Leadership – You Need The Respect And Support Of Those You Lead!

Welcome to Accountants Minute.

Good leadership is needed in every type of business – including accountancy/business advisory businesses!

Accountants/business advisors have two important groups to which to offer leadership – your team and to offer leadership/counselling to your clients.

Where do you start in understanding leadership?

Firstly, distinguishing between management and leadership.

They’re both different, but interdependent, and must be closely related to be fully effective.

• Management is essentially about the establishment of organisations, structures, processes and procedures, including:
• staffing
• management of costs
• implementation of ideas
• team training

• Leadership is about creating the environment in which people work willingly together to achieve commonly agreed ideas and goals.

Leadership skills are required in every segment of the business.

Whilst very few people are “born leaders” – most need to develop leadership skills by training and real-life experience.

The key components of developing your leadership skills are centred on an understanding of:

• teams and teamwork – an understanding of what is fundamental to good leadership
• coaching and counselling of members of the team
• solving problems and making decisions
• morale of the team for which the leader is responsible
• motivation of the team – developing ideas/strategies and “selling” these ideas and strategies to the team
• developing relationships – so that the leader has an understanding of the “challenges” that the team member is facing
• trust and delegation – leaders cannot do it all themselves – they have to inspire the team to go forth and implement – this is delegation.