As with a promising leadership position, managing the accounting team requires more than technical know-how; a good amount of empathy and compassion to always grow should also be included in the equation. It is vital for the CFO and accounting managers to work closely together to lead their team to achieve the organizational objectives at every level. Below are 4 ways to skill your accounting team to boost teamwork and achieve efficiency and effectively achieve the task.
1. Find out the gap
Find out the gap and the missing skills in your employee. Align training with individuals instead of teaching specific group skills they’ve already mastered while neglecting others who actually need it. Understand what your staff needs to learn and the skills they need to acquire. How to do that? Start with a skills assessment. You can then customize training to address particular weaknesses in expertise, where it would be most successful.
2. On-the-job training
Your accounting departments should develop a coaching culture that seeks to develop mutually beneficial relationships. This creates a lot of learning and direct reporting between supervisors, which can help drive immediate improvements and teach employees how to deal with particular aspects of their work.
3. Provide bite-sized training opportunities
the post-pandemic workload is quite high. Training program days will provide employees a wealth of useful data, but it can be challenging to maintain due to the busy accounting department demanding workloads. Look for ways to deliver learning in bite-sized chunks instead. You might have a two-hour monthly workshop or bi-weekly “lunch and learn” sessions covering various skills. Encourage staff to work between meetings on action items to improve what they’re learning.
4. Develop leaders
Provide employees an opportunity to show others what they’re learning. Research demonstrates that the only way to understand it by yourself is to explain a definition to someone else. As a bonus, offering teaching positions to staff makes it easier to understand how employees work together rather than how someone makes them do with human resources.
To go above and beyond, the accounting department needs the right people on board. Help them improve the abilities they need to optimize performance. This means that your training and development program addresses not just your organization’s needs, but also drives your staff’s success and job satisfaction.
