The crucial skill that will boost your accountancy career

Garreth Hanley:
This is INTHEBLACK, a leadership, strategy and business podcast, brought to you by CPA Australia.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Welcome to INTHEBLACK. Today we'll be discussing how complex financial information can be conveyed to everyday people. That's people accountants work with, fellow professionals and their clients. Finances keep governments, companies and households running. But accountants aside, so many of us are in the dark when it comes to dealing with figures. Today we're talking to Professor Nick McGuigan, professor at the Monash Business School, about how he works with accounting and finance students to develop more effective communication skills. He also has some timely advice for early and mid-year career professionals. Hello, Nick.

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
Hello, how are you? Thank you so much for having me on the show.

Jacqueline Blondell:
No worries. Well, let's kick off with the first question. So why are good communications skills so important for finance professionals, and that's now and into the future?

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
Such a great question. I mean, the language of business, the finance around businesses, it's of course so important to business in general, but we take that out and it's a language that we all live with. Globally, everyone is living under that language of accounting because we're making accounting decisions on our every day, all the time, we just may not consciously be aware about it. So our role in translating some of those more financial, the numbers, to individuals that might be afraid, they might have fear around interpreting what those numbers mean or numbers in general just might scare them, it's about trying to translate that information across to different stakeholders. And those stakeholders themselves are growing, so more individuals from diverse backgrounds are interested in financial information. And our role as accountants is to try to translate that information to multiple stakeholders, in multiple groups of individuals.

Jacqueline Blondell:
There's have been normally called soft skills. I believe that you don't like that term or you think it's misleading. Why, and is there a better term?

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
I'm frustrated a little bit in our interpretation of what soft skills means, in that there's a perception that they're easy skills or they're not as difficult as the more technical aspects of our discipline, for example. But soft skills probably are so much harder to be able to develop in oneself and there's no finite endpoint for that knowledge acquisition, so to speak. So we're continuously developing and growing our soft skills, which requires real hard work. So giving them the name soft, I think is really misleading. And so changing that narrative, because these will be the key to the future of our profession, they're human capabilities and developing one's human capability is going to be what makes us much more relevant in a very uncertain and changing world.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Absolutely. I'm thinking it's a type of empathy. It's being able to see yourself in someone else's shoes, which is sort of alien to a balance sheet approach to thinking.

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
That's so true. So much of our role is about translating that information to people so that they can make really informed, but also holistic decisions, and they can make the best decision at the point in time, with the limited information they have. And so these can often be quite high stress environments in which we have to engage with, but it's our role to put people at ease, for example, to translate that information in a way that people understand it. So that's multiple ways of translating, so the language, the spoken language, the written emails, for example, but equally the visuals and understanding trends and graphing information also. So that is a key part of our role.

Jacqueline Blondell:
So let's talk about how you go about developing these skills in the students. What sort of approach do you take?

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
It's a good question. So we obviously try to build the basic needs, how do you communicate, how do you write a written report, how can you construct an email? The kind of taken for granted things that we know professionals need as they graduate. But we also, we've tried to develop the communications course to be a point of innovation and experimentation. So we want to creatively play with visual ways of looking at the world or ways of communicating through Instagram and podcasts, for example, and all sorts of different media approaches to how we develop some of those skills, so that we expose students to different ways of seeing the world, different ways of thinking about accounting information.

But equally, you mentioned empathy and emotional intelligence. It's about trying to build the ability for individuals to see themselves in the shoes of another individual and where they might be coming from as a client when they're approaching the accountant for information and how we can try to build the ability to listen firstly, because often we don't listen enough. And so it's about actively listening to really deeply understand the context of the client or the context of the stakeholder we're communicating with, it could be a colleague at work, for example. But understand where they're coming from, the information needs that they might have, and then trying to meet them where they are to bring them to where they need to be. And often we don't take the time necessarily to think about what that means to build the empathy, to understand where someone's coming from, engage with them closely and make that connection before we sort of dump them with the information or the numbers.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Absolutely. So do you ever approach it from an outcome point of view, if you learn to develop these skills, these are the various positive outcomes you'd get?

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
Yeah, partly. When we're talking about building some of these skills, business students in general and business professionals also, because I work in terms of reflection with some professional bodies, they don't necessarily see the benefit of developing some of these skills straight away because they look at the short term rather than the long term. And so especially naive business students, for example, that haven't had experience in practice, we really do need to do work on how these are relevant for a profession which often is portrayed as technical, number driven, data processing disciplines.

So one technique we use is we look at job advertisements and we work with students for them to explore what are the job opportunities in accounting available to them. And they start to map, from those job advertisements, a type of skills matrix, and then we can use that skills matrix to try and explore, okay, so this is what they're asking for, here's how we can start to develop it within the unit.

And so we're really trying to link the relevance to where they might want grad positions or accounting positions in the future, and get them to internalise that process and start to think about how they might build those skills accordingly.

The other thing that I've found really helpful is also to try to get them to shift the mindset into the future and take a more long-term approach to their skill development, where it starts at school, it continues at university, and of course it continues into the profession with CPD and things like that. But the idea is to take that longer approach, looking at where the future of work is going to be going in the next 10 years, and what are the kind of skill sets that people need to engage with, i.e, working across discipline. So having that interdisciplinary perspective is the number one job skill into the future.

So things like the World Economic Forum, the future of jobs, they create these skill matrix for the future, and so allowing students to explore some of those frameworks and start to reflect on them and bring them back to the everyday, I think is a really good way to try and shift them into a future way of thinking and thinking, if I'm going to get over there, how am I going to achieve that, how can I do that? And it's not always within the university programs, it's how can I develop these skills in all my other areas of life and work and try and build myself to that point, if that's where the world is moving.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Because it gives you, if you have a broader outlook, a broader satisfaction from your job and your life.

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
Absolutely. And I think this is the number one thing that the accounting profession's currently facing now, is how can we develop ourselves with purpose? Young people are looking for jobs with purpose, and unless we're able to meet them at that point, we will continue to struggle into the future around recruiting young people into the profession. And so we are, of course, full of purpose.

If I look at Jane Gleeson-White's work around how accountants can save the world, we've got such a strong role to play in shifting business behaviour towards the integration of financial and non-financial information. And unless we build ourselves, as a profession, to be able to do that and show how we are impacting the world and how we can, I guess, take some of those changing societal trends and engage with them, it will be a very difficult task to engage young people.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Absolutely. And the communication skills are woven throughout that. If you've got a shift in a professional outlook, you need to be able to communicate what that shift is and why it's important.

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
Absolutely. And we saw that in the recent pandemic, we obviously saw that as being a major issue. The number one role an accountant had during that time was counselling. And yet we don't build counselling training, we don't build empathy, we don't build emotional intelligence into our university/professional development programs enough probably. And yet that's one of the key skills moving into the future, where we are providing assurance and stability within very uncertain times for clients, for individuals.

Jacqueline Blondell:
That is a very good point because accountants in public practice, they're dealing with the public, the pointy end of the public, and they'll be dealing, as you said, with the pandemic. That was the first port of call for many businesses looking for job keeper and so on, or anxieties about lockdown, they were calling their accountant. And that was reported back through us and it was a major shift, but had already been there because they have always been counsellors in some ways.

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
That's right. It probably was a type of hidden skill that we didn't make explicit in what our development matrix are for what a professional accountant might look like. And so the pandemic really just highlighted that role that we were playing in society and exponentially increased what the service was, and so you see a lot of accountants that are really tired as a result. We saw it pre-pandemic with our farming community in agriculture in Australia, where the farmers saw the accountant as the individual they could trust.

And so there are so many dynamics around that, but with drought and the increasing pressure that were on our local farmers, they really saw the accountant as the individual, the face that would get them out of some really stressful situations. And they ended up trusting the individual and talking to them when they couldn't talk to family members. They couldn't talk about succession planning to families, but they could talk to the accountant because they saw the accountant as the solution. And I'm not convinced that we are ready or prepared, through our training at the moment, for those situations. And these are really innate human situations that they're difficult to prepare for. You probably can't always prepare, but we need to engage in this space and build some empathetic understanding and emotional intelligence to be able to see those situations and often maybe probe, in terms of asking questions to really unearth and understand where the context is for the client and how we can then build and help.

Jacqueline Blondell:
I'm wondering, this is slightly off the topic, but given the amount of fraud that's going on with the public at the moment, accountants would be quite well-placed to be able to recognise it if it's happening on a personal level?

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
Yeah, I think some of these things, they've been there before, but we react to them. We're not good at proactively addressing these things and being open actually and being transparent about the conversations and shifting some of the discussions. So in the university environment, we often show, for example, with the banking crisis that recently happened in 2018 and things like that, we show films like Inside Job and we critically discuss what that actually means and where the accountant's role sits within those processes, and what whistleblowing actually means for an organisation, and really try to think about empathising with those situations, putting ourselves in that space and trying to work through the decisions we'd have to take as an individual. So really, it goes back to our role, as a profession, we provide a sense of accountability and responsibility to society. So society seems to be, and all of its stakeholders that it makes, up including non-humans, it's our responsibility to those different stakeholders and making that the core of what accounting profession is and building that into our programmes of education.

Jacqueline Blondell:
It sounds like a stewardship situation or a return to stewardship.

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
Absolutely. Very much a return to stewardship. Our role is to look at the resource allocation in really accountable and transparent ways to be making better decisions around that resource allocation. And so it is taking that more stewardship role in our profession, I think.

Jacqueline Blondell:
We hope you're enjoying INTHEBLACK. If you are interested in the latest news, analysis, policy updates and business insights, you should check out CPA Australia's With Interest Podcast. Join us as we dive into the news and delve into the business issues of the day. We talk to thought leaders from across the accounting, finance, strategy, economic and business spectrum and you get their expert opinions. Now back to INTHEBLACK.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Well, let's get back to a little of the brass tacks. Say you're a early or midyear accounting professional, what are some advice about communications with everyday people that's also your fellow professionals that aren't super financially up to speed, what sort of tools do you use to convey complex information and what sort of tools do you avoid?

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
It's a really good question and it's difficult. I mean, I think there's the usual things that we could do. There's CPD requirements built around some of that training, things like media training, being able to present with influence, those kind of things, of course. And I think they are taken for granted, that they're given and we should be engaging in those. But I think there's a deeper thing we could be thinking about as early career and mid-career professionals. I think what is really interesting is we need to understand from different perspectives, we need to broaden our horizon, so to speak. So I always look at it from the point of view of growing the types of experiences I might have as an individual and how my role in accounting might infiltrate some of those spaces or might connect to some of those spaces where I'm learning more about individuals. A colleague of mine at the Stockholm School of Economics calls this social bubble hopping.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Oh, really?

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
And the idea behind social bubble hopping is trying to put yourself in situations you would not normally be part of, groups that you might not engage with. So I know this is a big thing when we're recording this in Melbourne, but for example, going to the AFL and engaging in those kind of spaces where you're not necessarily, that's not part of your weekly endeavours, but you put yourself in those situations to understand what that community and environment feels like, what it looks like, the types of conversations that are happening. I then get to learn more about another group and understand how they might communicate, how they might engage, and I get to learn more about the different kind of stakeholders I'll be engaging with. And so it's about trying to broaden our horizons, broaden our experiences, and how we could understand people better, how we could relate to people in more authentic ways.

Jacqueline Blondell:
I think I'm going to bed tonight to dream about social bubble hopping. I can't get the image out of my head.

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
Yeah, it's a great tool, I think.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Okay. Now we know the world's not black and white, but why do you think there's still a clear delineation between the arts and the maths and sciences, isn't that part of the problem we have with the communication gap?

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
That's true. And we definitely see a divide across those different disciplines. It's changing, it's quite slow to change, but it is changing. So we see things like STEAM, where we do include arts and humanities within that more science, technology, engineering, and maths. But in part, often we drive that divide because STEM results in jobs and acquisition, et cetera. Whereas we see arts and humanities and we don't value them enough, I think personally, in terms of how they're built into jobs, because they're very difficult to measure. And I think we think objectively that science and technology and engineering and maths, that these are things that are reliable, they're objective and they can be measured with a degree of accuracy. But when we start to understand science, the more we see in science, the more it is that we don't understand and we lose, I think where it's shifting is we have lost, with that segregation and that rationality, we've lost the more holistic perspective of knowledge and of disciplines.

And so we are seeing a shift even in science, back to that lack of disciplinary boundaries and the more merging into holistic because these are complex systems and we need to understand and see the world. And I think that's where the pandemic showed us, we need to see the world through a system's perspective to really truly start to engage with it because it is complex. And I think in the last three decades at least, we've tried to reduce that complexity to a much more simple way of understanding, and that makes sense because that's how humans connect, and it's how we can make meaning inside our own minds and those of others. But we do need to embrace this level of complexity and see the world through systems because that really is going to be our future. This level of uncertainty is going to continue from different standpoints, sustainability, climate change, for example, but equally technology and generative AI. And so unless we are able to see the world from that much more complex view, it's going to be difficult for us as a profession to continue our relevance. So in accounting, for example, we do continuously seem to be reinforcing the financial accounting, the management accounting, the auditing as disciplinary silos, but in practise, an accountant is an accountant, and we engage in accounting information and we partner with different business units to provide value. So we need to lose a little bit of that and try to integrate those across so that we give individuals a more holistic perspective of their engagement.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Okay. That brings us to stereotypes of accountants. What's your view, is this changing or not?

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
The traditional stereotype of the accountant with the pens and pockets and the glasses and the nerd behind the desk kind of thing, I think that is really difficult to shake. And the reason it's difficult to shake is it's the butt of most jokes from a social personal connection, but equally, it's reinforced in media, films, and other types of engagement, and so it is difficult and it continues to be the case. What we do really need is some type of exciting television show like Succession, that would be set in an accounting firm or have accounting at its heart. So until we have that kind of break in the stereotype, it's difficult. And in part, it's also helpful, and this is the dilemma we have, because when you do see the accountant as the nerd or the individual sitting behind the desk crunching numbers, we're talking about people's money. And so if I see that image, I'm going to trust that individual with my money. And so I think we need to work a little bit in the behavioural connection to money and how we can shift some of the traditional mindsets around that so that we can engage in more diverse ways.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Absolutely. It seems to be a double-edged sword of, on one sense, there's a mockery of accountants, on the other sense, they're one of the most trusted professionals. I mean, I don't know how you square that circle or circle that square.

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
Yeah. And again, this also comes back to the idea of purpose. And I think this is our way out of it, is that if we can position our profession with purpose for a changing world, in a world of uncertainty and a world where we start to really solve climate change and our role within that bigger picture of where the world and society is moving to, that's going to be how we change our stereotype, I think, is we try to think about how we brand the profession or how we engage in the profession with purpose. This is going to make us highly relevant into the future.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Let's talk about how at Monash you've worked with artists in residence and finance students to develop a broader outlook.

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
Yeah. This is a really interesting concept. So again, we've been starting to play a little bit where it directly speaks to the stereotype. So it was trying to rethink and play with the accounting stereotype in quite an unusual way. So we decided to create the world's first artist in residence programme in an accounting department at Monash Business School. What that means is we bring in an artist to work with our staff, with members of the profession, and also with our students, and they live with us for a period of time to create a piece of artwork. And the condition of that is that the artwork that is created involves those three different stakeholder groups. And so it's an attractive residency for an artist because there's very few business schools that do it.

So those artists working in economy and accounting and other areas of business, it gives them a chance to really learn from us as professionals inside the business school, but equally, an opportunity for them to play in diverse ways. it was about how do we work with arts to be able to translate what is often a feared discipline or subject, to individuals where there is anxiety, there is stress associated with financial numbers and non-financial numbers, and how do we make meaning out of those? So if you think about the financial report or the annual report, it's a curation of the business's performance, just like an exhibition at the NGV or any other art gallery, is a particular curation of topics or of art. And so if we come from a curational lens, which is also a communication lens, how do you curate the performance of the organisation in a way that is translatable and understandable?

Jacqueline Blondell:
That's a brilliant way of looking at an annual report. In another art project, this time in London, you've been engaged in making CFOs feel uncomfortable. Can you tell me about this?

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
Yeah, that's great. So part of what we're trying to think about is this idea of integrative thinking, where we start to see accounting and its position as a system inside the organisation. So we think about accountability, sustainability, and digital and how those things integrate together. And we know that that's an uncomfortable space, often we're looking at those in isolation. We'll need to start looking at them in integration, and it's uncomfortable. So the big thing for developing the integrative thought is the idea that we're trying to position people to be comfortable with the uncomfortable. And that lends to that world of uncertainty into the future, how do you deal with pandemics, how do you engage with natural crisis, et cetera. And so part of that is you have to feel uncomfortable to be able to know what that's like and engage with. So we worked with an arts group in the UK, in Coventry, and the project was called, Send Them to Coventry. And we worked with three professional bodies based in the UK on this project. And we literally sent CFOs to Coventry, right opposite the bombed out cathedral, right in the centre of Coventry. And we placed them there for an evening over dinner conversation, but it was a very different unusual dinner, led by artists. And so an art group in the UK, a local art group in the UK, Talking Birds, we engaged them to facilitate this discussion and this engagement, and we worked with a mycelium based artists, so fungi based artist.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Fungi, like mushrooms?

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
So mushrooms, yeah, we're talking mushrooms. So this artist works with mushrooms, and she works with the kinetic energy in the human body and how when that connects to the mushrooms, the mushrooms make a sound, they make music. And so the individuals, the CFOs, were taken into the space and they then were moved through, after grabbing a glass of wine, they were moved through into this mycelium room where there was a whole bunch of mushrooms set up, where they could engage and they could make music. And the idea is that the mycelium is a communication device for trees, so trees will talk to each other through the mycelium that's underneath them, and they can survive with that kind of forms of communication. So mycelium will help, if the tree doesn't have the resources it needs, mycelium will help to tell the trees to stop taking so much of the water so that another tree can survive. And so the idea was that this kind of system creates this form of communication based on the human interaction.

And so it was really shifting the viewpoint of the accountants operating and practice, to really think about accounting as a system firstly, but then also accounting as a form of communication within a much broader holistic space, and how do you integrate the non-financial and the financial information together to be able to communicate accordingly. And so it was a fantastic project where we were able to engage in this really diverse way. And I think the biggest thing for me is when one of the CFOs came up and said how touched she was emotionally, so it really connected to her as an emotion, and she saw that she has this responsibility to communicate, and she hadn't thought about that way of communicating before. And so that was a really powerful, I think, outcome of the project. This is an ongoing project that we have with Coventry University called Creative Accounting, and it really comes back to that notion of creative accounting is often associated with fraud. We want to take ownership of that terminology again and really use it for purpose and for good. And so it's about changing the way we view creative accounting, knowing that these human capabilities and building them into our ways of thinking as accountants are going to be the critical part of our future as we get continuously digitalized, et cetera. The engagement with humans, being able to translate that information and communicate effectively, that's going to be our future.

Jacqueline Blondell:
It's going to be the key thing.

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
It's going to be the key thing.

Jacqueline Blondell:
I mean, particularly with technology taking over a lot of the day-to-day.

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
Absolutely. And that's already happening, and we're seeing it increase now with generative AI, we see it being built into the operations of what we do. So absolutely, the ability to look at information critically, being able to decide how best to communicate that, and that means understanding the context of the individual and listening is going to be at the heart of what we do.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Fascinating. Have you got more projects like this coming up, or is that ongoing with ...

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
So the Creative Accounting Project is ongoing. Our next project, we're looking at future accounting roles and we're working with an artist who visions, she tries to vision different future jobs that haven't been created yet, and we are basing that in Berlin. So that's our next project that's coming up.

Jacqueline Blondell:
That sounds fascinating. I can't wait to hear more about that one in the future. I think that's all we've got time for today. Thanks very much to our guest expert, Nick McGuigan.

Nick McGuigan FCPA:
Thank you so much for having me on the show.

Garreth Hanley:
If you've enjoyed this episode, help others discover INTHEBLACK by leaving us a review and sharing this episode with colleagues, clients, or anyone else interested in leadership, strategy and business. To find out more about our other podcasts, check out the show notes for this episode, and we hope you can join us again next time for another episode of INTHEBLACK.