Tips for driving change and driving out drama

Alex Dorr speaks to audiences and organizations all over about ditching the drama and getting more productivity and engagement from employees and more overall value for companies. His session at Digital CPA in Denver in December 2024 focused on many of those same principles and was tailored to modern accounting firms.

On the Journal of Accountancy podcast, Dorr, vice president at Reality-Based Leadership, explained more about how readiness for change can lead to a better work reality for employees and managers alike.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• Dorr’s reflection on whether he was a “high-drama” college basketball player.
• Why the examination of an employee’s or team’s value should include an assessment of “readiness for what’s next.”
• The “juicy” question Dorr answered about speaking to accounting groups.
• The importance of validating someone’s experience in the workplace before addressing ways to make it better.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Neil Amato: Welcome back to the Journal of Accountancy podcast. This is Neil Amato with the JofA. I’m honored to have Alex Dorr of Reality-Based Leadership joining the show. We’ve mentioned him in the pages of the JofA. He’s spoken at ENGAGE. He’s just come off the stage at Digital CPA in Denver. Alex, first, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for making time to be on.

Alex Dorr: Thanks for making this happen, and it’s cool to be here, especially after just getting offstage and getting some of that feedback, so it’s fun.

Amato: Your session title was “High Productivity but High Drama.” Now, first, I’m going to say, we’re actually going to take a side trip into basketball. Were you a high-drama basketball player?

Dorr: It’s funny you take that tangent. Yeah, I played in college and pro, and it’s funny. That was my first career. Without getting into too many details, I had learned some of these principles and then got on a team. I played at Iowa State at the time, and just, you see some characters at a high level that they’re very high performers, maybe even, like, ready to play in the NBA and even myself on a team thinking I’m adding value.

Then our content says, here’s what’s helpful and what doesn’t help so much that leads to drama in the workplace. But some of those same human patterns kept our team that I thought had so much talent — we just couldn’t get it together. Then I saw later, I was a big part of it, and then now it’s just funny to see the patterns of human behavior and how they interrupt your career success. I would say I was a key contributor at times to what I would call drama in the locker room. It’s funny you bring that up.

Amato: But also some high productivity, right?

Dorr: At times, depending on the day. A heck of a journey back then.

Amato: Exactly. Thanks for letting me veer off into sports, which is a passion of mine. But the second part of that keynote session name, “High Productivity but High Drama: A New Value Equation for the Modern Accounting Firm,” how does that play into the profession that you’re speaking to?

Dorr: Our research, I’ll start there, is on what we call drama in the workplace. Now, that’s the marketing term to get people’s ears perked up so we don’t just say “leadership” or “staff development.” It is really we study the interferences that keep people from success and happiness. We believe a big part of leadership is I meet you where you’re at when you’re stuck in an interference or an unpreferred reality or a work issue.

I validate your experience that this is hard, but I don’t validate the sense you’re making of it, meaning that, “I’m surrounded by idiots. I do everything around here. They should just talk to me, and this is never going to get figured out.” Like, a leader is there to support you and love you up. But a leader or a colleague, I have to call you up to greatness, and it takes some discernment. What we believe our main role is to issue that call to greatness and thus ditch the drama in the workplace. Now, that comes to our research. The average person spends about 2½ hours per day in drama. What does it have to do with the profession? Who could use an extra 2½ hours a day of time, energy? How’s that scale? It scales massively.

In health care, and I know it’s not the space, but it’s something to think about. They had 300 open nursing positions. They did a little bit of napkin math. If they had a few tools to ditch the drama, they’d only have 30 open nursing positions. We had just been talking about as much this thing about burnout and staffing and on the macro, we don’t have enough people. But how much are we losing just to the cost of drama? Then how many people leave the profession because they can’t handle the drama of the team? There’s so much that it’s a different lens to look at how we deal with some of the long-standing issues in the space.

Amato: In that keynote and subsequent, I guess, roundtable session, I mean, there’s a lot of interaction with the audience. I could see it even after. I mean, you were that speaker who you weren’t sure how much interaction you were going to get. It was right before the cocktail reception. You had a lot of people coming up to you. What are some of the questions you’re getting from them in follow-up?

Dorr: Great question, because what we did was a self-assessment. So, high productivity, high drama — we have this new employee value equation that doesn’t just look at performance. Traditionally, we’re like, is this a high performer in our firm, or am I a high performer, and we stop there. We found in our research, it’s not just performance right now, you have to have future potential, or sometimes we call it readiness for what’s next. Basically, are your skills going to be relevant in one to three to five years?

And then for your total value you add to your clients, to the organization, you have to subtract out your drama quotient, your freakout factor, your hassle factor, and that drama quotient has three times the negative. What we did in that roundtable was gave everybody our self-assessment. It ends up being about 30 questions, and you actually get a snapshot of your total value, but bringing in your fluency around drama. It was fun to see everybody raise their hands. There was a few positive numbers at the end of this, and these are really sharp people, high performers in their own right. But in this new metric, they had to look at their readiness. Are they getting a little resistant to change? They’re talking AI, technology, all these new tools. They had to reflect on, “Am I staying ready for what’s next?”

But then, they had to do a deep reflection on ten statements about, “Am I high-drama or low-drama?” Then we had about, I’d say 70%, maybe 80% of the audience raise their hand that they were a negative number when you add in this three times the negative multiplier to drama. This really is a big thing because the questions that came up after is like, “We get it.” This is a lack of fluency in how to deal with drama, how to recognize it. That’s what I really teach for the most part with the work I do. I say, we have the human condition. You’re going to screw this up and only daily. I’m the second-best expert in the world at this, besides our founder who’s been doing it 30 years, but I’m coming for her spot, and I screwed it up and only daily. It’s not about whether you mess it up. We’re human. It’s how quick can I get into a tool to say, “That’s a human condition? Now, how can we think through this problem differently with a visual coaching tool and then we work together through it?” That’s what people were asking about is like the practical tools which we gave them at the end.

Amato: Obviously, you’ve mentioned health care. You speak to a lot of different audiences, but the accounting audience, they’ve got to like this equation tool?

Dorr: Yes. I would say what was interesting is I went a little viral with the AICPA during the pandemic. When we work in health care, the name in the game is burnout, staffing. And the thing that’s different in health care is they were all labeled as health care heroes. They were [heroes], absolutely. We all remember the pandemic.

But I didn’t hear our accountants being called heroes trying to keep businesses alive, applying for a technology loan that was dreamed up in the middle of the night by the government that there — business owners are saying, “Hey, on page 18 at Google, I found this thing” — just a lot of things that are similar in those two spaces, and that is what I found interesting that our tools really transcend whatever profession. But we’ve really found a niche in making these through the AICPA and making our tools really relevant for those that are accountants or partners or trying to lead others in the space.

Amato: I don’t know if you ever get this question, but does anyone ever say, “What do you mean by Reality-Based Leadership?”

Dorr: Yeah they do, and it’s basically it’s a constant, steady beat of the drum on framing up our reality, stop the argument with reality because you’ll lose that but only 100% of the time and say, radically accept our reality as is. We don’t love it. We don’t think it’s the best forever. But given this reality right now, what is the first short-term step? Then maybe, what’s midterm? Some people are like, oh, I always have to over function and solve everything myself. I always do that. I go, no you tend to the client first, get the need addressed, and then a lot of people are well, this always happens to me. As a reality-based leader, I go, always, what do you mean by that?

“Well, it’s only happened twice in 14 years.”

I look midterm I’m like, is that enough to create a new process for this? They’re like, “Well, I guess I can just use resiliency there. It only happens twice every 14 years.” But if it is an issue that comes up monthly, let’s go into long term, what’s a process improvement idea, or let’s get some technology to automate that. It’s really embracing your reality with neutrality and saying, given that, how could we move forward?

Amato: You’ve been on AICPA Town Hall, you’ve spoken at ENGAGE. Obviously, Digital CPA is where we’re catching up. What do you like about talking to accountants?

Dorr: Oh, that’s a juicy one. I like that this group’s about — you’re about — numbers. It’s like, let’s get reality-based. The numbers don’t lie and I have found that there is peace in reality. That’s the only place. If you get in the past too far, you’re thinking about the past, you get into regrets. If you get too far into the future, you’ll freak yourself out. I love that accountants are really let’s see where the numbers fall, and that’ll tell the truth. Then from there, given this is how your year ended, let’s partner together to figure out how to make this better.

I find when we bring stuff up, accountants really embrace these tools. They think like this in good mental processes. They think in good methodologies that are proven, standard, compliant. Because there’s truth of the universe of healthy ways to think that lead to great results, and that’s what reality-based leadership is. There’s universal principles. That’s what accountants like to follow, and we have to follow that.

What I would say is the interesting part I’m working on is we tend to jump to those good processes in our relationships like the call to greatness, and we skip what I call loving people up before we call people up. I love to take these minds that are so good at the call to greatness and sticking to the numbers in reality and given this, let’s figure it out. And they can figure anything out.

But I do have to do a little bit of don’t forget to build relationships, validate someone’s experience before you jump into the tool. Finding that sweet spot with accountants, so we are building relationships, that human side. I love you up, I say, “Yeah, I’ll validate this is a tough moment for you, and I see you’re capable.” Let’s call you up with this tool. I think that’s a fun sweet spot that I like working with small, medium, large firms.

Amato: I don’t know how familiar you are with the pipeline issue with accounting numbers.

Dorr: It’s not, on the macro, looking promising where we’d like it.

Amato: How important is that versus maybe a focus on, “Hey, these are the hard facts. These are the numbers.” Meaning, I don’t know, does the way new accountants are managed matter for the profession?

Dorr: It absolutely does. One of my first slides I always talk about is the human condition slide. Briefly, it’s imagine an X crashing together. It’s like the macro trends, there’s not enough accountants. It’s more demands than ever. Technology is coming in; it’s getting crazy out there. There’s all this change. At the same time, we have less time, less people coming in, and all of us in the human condition, when the going and gets tough, mentally, we fantasize about quitting, winning the lottery, leaving the profession, writing the next American novel. Then when we step down, it doesn’t feel very good, we BMW drive, we bitch, moan, and whine about how everything’s horrible, and then we wish for a different reality. If only we fix the pipeline, if only people actually got what’s so cool about being an accountant — so, we wish for a different reality.

What I say is your circumstances in your reality, they’re not the circumstances in which you can’t succeed, they’re the new reality in which you must succeed. I would focus less on not arguing with it. It’s true. Those are the numbers. But how do I get more skillful in my current reality?

That’s the call to greatness is embracing reality, that truth. Given that, where do I need to evolve my skill set, modernize my approach, or increase my level of willingness to lean into the new world? All this conference is talking about, I heard the word “AI” in the opening session 17 times. That is you’re saying there’s no staff coming. There are robots that can do 98% of our work already here. It’s already here. It’s just, can you update — now, that scares people. They’re like, my job is going away.

If you’re ready for what’s next in low drama, you’re going to say, given that new tool, how do I now automate everything that’s annoying about the profession, and how do I add that human touch on top of it? You accept the standardization, and then you add the human touch for our clients. The thing you’re trying to create is a low-drama, highly accountable place for your best people to thrive, and they’ll stay and tell others about it.

Amato: You mentioned change. How does resisting change play a role in maybe just the productivity overall of CPA firms or the accounting profession in general?

Dorr: It’s a powerful question. Of the sources of drama, the fourth one, about 13%, is still resistance to change. You’ll hear it at a lot of these conferences, and there’s a part of the human condition that change is hard. I’ll acknowledge it’s true. But when we went into the research on change because everyone was saying that. They would start a company rollout, and every leader across the whole organization would say, “I know, change is really hard. I know you got a lot on your plate. You’re all super busy, but if out the goodness of your hearts, could you follow this new software?”

What a lot of leaders don’t realize is just in that language, I just colluded with you and revealed my cards that I don’t think you’re capable. Sometimes leaders would go, “Well, I don’t necessarily agree with this change, but I checked with the partners, it’s mandatory.” So I just showed us vs. them, and I just shared that I’m not bought in. At the end of that announcement, I now have to say, “Can you buy into this?” So I just sabotaged buy-in of the change from the start. But in all of that, what we found is that change wasn’t hard. It was only hard for the unready. Because when you’re unready for what’s next, you only have one option to resist change because it might expose you as incompetent.

With everybody going to be expecting in our firms that you are AI-enhanced, for example, it will not be from the younger generation. Like, if I need a form from you or a look at my balance sheet and with some comments and you’re like, “I’ll get that to you in a week,” people are going to not tolerate that because you should be able to feed that through AI, get 98% of it done, and then add your final touches and get it to me right after the call. Or, a QuickBooks is going to do it for you, or whatever you use. It will be an expectation that everybody’s AI-enhanced. That’s coming. If you’re not thinking about that with change, it’s going to really be tough to find clients.

And so, we work on readiness. The last thing I’d say is if you just look at the health care, we do preparedness. Public health, we do preparedness, is what they call it. In the military, we do readiness training. You don’t wait for something to break out and then all of a sudden change-manage it — not a good strategy, or in the military, you’d have to be at war all the time. What we do is we do readiness drills, and in health care, we do mock codes to get you ready for a crisis situation. But that’s what we need to do in leadership is I like to take the word “change” out and do “business readiness.” How are we going to have everybody ready, willing, and able to deliver what our clients need? That’s our mindset.

I sometimes go a week and just say we can’t say the word “change.” People say, “Well, I can’t handle all this ‘next.’ If you give me one more ‘next,’ I’m going to lose my mind.” It just shows the drama behind the word “change.” Those are some of my thoughts. It is hard, the human condition, but we can work on readiness and get a little bit better at it.

Amato: Alex Dorr, thanks for being on the Journal of Accountancy podcast.

Dorr: Thanks for having me. This is fun.