoming an Inspiring, Difference-Making Coach

Are you doing all that you can to motivate your talent and provide feedback in ways that are meaningful to them? Coaches that provide motivational and engaging experiences with timely, specific feedback will win in the recruiting-and-retention race. In this session, you will:

• Understand the role of a coach and strategies to make it successful for all involved
• Identify strategies to build rapport with your coachees and questions to ask to learn their motivators, interests and desires
• Recall the fundamentals of delegation and discuss different strategies that lead to accountability including effective goal setting
• Generate ways to deliver feedback to help your coachees thrive

Leave this session prepared to motivate and inspire team members who partner with you to drive firm results!

Building a Truly Progressive, Talent-Forward Firm

With all that’s happened in the last few years, the profession is facing unprecedented change. Firms are challenged to now integrate the dreams, goals, and desires of their talent into their core firm strategy. Leaders who drive cultural change stand the best chance of being a destination firm for high-potential talent. Attend this highly interactive, discussion-based session to explore strategies to engage, empower and develop your talent. After completion of this course, you’ll be able to:

• Identify critical cultural components that today’s talent are seeking, including a leadership culture centered on getting better, letting go, being open to change, and failing forward
• Recognize how embracing the changes facing our firms - remote and blended work, flexibility, technology, business model shifts, and new ways of learning to bring future leaders along faster - can create higher levels of engagement

Leave this session with ideas to shift your firm’s culture and identify new strategic priorities that inspire, empower, and retain your talent, providing a bright future for your firm.

Capacity Issues? Rightsize Your Client Base

Across the profession, firms are facing tremendous opportunity yet have limited capacity to capitalize on it. Capacity-building strategies are available but take precious time and resources to plan and implement. There is, however, one strategy that everyone can implement immediately to significantly improve capacity before their next busy season - reducing your firm’s client load. Together, we’ll explore the reasons to take this on and share tried and true strategies to support a more successful client reduction initiative. The learning objectives for this course are to:

• List the six reasons why culling is the right strategy for your firm, your leaders, your team members, and even your clients
• Recognize how to get started quickly and impactfully with timing and an approach that honors relationships with long-standing clients
• Identify strategic communication strategies and consistent position statements to protect your brand and reputation in your communities
• Recognize potential barriers that might get in the way of a culling initiative and how to proactively overcome them

A client reduction strategy isn’t easy yet it’s the fastest way to create capacity while demonstrating your commitment to improve the work life of your increasingly weary team members. Leave this session prepared to expand your capacity immediately!

Clarifying Your Firm's Remote and Flex Philosophy

Workplace flexibility is a must-have in today’s employment arena. When firm leaders aren’t clear about their firm’s flexible and remote work philosophy among leaders and with their team members, they often experience a “gap” in the results they were hoping to accomplish with new levels of flexibility. To maximize team engagement and attract the right people to your firm, it’s important to crystalize your firm’s “strategic position” along the spectrum of remote and flex cultures. In this session, you will: 

• Recognize the expanse of remote and flex philosophies and program options from “we don’t care when and where you work” to “45 hours a week is required, and we expect to see you all five days in the office”  
• Implement a brand “risk management assessment” of various positions along the spectrum of options 
• Identify the steps to produce a clear “how we work” document to govern the way all team members “operate,” ensuring your team remains in communication, collaborative, and accessible and responsive to one another and clients 
• Produce more committed and consistent support of your partners and managers, ensuring that their words and actions reflect your chosen remote and flex positioning 

Leave ready to create more realistic and unified expectations for your remote and flex approach! 

Designing Career Pathways for Non-Traditional Talent

Firm leaders are addressing capacity challenges by designing new roles within their workstream. They are hiring roles that don't always align with the traditional model of accounting and tax skills. These less-traditional roles come alongside their fellow accounting and tax professionals so they can each function at their highest and best use. However, the current path to advancement in most firms doesn't provide clear opportunities for non-accounting or non-CPA professionals. To retain and develop these important non-traditional team members, it is time to reimagine the career "ladder" or "lattice" and compensation structure. In this session, we will:

• Recognize the value of integrating operational and administrative resources into delivery teams to drive efficiency
• Identify the roles and responsibilities non-traditional talent can fulfill within CPA firms to create capacity for accounting and tax professionals
• Analyze methods to elevate non-accounting and non-CPA professionals
• Develop compensations structures that motivate and reward contributions.

Leave this session with ideas for non-traditional roles in your firm.

Develop a Leverage Culture

We all want to invest in new technology, learning and development, and innovations to enhance our firms. To fuel those investments, we have to ensure that we have the right business practices that protect your firm’s profitability. If only the professional services business model was intuitive! Many of us struggle to get our arms around the various “levers” in our practices that influence profitability and success. Attend this session to explore our FAVORITE elements of economic health in your practice where you will:

• Understand the most important CPA firm success metrics, such as fees per partner, leverage, and rate per hour
• Discover ways you can improve all three metrics including progressive pricing strategies, delegation, culling clients, and other ideas we’ll generate together
• Identify methods to further these change ideas with firm leadership

Leave this session with a clearer picture of how you can drive practice profitability and success!

Developing a Strategy for Growth

Historically, firms and practice areas have grown opportunistically based on the prospects or projects that show up at the door. But in the current environment of almost-endless opportunity and limited capacity to serve it, smart leaders are recognizing that they have to make careful choices in who they serve. Ideally, you want to serve clients who value your expertise, work on projects that give you joy and drive profits to help firm earnings grow.

To grow more strategically, you'll want to drive the right growth with a marketing plan designed to educate internal stakeholders and create the brand and lead generation activities to produce real results. Your plan will position you in the market to attract the clients and project you most want, support activities like informing external referral sources, updating web copy and digital marketing efforts, drive team member marketing efforts. In this session, we'll explore a step-by-step process to build a Marketing Plan to rally your team and shape your marketing and sales efforts.

• Defining a marketing strategy around the six P's of marketing
• Identifying who should be involved in marketing planning
• Recognizing the importance of socializing your plans for growth to get others on the same page

Leave this session empowered to build a clear plan to manage the right growth in your firm or practice area!