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Identify Leadership Gaps Before Busy Season

Leaders in CPA firms often spend time on work that sits below their highest and best use: meetings they do not need to attend, work delegated upward by their teams, client scope creep, administrative tasks, and avoided accountability conversations. Survey data cited in the course indicates that most leaders say yes to commitments they know they should decline, at a cost of hundreds of hours per year. This course introduces the distinction between hard work (time-bound), smart work (skills-based and intellectual), and uncomfortable work (emotional), and shows why avoided "Uncomfortable Work" is the common root of these low-value commitments. Participants complete a structured 32-item self-inventory across five categories: meetings and events, unrealistic expectations, strategies and opportunities, tasks and projects, and suboptimal performance. They then quantify the estimated annual hours lost to the commitments they identified, select one commitment to decline over the next month, and name the higher-value leadership activity (such as delegation, business development, project oversight, or performance management) that the reclaimed time will support. With the self-awareness and clarity gained through this program, you will know exactly which gaps need closing before work ramps back up. This event may be a rebroadcast of a live event and the instructor will be available to answer your questions during the event.

After attending this presentation, you will be able to...

• Distinguish among hard work, smart work, and uncomfortable work, and recognize how avoiding "Uncomfortable Work" constrains leadership effectiveness.
  
• Identify their own low-value commitments across five categories: meetings and events, unrealistic expectations, strategies and opportunities, tasks and projects, and suboptimal performance.
  
• Estimate the annual hours lost to the low-value commitments identified in the inventory.
  
• Select one commitment to decline and determine the higher-value leadership activity the reclaimed time will support.

Highlights

The major topics that will be covered in this course include:

• Why leadership capacity gets capped

  • External pressures on public accounting firms: private equity, technology disruption, talent shortage

  • The three kinds of work: hard (physical), smart (intellectual), uncomfortable (emotional)

  • The cost of saying yes: avoided conversations, rework, and time lost to lower-value work

• The inventory: five categories of low-value commitments

  • Meetings and events (e.g., meetings without agendas, "got a minute" interruptions, fear of not being in the know)

  • Unrealistic expectations (e.g., scope creep, upward delegation, duties outside the role)

  • Strategies and opportunities (e.g., shiny-object initiatives, unqualified leads, FOMO partnerships)

  • Tasks and projects (e.g., low-priority admin, unnecessary reporting, work that should be delegated, deferred, discontinued, or done differently)

  • Suboptimal performance (e.g., avoided accountability conversations, discount requests, non-revenue activities, technology avoidance)

• Quantifying the gap

  • Estimating weekly hours lost, applying a conservative haircut, annualizing

  • What the reclaimed hours are worth when redirected to highest-value work

• Committing to one change

  • Selecting one inventory item to decline for the next month

  • Naming the higher-value activity the time will fund

  • Where this step sits in the broader six-step process for doing uncomfortable work