GAINING MOMENTUM

The role of Mentorship in Finance & Accountancy: How to find and be a mentor

I suspect Mentoring has always been around but the last decade or so has seen it rise to considerable prominence...Its value is probably greater now than it was throughout our history, or at least modern history.I have been exposed to mentoring and mentorship from every angle having proactively sought out my own mentors in the past and in time taken on the role of mentor to others. In my dual roles as a partner within The CFO Partnership and a board director of Sharp Consultancy for over a quarter of a century I have experienced it through osmosis and experience. Mentoring is something very close to my heart.Hopefully in this article I can explain why you should seek out a mentor for yourself, why your skills could make you a great mentor for others, how much satisfaction you might gain from mentoring others and one or two points on what makes a great mentor. Mentoring in Finance:Whilst mentoring can be beneficial in every type of employment and indeed, every walk of life, I believe it has particular relevance in the accountancy and finance sector.Accountants need to develop their management and leadership skills as they progress just like anyone else. They need to develop their self-knowledge and self-awareness like anyone else. They are, however, more exposed to issues regarding ethics and integrity than many other roles/industries. There can be and often is pressure for the results to be better than they are, perhaps to secure further lending or investment, please the boss, even keep their job. More than a few accountants have found themselves at His Majesty’s pleasure having done something they wouldn’t normally have done but have been pressured into. The finance leader (usually Finance Director or CFO) is the key sounding board for the owners/stakeholders; they are often the conscience of the owners. They probably need the ability to say ‘no’ more than other board members – and say yes and encourage. Whilst not responsible for operations, marketing, HR, IT (sometimes they are) and so on they transcend all those areas. They make a mistake – everything can go South very quickly.It is in part for the above reasons that the value of a mentor, someone who can be an independent sounding board, can question you and listen to you, offer opinions and advice is invaluable.Frequently a mentor helps you reach your decision and gives you the confidence to fulfil your plan. They help set challenges into perspective. They ask questions you haven’t thought of and allow you to see things through another person’s experiences. They are calming influencers and confidence builders. As a younger man early in my career I was told the best way of developing fast was to be a sponge, to absorb the greatest attributes of those around me and above me; to become an amalgamation of the best traits of those people. The challenge in accountancy and finance is you can easily find yourself at a relatively young (and hence relatively inexperienced) age in a fairly senior role with perhaps only one or two more senior finance people above you. Even if they are good, it is a very shallow talent pool to learn from. A mentor therefore can help you ‘mentally mature’, hone your decision making, cope with daily stresses, deal with difficult situations, improve as a manager or leader, manage upwards, improve your profile and credibility and build your own personal brand – in effect be the best version of yourself.However, it is worth noting what a mentor is NOT. They are not there to tell you what to do. They are not there to make decisions for you. They are not there to do your job for you. If that is what you are looking for then a mentor is not the solution.Why I became a Mentor:It was a very easy decision for me. By nature, I love helping others (it’s why I’ve loved recruitment for nearly 30 years) and I benefitted so much from formal and informal mentors myself.As an aside, a formal mentor is someone who takes responsibility for mentoring you. Informal mentors are people you surround yourself with who you know you can learn so much from just by being associated with them. There are dozens if not hundreds of people I would class as informal mentors to me; people who probably believe that I have helped them and probably don’t realise just how much they have helped me. Osmosis again!Mentoring someone is surprisingly two-way. You are there to benefit them, but you often benefit from the dynamic yourself. Mentees frequently inspire you to think differently in the same way you hope to inspire them. If you like helping people, then few things are as satisfying as being a mentor. When your mentee has a huge challenge and they are lost at sea, helping them find their way of navigating those choppy waters is one of the most satisfying things you can do. They feel fulfilled. You feel fulfilled.Finding a Mentor:It would be very difficult to try and find a random person to be your mentor. Chances are it will be someone you know well enough to admire and respect. Possibly a colleague, a customer, a supplier, a relative or a friend.You probably need to know them in advance to be sure you’d feel comfortable opening up to them; and be sure they would operate in the strictest of confidence.My first mentor was one of my customers. He was (is) a chartered accountant and at the time had been a partner in private equity for many years. He was inspirational, knowledgeable, vastly experienced in business and because of his private equity experience, had dealt with every size and type of business and every type of management team. I was very nervous asking him, but I plucked up the courage and was surprised by how flattered and delighted he was to be asked.Pick a mentor who might have enjoyed the career and experiences that you hope to achieve yourself. Luckily in finance it’s likely that you have already been exposed to such people.Identify who you’d want and simply ask them in a manner that shows how much you respect them. Give them a very easy way out so they don’t feel trapped in to agreeing ‘I know how very busy you are so there’s absolutely no problem at all if you haven’t got the time or for that matter, if being a mentor just doesn’t appeal to you’.How to be a good mentor:I suspect this is the one area I am least qualified to speak with authority on. I hope I’m a decent mentor, but would I be told if I wasn’t?There are some very sensible things that you can do or avoid doing though:Do ask what they want to get out of the meetingsDo ask what they don’t want to cover Do ask lots of questions; questions where the mentee presents the potential answers.Do explore reasoning; ‘Why’ is not an aggressive questionDo give ideas if requested toDo listenDon’t tellDon’t do it for themDo agree what actions they want to deliver before the next meeting (if that’s something they want you to do)Don’t berate them if they haven’t done what they said they were going to do – you aren’t their managerDon’t be emotional. Be factual. The regularity of the meetings is entirely up to the mentee. I always liked 1 hour every 2-3 months but that’s me. Final Thoughts:Finance is a multifaceted, technical, regulated and challenging discipline. It has huge risks if mistakes are made and can have more ethical/integrity dilemmas than many jobs. Having a mentor in finance can therefore have huge benefits.From a career development perspective, they can make all the difference. Therefore:Decide on what kind of support and advice you would like.Decide what you are trying to achieve in your business and your career.Figure out what kind of prson might have the experience that would be valuable.Do you know anyone like that?Don’t be shy, ask them. Ask them the way I mentioned earlier, and they’ll be flattered (and more likely to say yes).A dog may be for life, but a Mentor doesn’t have to be. If it isn’t working (they all lose their benefit over time) move on to another.Consider doing the same for someone else and mentoring them.

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This year, for most of us – whether by choice or through circumstances – we have been afforded a little bit more ‘me’ time. I’ve recently taken the opportunity to read, or rather re-read (actually its possibly re-re-read), a book which looked at why some people are able to achieve more in comparison to their peers and many of the points being examined resonated as much, if not more, with me this time around as I applied the author’s thinking to what I see every day working in recruitment. We probably all remember being a child and hearing the story about the hare and the tortoise? It’s a familiar tale; the super confident hare sets off at such a pace that he feels he can afford forty winks and still beat the cumbersomely slow tortoise to win the race. The outcome – which has no doubt been repeated by parents time and time again – is that it is the tortoise who in fact claims victory and the moral of the story is that ‘slow and steady wins the race’.

We tend to focus on how it is the hare’s 'sure-of-himself attitude' that causes his comeuppance, but, just for a minute, let’s consider what it was about the tortoise’s approach which resulted in him gaining success and how that can play out when we apply that to achieving our own career ambitions.

What we are seeing is momentum. Rather than charging off at a break-neck speed which cannot be sustained for the duration of the race, the tortoise adopts a much more manageable pace which he is able to maintain for far longer. And the real undoing of the hare was that after stopping, he found that it was much, much harder to get going again.

How does that translate into the work place? It’s quite simple really. Essentially, it comes down to doing most – if not all – of the right things for most of the time. Being consistent, getting better results for putting in small amounts of effort into tasks over a sustained period of time as opposed to having to make a huge effort to get something done in a shorter time frame.

I thought about this some more in the context of candidates that I’d interviewed and placed over the years; what sets those that had gone on to achieve arguably greater successes in their career over a longer period of time apart from those that perhaps hadn’t quite fulfilled the early promise they had shown was this idea of momentum. There will always be the few exceptions, but for the most part, you could see how those that had climbed the career ladder at a steady and consistent pace – a more manageable pace - over the course of a number of years were achieving ‘more’ than many who, in the early stages of their career, had burst onto the scene with a bang but had been unable to maintain the same trajectory.

After initially showing great potential, what were they doing – or not doing – that was holding them back? I kept coming back to this idea of momentum and how it is somehow easier to keep something going once it has been started – when it has become a habit - and how it’s harder, or more time consuming, to have to go back to tasks we’ve let slip but ultimately still need to be done. And these are often uninspiring, yet no less important, everyday tasks. For example, think back to when we had paper copies of everything and documents needed to be filed. It was a far less onerous task for those people who took a few minutes to diligently file everything away at the end of each day, rather than leave it to pile up until the end of the week (or month).

If we consider again the moral of the hare and the tortoise story – slow and steady wins the race – and understand that what we are really aiming for is ‘steady’ then we see that whilst the drive and confidence in one’s own abilities as displayed by the hare will undoubtedly serve you well, it’s the tortoise-like qualities - reliable, diligent, methodical, dependable – that are absolutely fundamental to achieving longer term career success.

Sharp Consultancy specialises in the recruitment and executive search of finance and accountancy professionals. With offices in Leeds and Sheffield our highly experienced team of consultants recruit for temporary, interim and permanent roles across the full spectrum of positions throughout Yorkshire and beyond. CONTACT UStoday and speak to a member of our team about your recruitment needs or next career move.