Recently some members of our team were lucky enough to attend the 2022 Smithink Young Guns Workshop at the Gold Coast. The workshop was designed for emerging leaders and covered a wide range of topics relevant to the accounting industry from a leadership perspective. It also gave us the opportunity to meet and connect with other accountants and professionals from firms located across Australia and New Zealand. Whilst some of the topics were specific to the accounting industry, others were applicable to leaders in general and the learnings could be applied within local businesses. 

As such, outlined below are some of the broader key learnings from the workshop:

Leading Teams

• Be mindful with how you are communicating with your team. The medium used to communicate, and the content of the communication, can sometimes cause a difference between how you meant the message to be received, and how your staff (or customers) actually received it.
• Whilst leadership does involve managing people, it should also be focussed on the strategic direction and tasks of your business. If your days are filled with operational tasks and people issues, the strategic tasks will be forgotten.
• It is important to do things right, but it is also important to focus on the right things. As a leader you need to prioritise your time and tasks so that your focus is on planning. At times you will move into crisis mode, you will have general chat with staff or customers, or you will have interruptions, and all of these are a part of day to day business. However your need to ensure that you focus shifts back to planning.
• A leader that has highly developed delegation skills gets things done more efficiently and effectively, creates autonomous staff and encourages high performers. Remember to choose the right person with the right skillset to delegate to, or upskill your staff to get them to this level.
• Encourage your staff to share information and listen to other staff members. Also encourage them to ask questions, talk to you if they don’t like something and challenge you if they don’t agree with you. This will avoid silent judgement within the workplace.

Strategic Planning

• 57% of SMEs have no long term strategic business plan.
• If business owners have a strategic business plan in place they are more likely to succeed in business and remain focussed on their end goals.
• Over time goals can change and that is expected. However as your goals change you should be updating your strategy.
• The first step to strategic planning is identifying issues in your business (internal/external strengths, threats, opportunities or weaknesses).
• Understand your goals and how these can be achieved knowing the issues within your business. Develop multiple strategies and assess their viability.
• Document your goals and action plans. These must be associated with tasks, timeframes, people and KPIs.
• To achieve your goals, review your strategic plan and assess progress at least quarterly.

The Importance of Questions

• Adopt a growth mindset – with a growth mindset you accept that your skills and intelligence can be improved and that there is always room for change. With this mentality questions becomes more natural. 
• Be a “learn it all” not a “know it all”. A “learn it all” approach to decision making or problem solving in your business might involve asking yourself where your blind spots are, who you haven’t heard from in your team, and how you might think about the problem differently.
• When dealing with customers or staff, ask questions that can’t be answered with a yes or no response. You will learn more about them and build rapport faster.
• If you are planning staff meetings prepare questions about the outcome, purpose, attendees and time spent to make the meeting worthwhile and targeted. Don’t forget to reflect on the meeting and how it could have been better!
• Think about how you can respond to staff or customer requests that you really want to say no to but don’t know how to. Time management is crucial so ask questions to better clarify the request and understand who really needs to be involved.
• One of our favourite parts was around questions that leaders should be asking themselves. What should be stop doing? What is something I could do to make everything else easier? What rule can we kill? What is the best use of my time?

Mental Health Insights and Strategies

• In Australian this year 1 in 5 will experience a mental health disorder and only 35% will seek help.
• People are more likely to seek help if someone else suggests it. 
• Small business owners are more at risk of depression, anxiety and high rates of stress.
• Understand the warning signs of depression, anxiety and stress for yourself as a business owner but also your staff. 
• If you are responding to a mental health situation with a staff member first ensure that everyone is safe and establish whether an ambulance needs to be called.
• The ALGEE approach is a great way to frame a mental health discussion with a staff member, friend or family member. When having this discussion don’t be critical, interrupt, distracted, pass blame or tell the person what to do.
• Consider completing the Mental Health First Aid course to better equip yourself or give you more confidence to have these conversations. Some members of our organisation have completed this course and found that it was a very rewarding experience.
• Consider your exercise, eating and sleep routine to help improve your mental health, in conjunction with advice from your doctor. Also practice breathing, pausing, decluttering, smiling and not passing judgement. 
• Prepare a Mental Health Plan for your business and actively promote it amongst your staff members.
• One of our favourite phrases from the session was “It’s not good, it’s not bad, it is what it is” – don’t stress, just find a solution to the problem. Be kind to yourself and the people around you!

If you would like more information on the presenters of each of these topics, please visit the Smithink Young Guns website. Or if you need some assistance with strategic planning please contact Jenna van Nierop on 9842 5155 to discuss your situation and how we can help you.