As a successful accountant, you most likely are a successful leader. When you take on additional responsibilities and advance your career path, you assume greater leadership roles that impact the success of both your team members and the company. Increasing your contributions to the accounting industry makes you even more valuable as a leader.

5 Leadership Qualities of Successful Accountants

1. Quality of Financial Reporting

As a successful accountant, you lead by ensuring the highest quality in financial reporting. You are entrusted with safeguarding the integrity of financial information that a company produces, ensuring that the numbers and figures are accurate and truthful. You triple check your work and ask others to check as well to ensure accuracy.

 2. Solving Problems

As a successful accountant, you lead by using your skills and intimate knowledge of a company, its financials, and the environment it operates in to ask challenging business questions. You gather information to take a pragmatic, objective approach to resolve issues. You think outside the box to overcome a company’s most pressing issues while adhering to accepted accounting norms and regulations.

3. Strategic Planning

As a successful accountant, you lead by assisting with corporate strategy. You provide advice to reduce costs, improve revenue, and mitigate risks. For instance, you may represent the interest of the shareholders by approving annual budgets, accounting for the company’s performance, or determining management’s compensation. You also may analyze, create, and communicate financial information to drive the direction the company moves in. You could provide assurance to management that the company’s risk management, governance, and internal control processes are effectively operating. Plus, you could share your knowledge and skills and the ethical standards of the profession with newer accountants.

 4. Protecting Public Interest

As a successful accountant, you lead by protecting public interest. You maintain high standards and play a key role in helping the company to act ethically. Because you need to be trusted to provide public value, you must provide confidence in the financial data you produce in order to maintain that trust. For instance, you often need to balance competing demands between upholding values of the profession and demands of the real world.  You need to use professional judgment in fulfilling your role to take action that protects the public’s interest. You also need to exhibit integrity, objectivity, confidentiality, competence, and professional behavior at all times while complying with ethics, commercial pressures, and regulations.

 5. Evolving Responsibilities

As a successful accountant, you lead by evolving your responsibilities. As you face new challenges, you take on additional tasks to add increased value to their employer and the public. You play a key role in creating and sustaining value and growth by staying current on news, changes, and trends in the accounting industry. You take ongoing training and professional development very seriously because continuous education and growth are essential to remaining relevant in the accounting industry.

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