Personality a key consideration for productivity, says mid-tier

Edward Chan, co-founder and non-executive chairman of Chan & Naylor, said most accounting practices don’t “manage their resources very effectively” in terms of assigning employees to particular roles within the company.

Mr Chan said there are three types of roles you need to fill in an accountancy practice in order to effectively run your business; the grinding role: someone who can take direction; the minding role: a manager who has good interpersonal skills; the finding role: someone who is outgoing and can bring work into the practice.

“What’s very important is to get people on the right seat in the right bus. What I mean by that is if someone is a ‘grinder’, you can’t put them into a management role, and if someone’s a manager you can’t put them into a ‘grinding’ role,” Mr Chan said.

“Typically when someone says to me ‘I can’t find staff’, or they say ‘I can’t hang on to staff’, it’s because they’ve put them in the wrong seat.

“That’s typically 99 percent of it.”

Mr Chan said that employees who were stuck in the wrong role would be significantly less productive and would ultimately leave the practice.

Sometimes employees wouldn’t know which role they were suited to and needed help from leaders to identify this.

“Sometimes I don’t know that myself and it requires the person who’s doing the hiring, because that’s where the leadership should come from, to help me identify what my personality type is and what I’m happy to do. If they identify I’m a ‘finder’ not a ‘grinder’, therefore they’ll not put me in a ‘grinding’ role,” Mr Chan said.

“[Managers] don’t understand how to manage their resources very effectively, and when they do, not only is it a lot more efficient, but everyone’s happier, then you also work a lot less and make a lot more money. That’s the end result of running the practice with the right people in the right seat.”