Intentional Leadership: Setting You and Your Team Up for Success
May 06, 2025
By Andrea Beth Levy, CPA, CFE, CGMA, MBA
Stepping into a new leadership role is an exciting challenge, but success begins long before your first day. From refining your communication style to setting clear expectations with your team, the way you approach your transition can make all the difference.
Becoming Acquainted With You and Your Team
Before you start your new role, spend time reflecting on your communication style as a manager. In past positions, have you provided clear directions on assignments with due dates and milestones? If not, consider tactics for this transition. As mentioned in “Good Boss, Bad Boss” by Robert I. Sutton, Ph.D., “The best bosses break down problems into bite-sized pieces and talk and act like each little task is something people can complete without great difficulty. Doing so instills calmness and confidence and spurs constructive action.”
When stepping into a leadership role, ask yourself, are you planning to have an introductory meeting with your entire team? If yes, consider a discussion starter. A discussion starter is a way to engage your team and get to know one another better. Try staying on neutral topics such as favorite drinks at Starbucks or favorite summer activities. The idea is to share a piece of you that you would feel comfortable sharing at a networking event.
Next, consider your schedule as a new leader. When evaluating your schedule, do you prefer to have meetings in the morning or afternoon with your team? Have you ever blocked your calendar for focus time to ensure you meet your own deadlines? Taking time to become acquainted with yourself as a leader and your team establishes a foundation for success.
Showing Up for Your Team
Being a good boss takes skill and effort. Medical studies have shown that having a good boss decreases your chances of experiencing a heart attack by 20%! Part of being a good boss is showing up for your team.
It’s common to transition into a new organization and have many questions about how things work. Financial leaders hold an enormous amount of responsibility between the financial stewardship role and compliance with internal controls alone. It can be difficult to move into a job as a financial leader without an overwhelming sense of urgency, especially in the beginning.
One major cause for this sense of urgency is emails.
Studies have shown the average knowledge workers usually check emails every three minutes or less. It can seem impossible to manage the email flood during a new position, but there are many ways to slow down the frequency of checking your email.
At the beginning of a new position, try limiting yourself to checking email once per hour. Try scheduling emails to send in between replies to slow down conversations and use the “offline email mode” to ensure you’re staying focused.
Another way to show up for your team is one-on-one meetings.
Your new company will likely have guidance around management performance and preferences around working with direct reports. If there are no company guidelines, consider spending one half-hour meeting per week with each direct report and one 20-minute team meeting per week. When determining the cadence of your meetings, try avoiding late Friday afternoons and first thing Monday morning.
One-on-one meetings provide an opportunity for feedback and to celebrate accomplishments. An essential role of management is learning how to hold our team accountable to their job responsibilities. If we let errors slide and fail to correct them, our team members will not hear valuable feedback that could help them achieve their next promotion. Likewise, if we focus only on the errors, our team members will lose sight of the goal and start dreading our interactions.
One-on-one meetings can also help set precedents and boundaries in communications. In your first meetings, determine the general response times for emails and instant messages during and after business hours. Consider a five-hour response time on emails and two hours on instant messages during the workday. It’s important to be clear with your team on communication expectations, as this will set your team up for success. When meeting with direct reports, consider the straightforward agenda style featured below.
| Questions for Your Associate | Pro Management Tip |
|---|---|
| What's working? | We want to celebrate our wins because celebrating wins – even small ones increase employee satisfaction and retention, and combats burnout. We want to recognize the hard work our team completes every day, especially when no one is looking or when people don’t understand what we do. |
| What's not working? | We want to know where the bottlenecks are in our department. We want to learn where we can leverage our skill set to identify and solve the issues. Could we use automation or AI to improve a process? Are team members consistently waiting on data from another department to perform their work? |
| Where do you need help? | We want to develop trust, encourage independent working and let team members know we are here to help them be successful in their daily work. Is there a broken process? Does our team member need training? Does our team member need data from another department? Does our team member need clearer expectations of assignments or due dates? |
Finding Success in Collaboration
As CPAs, our goal is to measure productivity and strive to become a world-class organization. As financial leaders, we should collaboratively identify key performance indicators (KPIs) to track and monitor performance while focusing on key processes.
There may be team members you supervise where you lack experience in their specialty. In those circumstances, the key is to leverage your critical thinking skills to uncover bottlenecks and risks to develop a clear path forward. Start by applying your critical thinking to current processes and document your observations. After your walk through, identify key risks and controls, and confirm your understanding with your team.
Remember, your team members are your experts. It can be easy to assume we know how all the processes work, but that’s when mistakes are made.
I recall hearing about an ambulance agency that purchased new laptops. Senior management decided to install mandatory fingerprint biometric authentication. They thought this would make the devices safer and easier to use. However, senior management forgot that when paramedics respond to an emergency, paramedics place protective gloves on their hands; thereby, making it impossible for them to provide fingerprint biometric authentication and access their newly improved laptops in an emergency. Looking back, it would have been helpful for management to work collaboratively with paramedics before ordering the hardware. The agency would have saved themselves time and a financial misstep.
This all takes effort, but by establishing good time management, rapport with your team and being intentional with collaboration, you will develop trust, and trust is a cornerstone to leading a high-performing, successful team.