The Lone Changer

Being a change agent in an accountancy firm can be a pretty lonely existence. Why is it that no-one else can see that if your practice is not going forward it's going back - that standing still is not an option?

How familiar does this sound? You are head of a client service and keen to pull together several parts of the practice, in order to create a holistic, firm-wide offering quite different from anything else currently available. Problem is, you are struggling to create a team of champions at local level to share and drive this vision throughout the practice.

Or alternatively, you may be the office managing partner charged with achieving ambitious growth targets, needing each specialist team to bring in business on behalf of the whole practice. Once again, you are faced with the problem of partners operating in the 'comfort zone' of being trusted advisors to their respective clients - and so unwilling to put that at risk by exposing them to other parts of the practice.

The chances are that a number of different initiatives will have been tried, yet none will have had the desired impact. So, what's going wrong? Firstly, much effort will have been expended on structural change, new marketing initiatives and even, occasionally, new products - key elements in any improvement programme but insufficient by themselves to drive change.

It is people that make change happen - incorporating a change in behaviour to ensure successful and long-lasting improvement. And this will not be achieved by a series of one-off lunchtime presentations on, say, the various specialist services offered by the practice - successful though this mechanism may be for imparting technical updates on new products or legislative changes for example.

Critically, such a piecemeal approach falls short in three key areas: it cannot impart skills, offers no opportunity to practice what has been learned or provide individual feedback.

And finally, in an environment where the concept of 'selling' is rarely seen as relevant and individual customer relationships jealously guarded, a consultative approach to identifying customer need is required to identify all of the possible areas in which the practice can provide relevant solutions.

So, in more than two decades working with leading accountancy and other professional services companies, two things have become crystal clear to us at Huthwaite. Firstly, the concept of 'change behaviour, change results' goes to the heart of what needs to be addressed if accountancy firms are to serve today's more knowledgeable and demanding clients.

And secondly, that behaviour change is not achieved with a 'quick fix'. It demands an integrated training programme, led from the top, with obstacles removed - or at least worked around - and supported by effective feedback and reinforcement.

A far cry from the 'half-hour at lunchtime' new product run-throughs perhaps. Yet in terms of delivering real and measurable return on your training investment there is only one winner. Or two, in fact - you and your client. And what better basis is there for a happy, long-term - and profitable - relationship?

Alternatively, there are many easy ways to waste your investment in training. So, click on the following link to download 'Training Daze' - some light-hearted tips from Huthwaite on how to get it completely wrong and blow your training budget - fast!