Pursuit of happiness: AICPA Chair Carla McCall emphasizes people, positivity

A chair, by definition, is stationary.

A chair, when occupied by Carla McCall, CPA, CGMA, is anything but.

“Some chair roles are like, ‘Oh, you’re the chair, but you don’t really do much,’” McCall said. “This chair position is immersed in the profession.”

McCall’s tenure as AICPA chair has been filled with activity and advocacy. One example: In a recent 10-day stretch, she attended four AICPA regional council meetings in four days (New York to Chicago to Los Angeles to Dallas), spoke to students at North Carolina State University, and attended the AICPA and CPA.com AI in Accounting and Finance Symposium in New York City.

Her tenure has featured a variety of venues — state CPA societies, conferences, and colleges among them — and a variety of topics.

But, whether McCall is fielding a question from a student considering a career in accounting or from a lifer looking to resolve an issue facing their firm, the interactions all have the same end goal:

The pursuit of happiness.

That happens to be an area of expertise for McCall.

“If you have happy people, you have happy clients,” she said. “And growth will follow.”

What is happiness for a CPA? The details might vary based on an individual’s career stage, but McCall has thoughts on them all.

Happiness for leaders: A productive staff

McCall is a leader away from her chair role, serving as managing partner since 2011 at AAFCPAs, a 325-person firm in the Boston area.

She assumed the AICPA chair role as many leaders struggled to recruit and retain the talent needed to thrive. In the midst of McCall’s tenure, the National Pipeline Advisory Group published its recommendations related to the talent crunch, in part calling for accounting professionals to help power the profession by telling a better story about the great things their careers have afforded them.

The stories, though, can’t merely be tall tales.

“You can’t tell a better story unless you’re evolving the way you work,” McCall said. “You can fill the top of the funnel all you want, but unless we’re doing the work on ourselves — on our expectations, on how we pay, on how we run our businesses — we’re not going to keep them in the profession.”

That has been McCall’s approach since she became a partner at AAFCPAs, and it continues to pay dividends. Since she started as managing partner, the firm’s annual revenue has risen five-fold.

“As a new partner, I always tried to improve the environment around me. I implemented programs, changed policies, being that intermediary between the employees and the partners because there was a huge disconnect,” McCall said. “I set out to flip that script.”

Her advice to leaders looking to accomplish the same?

“You have to start somewhere, you get buy-in, you have success. Once you have wins, you build more influence, and it’s easier to implement ideas after that. People need to think about, ‘What is the culture that we want? What do we want people to feel when they’re working for us? How do we want them to talk about us?’

“We’re nothing without people.”

Happiness for staff: Work/life balance

“There are never life-and-death emergencies in accounting!”

Those were McCall’s closing words in a recent LinkedIn post in which she shared details around her decision to take a last-minute beach trip with her children.

Her opening words were about work/life balance. Or, as she prefers to call it, work/life integration.

“There is no balance, only integration of all the things that are important to you, and every day you decide your priorities,” McCall wrote. “But only you can decide your priorities.”

That’s the way McCall leads her firm, an approach that resonates with her team. She gained some sobering but significant perspective on what team members need when, in her first year as a senior at AAFCPAs in the late 1990s, her father died unexpectedly.

“It’s like everything else isn’t important in a second,” McCall said. “What happens is obviously everybody jumps in, they help you out, whatever you need to get through your grief and all that. But then you tend to go right back into your old ways, that everything at work is a crisis.

“If only you could bottle that moment that everything was put into perspective.”

McCall in effect did bottle that perspective, using it as the basis for how leaders at AAFCPAs aim to create a sense of satisfaction across the team.

Happiness for CPA candidates: A worthy profession

“I tell students that they’re entering the profession in the most exciting time since I’ve been in it,” McCall said. “I’m bullish on our future.”

McCall has told students across the country that earning CPA status guarantees fluency in the “language of business” and opens up a lengthy list of career paths.

And, at a time when the accounting profession must adjust to compete with students’ expectations related to starting salaries, McCall makes sure students are aware of recent research that puts the average annual compensation for equity partners at firms similar in size to hers at more than $800,000.

“You shouldn’t pick a major based on salary, though. It’s what I did, but I happened to like it,” McCall said. “You need to learn, you need to prove yourself, and if you’re good at what you do, the money is going to follow.

“Where you start isn’t always where you will end up, so enjoy the journey. Every experience you have, the good and bad, you learn from and it prepares you for your next role. There’s financial freedom in our profession. It just doesn’t always happen at day 1 or year 1.”

McCall also has been interacting with those charged with preparing the next generation, exchanging ideas with faculty members about how they can get students ready — and get them excited — about the field.

Happiness for all: Meaningful work

While improved working conditions as a pathway to happiness has been a big theme for McCall as AICPA chair, another pathway to happiness arises from a fundamental question asked around cubicles countless times each day.

“What are you working on?”

“Firms need to recognize that we’ll do best if we place people in the work that gives them meaning,” McCall said. “When you have work that gives you meaning, it just becomes a fabric of your life.

“I tell students to grant themselves grace. Take risks. Try new things. When they find their meaningful work, it’s magic.”

McCall believes that wise investment in evolving technologies can free employees to trade in the mundane for the meaningful.

Finding meaning is something she has long prioritized in her partner role, and it’s something she has also embraced as AICPA chair.

“Some students at N.C. State, they were like, ‘I really appreciated what you said. I appreciate you being so honest, so real, so transparent. You made me rethink an issue I was dealing with.’ That is so refreshing,” McCall said. “That’s the stuff that gives me energy because I know I’m reaching people. I can make a difference.

“I had someone call me from a firm in another part of the country and say, ‘We’re going through this evolution that you’ve gone through. Can you come talk to my partner group?’ That’s cool. I guess I didn’t realize maybe the impact that I would have on others. Sometimes you think you’re going to give a talk or something, and people are going to be like, ‘It’s just the chair’ or whatever. But to have them come back and say, ‘That really resonated.’ That has been awesome.”

— To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Bryan Strickland at Bryan.Strickland@aicpa-cima.com.