How Being a Purpose-Driven Leader Inspires Accounting Teams

By Alissa Vickery, Chief Accounting Officer, SVP Accounting and Control at FLEETCOR

Purpose-driven leaders power productivity. They foster more introspective, innovative and aspirational accounting teams and can help transform competent employees into high-performing super stars. They help people build on their strengths while improving on their weaknesses.

Accounting managers with purpose become leaders, employees look up to and respect. However, purpose-driven leaders aren’t grown on trees. Becoming one requires the development of characteristics like empathy toward others, practicing active listening, ensuring personal development for themselves and their employees – and helping team members learn, grow and achieve their professional best.

Let’s take a look at some ways in which you can become a leader with a purpose who inspires your accounting team and other people around you.

Mentor others

As a manager, you likely know your employees’ needs better than anyone else. As such, it’s up to you to provide timely feedback, offer counsel based on your experience, and share your insights into the accounting industry.

In cases where a team is too large to mentor everyone, consider assigning a veteran accountant to help foster new team members. This could even mean recruiting someone outside your company with vast industry knowledge and experience to cultivate leaders on your team.

Provide professional development opportunities

Aside from sharing industry knowledge and professional best practices, purpose-driven leaders want their employees to stretch themselves. What are each person’s unique development needs – and what can you do to ensure they receive the training necessary to progress their careers?

I’m passionate about continued personal development because I cut my teeth at two of the Big Five consulting firms that valued and supported career progression through ongoing learning. When I started at FLEETCOR a decade ago, I was a department of one for quite some time and did what was needed to get the job done.

However, as a global S&P 500 corporate payments company, we now embraces a culture of change that values the development of our people, personally and professionally. Development was certainly important 10 years ago, but we’ve elevated it and I’ve been assiduous about providing the means for my accounting team to move forward, improve and grow.

"Having an open-door policy and truly listening to employees is part of being a purpose-driven leader"

Help employees find their niche

Making an employee’s passion and professional desire a priority sometimes means you’ll lose valuable team members to other departments or even companies, which I recently experienced.

Lauren worked for me for seven years and was one of those ‘go-to’ people I could lean on for anything. Even when tasked with an unfamiliar assignment, she would figure it out and see it through. She is a certified fraud examiner and when an opportunity arose within FLEETCOR in that area, she expressed her interest to me and asked my opinion. I encouraged her to connect with the hiring manager to determine whether she wanted to pursue the position.

Lauren moved from my department into a field in which she was trained, and while I lost a valuable team member, the company kept an outstanding employee. It’s important to keep the lines of communication open with your employees and to let them know they can talk to you, even when the conversation might be uncomfortable.

Encourage them to speak up

With greater purpose in leadership, you are much more likely to keep employees, which are extremely important during the current Great Resignation, when they feel empowered to share new ideas. That also means the ability to voice concerns when something in their department or the company isn’t quite right.

Perhaps they have a suggestion that could enhance company culture or a new business strategy for driving growth. Having an open-door policy and truly listening to employees is part of being a purpose-driven leader.

When someone knocks on my door, unless I have another meeting scheduled or a deadline that’s looming immediately, I put everything down to give that person my undivided attention. Hearing your employees and truly listening matters; so does having a broad representation of diverse folks on your team and in your organization.

Foster diversity, equity & inclusion

According to a 2020 McKinsey & Company report, companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 25 percent more likely to outperform their competitors on profitability than organizations in the bottom quartile. Further, the greater the gender diversity, the higher the likelihood of outperformance.

Gender diversity and ethnic and cultural diversity are important, and accounting leaders should strive to achieve a better balance with their teams. The greater the mix of individuals diversity-wise, the greater the assortment of knowledge and skills. Harvard Business Review reports a diverse workforce implies an attractive place to work and that leaders with diverse backgrounds help their companies innovate more.

Work and play hard together

While I work with diligent team members, we understand the importance of authentic camaraderie and look for ways to inject a sense of fun into the workplace.

For example, every Halloween we pick a theme and dress up as those characters with my team donning Harry Potter attire one year and as Wizard of Oz characters another! Of course, I always dress as the villain!

Building a true sense of team comes in many shapes and forms and dressing up for Halloween and enjoying each other’s company during the year-end holidays are just a couple of ways we do so. Having fun is purposeful – just like our work.

At FLEETCOR, we strive to be purpose-driven leaders that encourage employees to reach their full potential. Becoming a manager people look up to can include mentorship, ensuring they have opportunities to learn, grow and find their niche, letting them know they can respectively say what’s on their mind, hiring a diverse and inclusive workforce and having fun, too.

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