Top 5 Skills of Accounting Professionals Today: #1

If you do a Google search, I’m sure you will find hundreds of posts that have this variation. But what are the credentials of their authors? How recent was their accounting experience? Are they even speaking from experience, or just regurgitating other people’s articles?

I’ve had to hire dozens of people in the last few years, and there are very clear differences between a successful accounting hire who will go on to accomplish great things vs someone who is probably going to be spending a lot of time at their current level or even worse, managed out of the company within a year.

Here’s number 1!!! The most important one! This one will get you far on its own. If you fail at all the other important accountant skills, you can always switch your major or career to sales, recruiting, or any other field where talking is your number one asset. My husband is one of these and can talk himself into and out of any situation. Comes in pretty handy.

(I had to break this post up into 5 separate posts. I realized that I have so much to say about each of these and many examples to provide.)

Communication Skills

In today’s world, 90% of our communication with our team, cross-functional partners, customers, vendors, etc is going to be via electronic communications. For companies that are fully remote, hybrid, or even just a larger multinational corporation working across countries or time zones, the amount of electronic communications could be even higher. We no longer have the chance to build rapport and trust with our co-workers face to face, running into each other at the water cooler (coffee machine), or even over the phone, where tone, facial expression, and body expressions can do so much of the talking for us. It’s been said that we can hear someone smiling over the phone!

Everyday, I have coaching conversations with my team about their written communications, with a focus on eliminating ambiguity and how to present information in a clear and concise manner. Additionally, we talk a lot about the words that we choose to use, and how they could be interpreted by the other party, despite what the writer is intending. Words and emojis can easily be misunderstood, or misconstrued. Generational divides create different perceptions of what is being said.

Here are a few examples.

Exclamation marks are a big one that can cause people a lot of grief! Millennials use the mighty exclamation mark to express sincerity or excitement and tend to sprinkle them throughout their conversations! The ! can trigger some people to respond with a stress or panicked response and in turn, see this as a sign of aggression!

I heard recently from my Gen Z brother that the thumbs-up emoji is seen as passive-aggressive and that I should stop using it as a response. 👍🏻 At my peril, I decided to ignore him and continue to use this emoji to acknowledge people’s messages. 😂

In college, I was taught to use full sentences and paragraphs for business communications. As a senior leader frequently communicating with other senior leaders, I’ve recognized that sentences and paragraphs get me nowhere and instead are overwhelming for others to read. As a manager who gets messages from 5-6 team members, I prefer to read messages in bullet point format. This is also the way I send the majority of my messages. Especially if I require a response or input from the other person.

My boss who was a bit older than me, used to respond to my messages with a simple “k”. No period, no emoji, no caps. NOTHING. Every time he would respond this way, I would have a small meltdown internally. Haha. As an insecure 28-year-old, my brain immediately jumped to all kinds of conclusions. Was he unhappy with my update? Why was he not happy that I completed my project ahead of time? I finally had to call him out one day and ask him, “Hey, what do you mean when you say “k”?” And his response to me? “I’m acknowledging what you said to me!” In his mind, this was not dismissive or negative in any form but to my millennial mind, he was probably deeply dissatisfied with me.

As you can see, there are a hundred million ways you could make a small communication error that could blow up into a huge thing. And if we are not trained or taught to recognize these, we could be making these mistakes. There is no guidebook out there telling us what Gen Z vs Gen Z vs Millennials disagree on. Language is constantly changing.

So what can we do about it? We need to make sure we are building good foundations with our partners, developing deep connections with some of those people, and asking our friends and co-workers to partner with us so we can help each other. Call each other in safe spaces when messages are received negatively. Explain to them why what they said triggered you. Be careful of what is a personal trigger vs a general trigger that other people might share. Then, slowly over time, you will learn to adjust your communications and be more aware. No one will be perfect at this. I am still learning every day. Every teammate requires a different touch. But moving to fully remote work has challenged me to be more deliberate with my words, and be more emotionally aware of other people and how they respond to my messages. I like to think that I’ve gotten better, but I’m sure tomorrow there will be a new emoji that I’m offending someone with! 😒

That’s it! My top 5 skills that accountants must have today to be successful. Have I missed any other important skills? What else do you think is crucial to being a successful accountant in today’s day and age?