Can ACCA Accountants Be Leaders?

Part I

This question is asked of me so many times that I decided to directly ask various company professionals. So I started a poll at a finance group at Linkedln (Professional Networking website) and so far the results are not concluding. According to my survey and current results, none of the respondents said YES (quite surprising for me) and rest of the answers were equally divided into 4 parts depicting “In most cases”, “In some cases”, “In rare cases” and “No”.

So I asked professionals directly what their opinions on this question are. According to Miss Roxanne Mah, also an ACCA accountant and working at Rolling Mix Concrete, “It is not the choice of career that determines one’s ability to lead, but rather their desire to facilitate both their organization and the people around them. I would say that more often than not I have worked with highly gifted technical accountants who were promoted to management because of their technical strengths, only to see them to flounder in their ability to lead others. So the answer to your question is maybe Yes / maybe No”

I asked the same question to Nick Robinson, Non-executive director and chair of audit at Trafford Healthcare NHS trust and also a leadership coach*. And for him, this is a sweeping question. Why? I asked him. “I guess you are assigning a set of traits to the ‘typical accountant’ that you consider are not useful to a ‘good leader’. Whilst there might be a small grain of truth in that, it’s kind of stereotyping”.

“In my experience as an ex-accountant, nearly everybody, including accountants and lawyers, can be taught to flex their natural behavior preferences enough to be good leaders in normal circumstances”, he added. “Good leadership draws heavily on authenticity and integrity – so consistently being yourself and being honest are important and can anyway outweigh the traits that might be more typically associated with natural leaders in normal circumstances”.

Zahid Jamal, a part time DJ of two famous radio stations in Pakistan and also an associate auditor at Ernst and Young, Pakistan, give me a BIG NO. He said, “Accountancy teaches us how to recode and maintain some numeric records. But numbers themselves can never describe the psychological, creative and behavioral aspects of making decision. Accountancy does not polish anyone’s leadership skills rather it creates a number cruncher”.

The discussion was too long to be surmised here, with comments even from Glasgow (place of ACCA head office) but we shall keep them for the next article, as a CEO of a company asked me to change the question.

So stay in touch for the next article to know what the connection is between leadership, accountants, and why ACCA changed its syllabus to tackle the problem. I was not aware that this simple question could produce such a long debate.

In a meanwhile please email us at our ACCA discussion forum if you have any comments or questions about this subject.

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