Practical Accountant interviewed managing partners of prominent firms, and consultants to find out how the leadership role has changed in the last few years. Here’s what they found:

Larry Unruh, managing partner, Hein & Associates, Denver:

• The firm has three generations with differing perspectives on balancing work and personal life. They are all trying to provide a more varied group of services to a client base that expects more value than in the past. This requires a different kind of leadership, one focused on far more than management and administration.
• Leaders must be visionaries. They must be persuasive in visualizing the future and communicating it to others.
• Leaders must attract the kind of people that will enable the firm to realize that future.
• The leader must be respected and admired, and must be trusted to make the right decisions in difficult circumstances.
• The managing partner shouldn’t completely relinquish client responsibilities, lest he/she loses the feel for the marketplace.
• The firm cut back on the chargeable hours standards for partners so they could devote time to quality control, regulatory matters, leading departments, etc. While accomplishing this change, the firm also had to accommodate the demand for better work/life balance by staff.
• If firms don’t meet these work/life demands, some of the most talented people will leave the profession, and this will aggravate the succession problem.

David Graling, managing partner, Gelman, Rosenberg & Freedman, Bethesda, MD:

• Rainmakers aren’t necessarily leaders today.

Jeffrey Smith, managing member, Brown Smith Wallace, St. Louis:

• Rainmaking is one element of leadership, but not the only one. In the corporate world, leaders are not part-time.
• Today people need to be given opportunities to do the kind of work they like. If no one in the firm wants to sell, bring in a salesperson.
• Consider a new position charged solely with client satisfaction.
• You can’t attract top level talent with less than top-level management.

Vic Alexander, chief manager, KraftCPAs, Nashville:

• Leaders must develop internal processes, adopt best practices, and identify key performance indicators and critical success factors.

Jeffrey McEwen, senior associate, Cambridge Leadership Associates, Cambridge, MA:

• Leaders must prepare the firm to create revenue sources to succeed the current ones, e.g., regulatory work caused by Sarbanes Oxley. To do this requires change. Change is best achieved during good times, but during good times it is most difficult to convince people they must change.
• It is very difficult for any partner to give up a relationship with a long-standing client.

Chris Lynch, managing partner, Nisivoccia & Company, Randolph, NJ:

• Leading is far different from managing. Ninety percent of partner meeting time should be devoted to strategy, and perhaps 10 percent to management issues.
• The leader should free partners from routine management responsibilities.

Ivan Brown, managing partner, WithumSmith+Brown, Red Bank, NJ:

• Leaders should create an exciting work environment for employees.

Tracy Gallagher, managing director, Tofias PC, Cambridge, MA:

• The leader’s client service time must be limited.
• Practitioners serve clients. Professional managers run the firm.
• When a firm has 50 professionals, it is time to move to a corporate form of governance.

Mark Murovitz, managing shareholder, Tauber & Balser, Atlanta:

• Being a rainmaker detracts from the leadership role.
• Selecting the best practice leaders is the most important role of the firm leader.
• Leaders are challenged by the question of whether to develop new niches. They are even more challenged to determine when it is time to abandon a new line of business.
• Leadership cannot allow growth to impair the quality of the firm.

Sheldon Burman, treasurer, RS&F, Owings Mills, MD:

• Leadership means morale building, strategic visioning, and being able to anticipate client needs before a problem occurs. Managers are reactive, leaders proactive.
• The firm leader has to be sufficiently versed in the various client niches to communicate with the niche leaders.

Tom Marino, CEO, J.H. Cohn, Roseland, NJ:

• As a firm gets larger, rainmaking becomes less important. The firm attracts more business because it is better known in its community.

Jeff Bleacher, operations partner, Ross Buehler Falk & Company, Lancaster, PA:

• Management must be full-time.
• Compensation systems must reward leadership and management. The old system of rewarding chargeable hours and book of business doesn’t do that.

From Practical Accountant, July 2006, 800-221-1809. For the complete article, click on the following link: http://www.webcpa.com/article.cfm?articleid=20714&;pg=pracacc.