Factors Influencing Partner Accountability

Source: RedZone Blog, April 17, 2018

The following includes excerpts, reproduced with permission, from a blog entry by Accountants Advisory Group.

Traditionally, partner accountability provides guidance to partners on establishing and implementing their goals and objectives and is used as a measuring tool for performance and related compensation criteria. However, the solution to achieving greater levels of firm and partner success through accountability is often influenced by many factors, including:

• The best partner accountability system and strategic plan will be useless if a firm does not have an over-achieving partner team. Demanding that partners are accountable for performance that they are not capable of achieving will only waste valuable leadership time and delay inevitable failure.

• Culture trumps accountability. Quite often, cultural obstacles are in place prior to implementing a partner accountability program and are ignored in structuring, and the actual execution of the program.

• Partner accountability is flawed from the start in firms that do not provide the proper infrastructure for Marketing, HR, and IT to support the partners’ performance and the firm’s goals and objectives.

• The most fundamental of all management skills is delegation: getting things done through others.

• It is important to have strong leadership that make tough decisions to ensure that the partners are a united, synchronized group that can achieve the goals and objectives of the firm.
• Place more emphasis with the “end” in mind, rather than annual accountability criteria with no clear endgame.

For the complete entry, read “Beyond Partner Accountability.”