
Is Your Accounting Firm Developing Leaders or Just Promoting Good Employees?
From One Step Better Podcast by Whirks
June 4, 2026 · 25 min
About this episode
The episode discusses the common mistake of promoting top accountants to leadership roles without proper training and the implications of this practice.
At some point, every growing accounting firm takes their best person, puts them in a leadership role, and hopes for the best. And for a while it kind of works. Until it doesn't... Mike and Matt are in the middle of this right now. 60 people, multiple team leads, a director of accounting, and an honest conversation about the fact that being great at the work and being great at leading people are two completely different skill sets. And they haven't always treated them that way. In this episode: Why promoting your best accountant into a leadership role is the most common mistake growing firms make What actually happens when you hand someone a team and say "figure it out" The accountability gap that shows up when leaders don't know what they're actually allowed to hold people to How to think about training when you already can't fit everything into the calendar you have Why developing leaders inside your accounting firm is the highest ROI thing you're probably not doing intentionally 💬 Got a topic you want us to tackle? Drop a comment, send us a message, or share this episode with a firm owner who needs to hear it. 🎙 Want to be a guest? We're opening the show up to firm…
People in this episode
Hosts: Mike, Matt
Topics covered
- leadership development
- accounting firms
- employee promotion
- skill sets
- training
- accountability
Keywords
- accounting
- leadership
- employee promotion
- training
- skill sets
- accountability
- business growth
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Cloud Accountant Staffing, patrickaccounting.com
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