Essential Accounting Manager Skills & Tips to Succeed

Being a first time manager of accountants is an exciting validation of your accounting competencies, contributions, and performance. However, it's important to understand and embody the accounting manager skills that will bring success in your role.

Summary 

A successful transition to a first-time accounting manager requires shifting from self-management to enabling the performance of others through five key skills: soliciting feedback to ensure team success, establishing clear professional boundaries, assessing performance against business objectives, balancing strategic leadership with tactical management, and preparing the team for industry changes through continuous upskilling

What Do Accounting Managers Do? 

Accounting Managers are responsible for leading the accounting team, overseeing accounting tasks, supervising their team members, and supporting overall team success. They may focus on a specialization, like tax accounting, and often carry responsibilities such as effective people leadership, budget management, data analysis, and financial decision-making. 

5 Key Accounting Manager Skills

As you step into your accounting manager role, aim to implement these top five essential skills. 

#1: Ensuring the Successful Performance of Others

Prior to becoming an accounting manager, you were responsible for only your own performance behavior. You knew your goals and objectives, skills, optimal work style, scheduling, etc. You were responsible for yourself and only yourself, but now, you are responsible for the successful performance of others. So, how do you ensure that others perform well?

Make it part of your leadership style to solicit feedback. Specifically, conduct a series of virtual or in-person meetings where you:

• Ask questions specific to your team members and their responsibilities
• Record the responses for you and the participants to review, provide feedback, and reach alignment
• Summarize and publish findings for the team to use as guidelines for team performance

Here’s a list of possible questions to ask that will help you get to know those you are managing. Try sending your team these questions one week ahead of meeting, so participants can review and prepare their responses accordingly. 

• What work tasks highly motivate you to work above and beyond?
• What work tasks are the most challenging for you?
• What is your top priority right now?
• What does success look like for each task you are working on?
• What is your single, biggest job-wise concern going forward?

It is essential to recognize that accounting manager skills must enable and empower others to solve problems while using their unique expertise. Having this mindset will build a set of shared experiences and objectives that serve as a roadmap for the teams’ successful performance. Be sure to repeat these discussions on a regular basis so you’re always able to have a good handle on team sentiment. 

#2: Knowing Your Personal and Professional Boundaries

When working with others, there are always explicit and implicit rules of engagement. Explicit rules are company policy: for example, legal and human resources requirements (ex. cybersecurity precautions, conflicts of interest scenarios, etc.). In contrast, implicit demands include factors like working styles and conflict management. In the transition to a first time manager of accountants, you may need to revisit your boundaries or rules of engagement with individuals that were formerly peers.

Most organizations provide mandatory compliance training so managers can understand the explicit rules of engagement. However, addressing implicit or unspoken rules is one of the necessary accounting manager skills you need to develop. However, your former same-level peers are also facing this transition, and you can openly acknowledge these feelings. You can address this in your individual chats with team members and discuss what will or won’t change surrounding your promotion.

#3: Assessing Your Performance As a Manager 

As a new accounting manager, you will be judged on not only your performance but the performance of others as well. Your management will be looking to you to report performance and be responsible for actions outside of your former subject matter expertise, which can include all business areas.

Put together a detailed plan of your team's goals and objectives, specifying expectations. This will help to focus your team’s interactions on business outcomes, and will also provide upper management with tangible information to analyze, discuss, and evaluate performance.

Use the input you have received from the above two sets of meetings. This will give you a foundation of data and points of view and will signal to others that you are incorporating their input and ideas into your department planning. 

#4: Successfully Leading and Managing Others

In general, leadership is future-focused. It tends to be strategic, focusing on communication, and building a network of key work relationships. On the other hand, management is present, tactical, and more focused on operations, development, and enabling optimum performance on a day-to-day level. A necessary accounting manager skills is balancing both leadership and management. 

By implementing the qualities of both a manager and a leader, you can clearly communicate your team’s direction by specifying team objectives both in the long term and short term. As a leader, you have the agency to make decisions that rapidly develop key relationships and skills for your team, and can ensure team members’ continuous development and growth through upskilling.

#5: Preparing for the New and Next Normal

Several changes are impacting the accounting industry and your team members will likely have questions. For example, with the increasing digitalization of certain accounting processes, global cybersecurity concerns, and a host of other issues, accountants will need to continuously upgrade their skills to face these challenges head-on.

Each of these changes will demand learning new skills and training. As a new manager, you need to ensure that you receive coaching and direction to understand how your organization should respond to these changes. You also need to enable your team members to receive new knowledge and skills to meet these challenges. Becker has a wide variety of CPE courses across different fields of study that can help your team members upskill and grow professionally.

Be Confident As an Accounting Manager  

A promotion to accounting manager brings on a number of challenges, from work-related hurdles to personal ones. Remember that you were promoted because you’re more than capable of managing not only yourself, but others as well. By implementing these accounting manager skills, you can make a smooth transition from self-managing to managing others.

Becker’s CPE courses “Leading vs. managing: What to do when and with whom” and how to be a manager empower you to apply leadership behaviors to produce successful business outcomes.

James Eicher is the creator of Cognitive Management, which applies research from the cognitive sciences to organizational and leadership behavior. He has held leadership positions at KPMG, Booz Allen Hamilton, Symantec, and IBM among others, and has been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal and Selling magazine.

Mr. Eicher is the author of many organizational change management and leadership articles, assessments, and book chapters, as well as the management communication text Making the Message Clear.

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