The power skills needed to lead effectively — from the AICPA’s vice chair

Carla McCall, CPA, CGMA, was a prominent speaker at AICPA & CIMA ENGAGE 2023 for good reason. On this episode of the Journal of Accountancy podcast, McCall, recently named AICPA vice chair, discusses her career path and interest in volunteering while also serving as managing partner of the firm AAFCPAs.

McCall shares some of the key traits of leaders, what her firm is doing to address capacity issues, and one aspect of feedback that she considers difficult.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• An overview of McCall’s career in public accounting.
• Why gaining an outside perspective has helped McCall and her firm.
• How she has learned to delegate responsibilities over the years.
• An obstacle McCall faced regarding mentorship early in her career.
• What she looks forward to in her role as AICPA vice chair.

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 your host, Neil Amato. I am not live at AICPA & CIMA ENGAGE in Las Vegas, but our next podcast guest is. She is Carla McCall, a firm leader who is also the new AICPA board of directors vice chair. Carla, welcome to the podcast. How is Las Vegas?

Carla McCall: Thanks. It’s wonderful. I love this event, and the weather is fantastic.

Amato: That’s great. I appreciate you being on remotely. I’m recording in North Carolina as I said. You are at the Aria in Las Vegas. First, if you could tell our listeners briefly about who you are, your firm, your role, how long you’ve been there, things like that.

McCall: Sure, I’m managing partner at AAFCPAs. We’re a New England-based CPA and consulting firm. We are about 300 team members strong today. I’ve been with the firm for about 27 years. I’ve been sitting in a managing partner seat since 2011 when we went through a founder transition, and I’ve spent my entire career in public accounting. I’m a Bentley University grad, went into public [accounting] for a small firm in Connecticut where I grew up, relocated back to Boston, and I’ve been with AAFCPAs ever since.

Amato: That’s a great introduction. Thank you for that. How do you balance leading a successful growing firm with also being a volunteer in the profession?

McCall: Thanks for that question. I get that a lot. In fact, I’ve gotten that question a lot here at ENGAGE. When I think about my journey and I think about the success of our firm, I credit a lot of that to having a front row seat with the AICPA Council. I was a past president of the [Massachusetts] Society of CPAs, which gave me a seat on Council, which got me in front of Barry [Melancon], and listening to what’s coming down the pike for the profession. The fact that I have kept an external view, I credit a lot of the firm’s success, because I was able to listen to what was happening in the industry, take it back to the firm, and execute on growth strategy. First, I want to just put an exclamation point on how important it is to have that balance.

That being said, being a managing partner of a top 100 firm, what I’ve learned over the years is that I don’t have to make every decision. I’ve learned the importance of having the right butt in the right seats. I have an amazing senior leadership team. I have an amazing executive board that supports my efforts of giving back to the profession. I let my leaders lead. I do not have to be involved in every aspect of the operation. I really can focus my time on strategy and vision. For the firm to be successful, somebody needs to have a pulse on what’s happening in the industry. The time I spend volunteering for the profession, I get more back in value for me and the firm that I feel I’m giving to the profession. It’s really a motivator.

Amato: Some of those outside roles, you touched on it that you get more than maybe you give. How have those outside roles affected the success that you and the firm have had?

McCall: When I’ve been sitting in Council and I’m listening and I’m going back probably five to eight years, and I’m listening to Barry talk about the proliferation of advisory in CPA firms. I was able to listen to that and come back and say, when I stepped into a managing partner role in 2011, we were very much an audit and tax firm, but I’m hearing that we need to expand our services. If you look at our firm today and the evolution over the last 10 to 12 years, we now have a robust technology and advisory practice. We’re doing cyber health, we’re doing SOC, we’re doing RPA and data analytics. We have an incredible high-growth CAS practice that is a cloud-based outsourcing solution for clients.

We have significant growth in our independent RIA, our wealth management, and financial planning practice. It has given me the tools, if you will, to think about our growth strategy and how we wanted to grow as a CPA and advisory firm. The speakers that I was fortunate to listen to, the futurists that would talk about what’s coming down the pike, transformation—when I think about all of the information that I was able to absorb about audit transformation and technology to transformation and how that was going to change the way we do our work, has allowed me to be at the forefront of innovation in our firm and has helped our growth strategy.

Amato: What is AAFCPAs doing to help address the profession’s staffing and capacity issues?

McCall: Yes. Thank you for that. Clearly, pipeline is on everybody’s mind and finding talent. There’s a few programs that I will call out. One is our AAFCPA E3 Program where we partner with a local community college in order to recruit students in that are in an associate’s program, and we support them. They work for us on a part-time basis, and we support them through their education. Then they can enter our ZIP2CPA Program, which is the second program that we created.

Our ZIP2CPA Program is an organized program that has an adjunct professor who happens to work for us, and he’s one of our partners. But they have a one-on-one coach. It provides a structured work schedule. When young professionals talk about not having time to study, not having time to take the exam, this is a program they go into where there’s that structure that they are asking for. There’s group discussions, and then they also have access to a one-on-one coach, which is an adjunct professor, which is helping them think about strategy for the CPA Exam. The thought was that we have students that come in through our E3 Program, we support them as they get their bachelor’s, and then they can go right into the ZIP2CPA, or our college recruits, that we recruit probably 15 to 25 a year out of college, can go into our ZIP2CPA Program right away, get the CPA Exam done, and then go on to get the extra credit hours for the CPA. Those are two programs that we have.

We also have invested in an offshore company, so we’re starting to create an offshore talent pool to augment our U.S.-based staff, and we’re also hiring different skill sets in the firm. One of the departments that we created probably like five years ago was a project specialist-, project management-type group. Their backgrounds are very varied, and they support the firm and specific projects, and it has provided leverage for various groups throughout the firm.

Amato: Let’s talk some about leadership. You’ve risen in the firm. But I guess I’d like to know, how did you learn to become a leader, or do you even think it’s something people do learn or have to learn?

McCall: Yeah. It’s funny because I was on a panel [Monday] here at ENGAGE ,and it was for the women’s track and it was on power skills, and we were talking about this very thing, about what are the power skills that people need to be a leader. I think it can be learned. I think, for me, leadership is about human connections. It’s all about people. The best leaders have the ability to forge the best relationships. When I was asked in interviews, “What’s your strength?” I would always say interpersonal skills. I don’t think I appreciated then what it was. Now, after a period of leadership and some self-reflection, I realize it’s the ability to build rapport with other people of varying backgrounds. I think that’s really important because it’s all about human relations. We’re in a trust business; it’s about building trust.

If you can build strong relationships and you can build trust, then you can gain influence. Once you gain influence, you will propel yourself to leadership. For me, it’s how do you build rapport? It’s a combination of skill sets. It’s self-awareness, it’s strong communication, it’s decision-making, it’s a bunch of, I think, core skills that builds that muscle.

Amato: Yeah. I think that’s great. Tell me this: Every leader I think has mentors, but how have you been led in the past and maybe the good and the bad, and what have you taken from those experiences?

McCall: Yeah. That’s a little bit of a loaded question because, coming up, there wasn’t a lot of mentorship when I was growing up in the profession, and so a lot of what has evolved in our firm I had to create. There wasn’t really strong HR, there were no mentor programs and things like that, so I had to build, and that’s part of my leadership journey coming up.

As a partner, I was able to create a lot, and I’m grateful that the partners at the time gave me the leeway to build programs like our first mentorship program, our first coaching program that evolved to our Professional Accountant Development Program, which is a group coaching model, that then evolved into the Women’s Opportunity Network, our Innovation Lab, our Changemaker Challenge, our diversity, equity, inclusion, and on and on and on.

Part of my leadership journey has been a deep desire to improve the environment around me. That’s what led me to create programs that I felt were important but I didn’t see in place. All of that being said, and I do try to mentor others to give back and encourage other people to ask for what they deserve, to voice opinions, to give ideas, and don’t be shy about it. That really will show people in leadership that you have something to bring to the table. You have great ideas, you’re not afraid to voice them, and that all builds on leadership.

That being said, I did have some mentors along the way. One of the founders of our firm was a great mentor because he wasn’t afraid to give me candid feedback. I think every person in any leadership journey needs to have self-awareness, needs to be able to accept feedback, needs to make themselves a little bit vulnerable, and you need to be keenly aware of your blind spots so that you can focus on those on a daily basis.

Amato: Do you think that accepting feedback is a skill you have to learn over the years?

McCall: Yes. We have two executive coaches that sit in our firm, and their sole job is literally coaching our team members. But it’s anybody in the firm. They are doing full potential coaching with a lot of partners in the firm because we need strong leaders.

Listen, getting feedback doesn’t always feel good, so we need to acknowledge our feelings about it. Do I want to be told that I made somebody feel bad in a meeting? No. Do I have a pit in my stomach when someone’s giving [feedback]? Yes, but you need to really embrace it and get through the feeling and then feel bad for a little bit. Then say, what am I going to do to fix it so that doesn’t happen again? If you have the resources to help you, I don’t think we can always adjust it on our own. That’s where talent advisers or executive coaches have that ability to work with you to understand why you may have done what you did, or talk about the differences that people have.

A lot of negative feedback or, I’ll say, constructive feedback comes from just people being different and having different natural preferences, and we need to interact with different people differently. Once you understand that, there’s a lot of power in how you can develop better relationships.

Amato: That’s definitely one of those power skills that I’m sure you talked about in that session. This has been a great conversation. It’s been great getting to know you some. Anything else that maybe you’d like to mention that I didn’t ask you about in closing?

McCall: Just that I’m really excited about my vice chair role for the AICPA. I’m really just thrilled to continue to have a front row seat to support our profession and on a global stage, and I’m very passionate about this profession. I absolutely love what I do, and I love inspiring the next generation, and I’m looking forward to that.

Amato: I think your passion for the profession definitely comes through. Carla, thank you very much.

McCall: Thank you.