Think of one thing you’d change today about your accounting practice, if you could snap your fingers and make it happen instantly. Would you want a better way to collect documents from clients? A balanced workload across your staff, with no one (including you) feeling overwhelmed or burned out? An immediate end to all busywork, data cleanup, disconnected apps, and other costly manual processes?
Picking something to change is the easy part. The hard part is everything else.
That’s where our new ebook comes in. In Leading Change in Your Firm: Five Foundational Steps for Transforming Your Accounting Practice, Whitney Kisner, Director of Practice Innovation at RMW Accounting, walks you through the five stages of change management—Prepare, Plan, Implement, Embed, and Review.
She fills each stage in with her own change-management experiences in four different roles: as a firm’s Director of Operations, a consultant advising founders and executive teams, the Director of Practice Innovation across multiple dispersed offices at once, and even in her hobby building elaborate creatures to decorate her yard for Halloween. (6-ft. zombie kraken, anyone? Keep scrolling to see it!)
No matter what kind of change you’re trying to lead or implement, a few key lessons apply across the board.
Make the Plan With the People Who Have to Live With It
“Change cannot be put on people,” says Lisa Bodell, author and founder of futurethink. “The best way to instill change is to do it with them. Create it with them.”
A workable plan needs two qualities that seem at odds with each other. It has to be clear enough that every person on your team can describe the end goal the same way when you ask them separately. And it needs enough flexibility that when reality shows up looking different from the plan, adjusting doesn’t feel like failure. Kisner calls these soft guidelines: firm on the destination, flexible on the route.
The guide walks you through the four elements of every change plan that need to be nailed down before work starts, including the one firms skip most often—capturing what your numbers look like today, so you have something real to measure against a year from now.
Friction Doesn’t Disappear When You Ignore It
It’s human nature to resist change and prefer the status quo. So expect some initial resistance when you bring a change to your team. Occasionally, concerns will be shared directly. Far more often, they’ll show up in the form of a long pause, or a “sure, that makes sense” delivered in a tone that suggests the opposite.
Pay attention to those protracted pauses and hinted hesitations. “Friction you don’t address doesn’t disappear,” says Kisner. “It just quietly moves into the shadows.” If you ignore it in week one, it will resurface as a workaround in month three, or as the team member who subtly backslides as soon as the initial push is over.
The guide gets specific about how to address issues early, including how to decide whether a given concern belongs in front of the whole room or in a one-on-one. Some questions are shared by half the team, and answering them publicly will save you from having five separate conversations. Others are really more about someone’s workload or standing, and airing them in front of the group has the potential to make things worse.
Stop Waiting for the Quiet Stretch
Ask a team what worries them most about a change initiative, and there’s a good chance timing will come up first. Nobody wants a major disruption in the middle of busy season.
But as Kisner points out, we are always in a busy season of some kind or another. Tax season runs into extensions, extensions run into planning, planning runs into year-end, and then it’s January again. If you wait for the stretch where nobody’s under pressure, you’ll be waiting forever. Starting at a moment you deliberately choose will always beat starting in a scramble because something finally broke.
The Implement chapter of the ebook covers how to protect your team’s capacity through a rollout, why short-term wins do more for buy-in than any amount of reassurance, and the single question Kisner asks every team at kickoff—the one she credits with turning more skeptics into advocates than anything else she’s tried. (Download the guide to find out what it is!)
Treat a Backslide as Information
When somebody reverts to the old way of doing things, your first instinct might be to remind them about the process.
Kisner stopped doing that. Now when someone backslides, she sees two possible explanations: either they don’t understand the new process well enough to use it under pressure, or the new process is genuinely worse for that piece of the job. Both answers are valid—and useful. Neither gets fixed by applying pressure or issuing a reminder. “Some of the best refinements I’ve made came out of watching somebody break the process that was built,” she writes.
The Embed and Review chapters cover how to build feedback loops that catch issues like this—especially with distributed teams—and why you need to test any significant change for a full cycle before you can honestly say whether it worked.
Get the Full Guide
Leading Change in Your Firm goes deeper into all five stages, with a change management checklist you can score your firm against and a set of reflection questions to work through with your team once the dust settles. Download it free today.
Already running Canopy? Your reporting and dashboards are a good place to start step one—overdue work, uneven workloads, and upcoming task volume will usually point straight at the process that’s about to break.
