That accounting is a “people business” is a truism as old as the profession, and it seems, at first blush, a self-evident proposition. Accounting firm services aren’t grown in fields or assembled in automated factories; they emerge from the brains and expertise and effort of the people who work in those firms.
But on further inspection, it becomes clear that calling accounting a “people business” begs an important question: Just what kind of people are we talking about?
Until the beginning of this century, “people” in accounting mostly meant groups. It was the intern class that became the entry-level hires who were winnowed down to the partner class. The profession’s model was about funneling in large amounts of human talent to handle an extraordinary amount of rote labor, and then paring all that talent down into smaller and smaller classes of management. The smaller the class, the more the employees emerged as individuals; they started as fungible labor and, if they made it through the gauntlet, emerged eventually as individual partners. And depending on the firm, even the partners might still be thought of as a group, a monolithic class with a single set of characteristics.
All that is changing.
Accounting will always be a people business, but now it’s much less about people as classes, and more about people as individuals. With so much rote work being automated (and artificial intelligence set to automate even more), the profession no longer needs large cadres of worker bees, and that’s good, because with the pipeline problem, there are no longer enough people coming in to populate those cadres. What’s more, the ongoing move to advisory calls for individualized skills and approaches to the work that can’t be found uniformly across large groups.
Contributing to this is the fact that the younger generations in the workforce are no longer willing to be treated as undifferentiated masses; one size no longer fits all, as any HR director will tell you; one size fits one.
What all this means is that, while accounting is still a people business, how you treat your people needs to change. They are individuals with different priorities and aptitudes, different family and personal lives, and different career goals; firms need to recognize all that, and be flexible enough to accommodate it. The single path to partner will no longer suit the vast majority of your employees; you need to offer them ladders of advancement that work for each of them, and then mentor them individually along them.
With technology taking care of much of the work that entry-level employees used to do, a growing percentage of the workforce of the average firm will be doing higher-level work — work where their individual contributions and their individual expertise stand out much more, and their treatment by the firm will need to reflect that.
From its prior focus on marshalling masses of people, accounting is becoming more and more about picking the right person and nurturing them, building the profession of the future one individual at a time. (Oh, and by the way, the right person may not have a background or a degree in accounting.) It will take more work from managers and firm leaders, but it’s what they need to do if they want accounting to remain a “people business.”
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