Find out everything you need to know about leading and managing people in this hub.
If you are going to grow and scale your practice beyond you, then you will need to be able to lead and manage people.
This is why two of the 6 profit pillars we check in our free Growth Assessment are Pillar 3 – Team Performance – and Pillar 5 – Owner Time & Role Clarity.
Written by Becky Rogers, copy and content writer for Accounting firm owners and Accounting specialists.
You’ve likely played the conversation out three times already. First in the car on the way home, then in the shower, and again at 2:00 AM when sleep felt impossible. You know what needs to be said, and you’ve rephrased it four different ways to make it land gently. Yet, you still haven’t had the talk. What if they get defensive and resign? You still need them to complete the work, right?
Right. But managing poor performance in an accountancy practice isn’t about changing who you are; it’s a set of learnable habits.
According to research from the CIPD’s Good Work Index, 47% of people choose to ignore friction at work altogether. Avoidance is the natural default, not a personal failing. But that same research found something that should worry any firm owner: people who experience unresolved friction at work are twice as likely to be looking for another job within a year. This means that by dodging one awkward meeting, you aren’t saving your firm…you’re risking your best talent while subsidising low standards.
Here’s how to set boundaries that hold, give feedback people can actually act on, and handle underperformance without lying awake worrying about it.
Key takeaway:
Accountants, as a rule, are decent people. You went into a profession built on care, accuracy and looking after people’s affairs properly. You’re conscientious. You’d rather absorb an inconvenience than cause one. (Which is partly why we’ve worked with accounting firm owners now for over 20 years!)
That instinct is genuinely lovely, and it makes you the kind of person clients want to work with. It also makes you a soft touch, and your team worked that out some time ago.
We tend to see these three qualities in the accounting firm owners we work with:
You’ll see the same instinct with clients, incidentally. How much of the festive period over the years have you lost to clients who sent their records six weeks late? Time you really needed to relax, recharge and create magical memories with your family. How many times have you rewritten a deadline rather than have the conversation about why they keep missing it? The pattern with your staff and the pattern with your clients come from exactly the same place.
Being too nice isn’t kind. It just moves the cost somewhere else, and that somewhere is usually you.
Every job that comes back below standard is a job you finish yourself. Every deadline someone misses is a deadline you cover. And with 74% of accountants reporting burnout indicators, you don’t have the spare capacity to carry someone.
But the bigger cost isn’t yours at all. It’s your good people’s.
Your best team member knows exactly who isn’t pulling their weight. They’ve known for months. They’re the ones picking up the slack, redoing the work, biting their tongue in team meetings. And they’re watching to see what you do about it. When you do nothing, you’re telling them their extra effort has no value and the standard round here is whatever the weakest person feels like doing.
That’s usually who resigns first. I.e. your good performer as they are fed up of picking up the slack for the low performers.
Not sure how much this is costing your firm? Team Performance is one of the six pillars we measure in our free Growth Assessment. It takes under 15 minutes and gives you a personalised report on where your practice is losing capacity and what to tackle first. |
If you want to really grow your business, you need to stop firefighting and start working on the business rather than in it. And to be able to do this, you need an effective team behind you. This is why two of the 6 profit pillars we check in our free Growth Assessment are Pillar 3 – Team Performance – and Pillar 5 – Owner Time & Role Clarity.
To see whether you have a role or team performance issue or a bigger, more systematic problem, take our 10-15 min free Growth Assessment here.
Get back in control of workflow by getting team members to fill in this free (unbranded) end of week report. Click here.
Not sure how to fix your team to get it to work together better? Download our team effectiveness review to pinpoint exactly what you need to do to fix it. Click here.
Download our low-confrontational way of dealing with low performers masterclass recording. Click here.
Find an extra 8 hours to work on growing your firm. Our webinar will help you minimise interruptions and the demands on you from your staff and clients. Click here to download our webinar recording (for free)
Chapter 1 shows you how to eliminate work from your desk, freeing up an extra eight hours a week for essential strategic thinking time and headspace. (Read this if you find yourself firefighting most of the time and working very long hours)
Chapter 4 will help you if your practice is constantly running over capacity with a perpetual backlog of client work.
Chapter 6 & 7 cover how to build the right team around you and how to lead and manage your people.
Order your free copy here.
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This is the part nobody enjoys hearing, but it’s true nevertheless. Your team’s performance is your responsibility.
If you have never told someone their work isn’t good enough, the chances of them working it out on their own are close to zero. People are not mind readers. Plenty of underperformers are genuinely surprised when it’s finally raised with them. After all, if you haven’t told them, who did?
A good rule of thumb is almost nobody sets out to be a poor performer. Before you decide someone’s a bad hire, look at what’s changed around them:
When you are managing performance in an accountancy firm it is easy to move straight to assumptions or judgments. E.g. “they are a poor performer”. Whereas actually, the first step is to diagnose the problem. Quite often the “lazy” team member turns out to be a capable person who’s needs some extra support or development.
Case study: How Simon doubled his profitability in three months and ended up with the team he actually wanted
Just before the busiest period of the year, Simon’s practice lost half its accounts team. He did the maths: every remaining member of staff would need to complete two sets of year-end accounts every day for three months to hit all his clients’ deadlines. That was including weekends… It wasn’t going to happen.
So Simon outsourced his year-end accounts backlog to a specialist outsourcing company. The quality of what came back was good enough that within six months he was outsourcing 80% of all his year-end accounts work. It gave him and his practice the headspace and capacity to grow and add higher-value advisory work, and his profitability doubled within three months of starting.
In this situation accounting firm owners often fear that good people will leave if they start outsourcing. Where as his good people stayed and grew with the practice. The staff members he’d privately been unsure about all voted with their feet and found new roles within three months. Simon hadn’t had to have a single difficult conversation about it, but when the standard of the work around them went up, the people who didn’t want to meet it left of their own accord. That turned out to be the shot in the arm his practice needed.
Get clear on three things before you sit down:
Most people default to the feedback sandwich (a criticism tucked between two compliments). It doesn’t work. The person on the receiving end is well aware of what’s happening, decides the nice bits are padding, and hears only the negative feedback in the middle. They could then start to distrust your positive feedback going forward because they are waiting for the “but”.
The Situation-Behaviour-Outcome model is far better, because it strips out judgement and sticks to what actually happened.
Situation: describe where and when. Be specific. “James, at yesterday’s meeting with the Hendersons…”
Behaviour: describe only what you saw or heard. This is the bit people get wrong. “You weren’t listening” is an interpretation. “When I was talking, you pushed your chair back from the table and looked out of the window” is a behaviour.
Outcome: share the effect it had. Usually starts with “I felt…”, “I was…”, or “it appeared to me that…”
Weak feedback: “Janet, you were good in the client meeting today, thanks.”
Effective feedback: “Janet, at the client meeting this afternoon [situation], you showed your knowledge of our retail client really well when you talked about the challenges of managing cash flow for retailers [behaviour]. She commented on how thoroughly you’d prepared, and I could see her opening up much more about the help she actually needed [outcome].”
Weak feedback: “James, the client was unhappy, you didn’t do what he asked.”
Effective feedback: “James, the client was unhappy because he didn’t hear back on his VAT query when you said he would [situation]. I know you’re stretched at the moment, but not keeping him updated or managing his expectations [behaviour] meant he got frustrated and rang me to complain, and I spent an hour smoothing it over [outcome]. Can we work through this together so it doesn’t happen again?”
Notice that the second version is more specific and less personal at the same time. You’re not attacking their character. When someone feels their character is being attacked they quickly get defensive. Whereas, it’s very hard to get defensive about a description of an event.
Being the sort of boss people want to work for isn’t only about giving feedback well. It’s about being open to feedback, not getting defensive and acting on it.
Treat feedback as a gift you can choose to act on or not. There are times when it isn’t a gift you want to accept. For example, feedback from a bitter or disgruntled former employee may not be a gift.
Never been taught any of this? You’re not alone. Nobody gives accountants management training on the way to owning a firm. Our Accountants’ Growth Club members asked us for exactly this, so we built it: professionally designed training programmes on leading and managing people, delivered in bite-sized chunks with weekly group calls and implementation weeks built in. Elsewhere you’d pay £2 – 5k for the same thing. For Grow and Boost members, it’s included. |
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Your employees need you to set the standards expected of them. If your expectations of them only exist in your head, every conversation about performance becomes a matter of opinion.
Here’s how to formally set expectations in your firm with team members:
Most firm owners deal with performance in one of two modes: nothing at all, or a full-blown crisis to be handled. Often what is missing is the regular 1:2:1s and performance conversations.
A monthly one-to-one with each team member, using a simple Work and Development Plan to record objectives, progress and development needs, is often what is needed. Ideally, it should be a dialogue between you and them about:
Make it more frequent – weekly, or even daily for a while – if someone is new or currently struggling. It’s very tempting to take these conversations out during busy season or when everyone is busy. This is not the time to take them out. Perhaps reduce the length of them. But this is the time when small issues can bubble up into large problems. A regular 1:2:1 with staff members will nip any of these problems in the bud.
Sometimes you do everything right and your team member’s performance is still found wanting. Doing nothing isn’t going to cure their performance issues. This is when you need to start formal performance management proceedings.
Initially you want to keep it ‘informal’. I.e. Sit down weekly, or daily if needed, to agree exactly what’s to be achieved and what support they need to achieve it. However, you need to decide how long before you go from ‘informal’ to ‘formal performance management.
If after a period of time their performance hasn’t improved then you need to start formal performance management. If you are confident at people stuff then you may like to do the formal performance management without the support of an HR professional.
Which brings us to the fear that started all this. If someone is consistently failing to perform and refuses to step up, you are not worse off if they leave. You are currently paying a salary for work you’re partly doing yourself, while your good people watch and draw conclusions. A resistant team member leaving frees up money, capacity and morale, and it very often gives the firm the shot in the arm it needed.
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We can all remember the poor managers we have had in the past. And you probably decided never to become like them? But as a result, you can become too nice and avoid tough conversations.
For example, an Accountants’ Growth Club member decided they didn’t want to run an accounting firm where they micro-managed their staff. However, this didn’t work as an approach when they had very junior team members and low performers. This needed to be reframed as they would adopt and flex their management style so that would get the best out of each individual staff member. That means for some team members you may have a 1:2:1 daily. Whereas for others it could be a weekly 1:2:1.
You don’t need your team to like you. Or even to be best buddies with you. But what you do need is for them to respect you and to work hard for you. You’ll get that by being transparent about what you expect from them and not shying away from difficult conversations.
Firm owners often fall into the “too nice” trap due to conflict avoidance, fear of staff resigning when it’s hard to hire accounting staff, and a desire to be liked. However, avoiding difficult conversations forces you to cover missed work yourself and risks alienating your best team members.
The Situation-Behaviour-Outcome (SBO) model provides feedback by stating the specific situation, describing the exact observed behaviour without personal judgement, and explaining the outcome. This objective approach prevents defensiveness far better than traditional “feedback sandwiches”.
Tolerating underperformance increases owner burnout as you end up completing below-standard work yourself. Crucially, it demoralises top performers who must pick up the slack. Seeing inaction signals that extra effort is unvalued, causing your best staff to resign first.
Establish four core boundary pillars: a documented competency framework, explicit job descriptions, practice core values, and no more than five meaningful KPIs per person.
Hold monthly one-to-one meetings using a simple Work and Development Plan to review progress and address issues early. Maintaining this regular rhythm turns feedback into a routine touchpoint rather than a high-stress crisis meeting, even during busy tax seasons.
Ready to stop dreading these conversations? Want to lead with confidence? An effective team is essential to sustainable firm growth. This is why two of the 6 profit pillars we check in our free Growth Assessment is Profit Pillar 3 – Team Performance – and Profit Pillar 5 – Owner Time & Role Clarity.
To see whether your issue is just with leadership and performance or a bigger more systematic problem, take our Growth Assessment here. It takes 10-15 minutes.
Written by Becky Rogers. Becky has spent the last 10+ years writing copy and content for Accounting firm owners and Accounting specialists. Over the last 5 years she’s written copy for over 30 accountants’ websites. Connect with Becky on LinkedIn.