When evaluating your CPA firm’s talent bench to assess capacity and identify future leaders, it’s natural to focus on employee performance. Who handled pressure exceptionally well during the last busy season? Who demonstrated strong technical skills or volunteered ideas to improve team efficiency? Who stepped up to coach less-seasoned colleagues or protect client relationships?
The answers to those questions can help reveal which employees have the skills and qualities to guide projects, support teams or eventually transition into a senior management role. However, they don’t necessarily provide insight into whether a team member is willing to do any of those things—or be an active participant in your firm’s succession plan.
You can’t understand how an employee wants to grow professionally unless you have meaningful career conversations with them regularly. Otherwise, you could end up spending valuable time and resources preparing a top performer for a leadership move they don’t want. That employee may also feel pressure to follow the track you suggest, believing it’s the only way they can go farther and do more at the firm.
Creating a succession plan based on assumptions can lead to employee frustration and disengagement or even the loss of a talented team member who might have stayed longer if they’d been offered a different opportunity for growth and development. It can also leave the firm’s future at risk.
Your best performers may not share your vision for their future
In many CPA firms, high performance has long been associated with upward movement: senior associate to manager, manager to senior manager, senior manager to partner. These traditional transition patterns at the firm remain relevant—and still appeal to many professionals. However, they aren’t necessarily the best career pathways for every high-potential employee.
A technically strong senior associate may enjoy complex tax research but have no interest in managing a team. A manager may excel at client service but have little enthusiasm for leading new business development. And an MVP who doesn’t aspire to the partner track might jump at the chance to help lead the firm’s adoption of AI and the change management efforts around it.
Creating space for more than one kind of growth opportunity can make professional development and succession planning efforts at your firm more effective—and realistic. While you need to invest in future leaders, you also need to focus on developing the contributors who can strengthen the business in other ways, like technical specialists, client advisers, process improvement leaders, trainers and mentors.
Investing in these roles supports and enhances the firm’s growth, client service and employee retention. It also helps protect against a common succession planning risk: pushing people toward roles that don’t align with their strengths or interests simply because the firm hasn’t provided other options.
Questions to help uncover what employees really want
Many CPA firm leaders schedule career conversations during performance review season to outline development goals for the year ahead. That’s a good start, but understanding employee preferences takes more than one or two annual meetings. More frequent and informal conversations can help you dig deeper into what kind of work people want to do, how they view growth, how their goals and interests may be evolving, and what support will help them stay motivated and engaged.
During these 1:1 discussions, consider asking employees questions such as:
- What type of work energizes you most right now?
- What responsibilities would you like to take on more often?
- Are there parts of your current role you would prefer to move away from over time?
- How do you feel about managing people?
- Do you see yourself pursuing the partner track or a broader leadership role?
- What kind of support would help you explore that path?
Keep in mind that some employees may be hesitant to say they don’t want a traditional leadership role because they worry it will limit their future at the firm. So, be sure to make it clear from the outset that there are multiple ways for team members to expand their skills, responsibilities and contributions. That message can make it easier for employees to talk openly about what they want from their careers.
A win-win for employees and the business
Understanding what your employees want from their careers lays the foundation for more targeted professional development—and thus, better use of your time and resources. It also helps you turn succession planning at your CPA firm into a shared conversation about where business needs and employees’ ambitions intersect and complement each other.
If a top performer is interested in a management role, insight from career conversations can help you identify the learning and skills-building experiences the employee should pursue next. That might include leading a client engagement, coaching staff, presenting recommendations, participating in business development or gaining more exposure to firm operations.
If the employee doesn’t want to be part of the firm’s succession plan, the conversation should shift to how their strengths can create value in other ways. For example, a professional who enjoys technical work could deepen their expertise in a complex service area. Someone with strong client instincts may be able to support advisory work. Another high-potential and detail-oriented team member might be an ideal candidate for taking on quality control or process improvement responsibilities.
Career conversations can also give you a more accurate view of the firm’s leadership pipeline. If you assume a top performer is on the partner track but that person has no interest in ownership, the succession plan may be weaker than it appears on paper. Knowing that earlier gives you time to adjust development plans, identify other potential successors or consider outside hiring where needed.
A succession plan built on assumptions is likely to fall short of expectations when it matters most. Career conversations help replace assumptions with real insight into which employees want to become leaders, and which ones want to grow and add value in other ways. Taking both performance and aspiration into account when developing your succession strategy and professional development plans allows you to make the best use of your full talent bench and strengthen your firm at every level.
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Steve Saah is the executive director of the finance and accounting permanent placement practice at Robert Half, the world’s first and largest specialized financial talent solutions service. The company has more than 300 locations worldwide. He is responsible for leading U.S. operations, based in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. He was named executive director in 2017, previously serving as director of permanent placement services.
Saah has been with the company since 1998, where he started as a recruiting manager, following a career as an internal auditor and assistant controller. He is a noted expert, author and presenter on career, management and hiring trends, particularly those affecting the accounting and finance fields. Saah earned a finance degree from Virginia Tech.
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