Action, Approval, Information - Which is it?

"Bill, I'm not sure what you're asking the committee to do with the material you sent out for the meeting." The man on the phone was the committee Chair and he wanted to be sure he understood what was being asked of him before going into the meeting.

That was my mistake. As the resource person supporting the work of the committee, my job is to organize the material so that its purpose is crystal clear. For example, there are only three things you can ask of a Board or Committee:

• Action - You're asking them to do something
  
• Approval - You need their approval in order to move something forward
  
• Information - You are reporting back to them

If the Chair is clear on what is being asked of the Committee, (s)he can set the right tone for the discussion. If the supporting written material is already organized so that it flows towards a clear objective, less time will be wasted. With clarity of purpose and well organized supporting material, the work of the Committee can be done quickly and effectively.

It's when there is no clear purpose that Committees often flounder and meetings become protracted. Members end up trying to second guess the intent of the material before them or worse, re-write it completely. When that happens, when you look around the room and see a lot of tired faces, the best thing is to refer the work back to where it came from with instructions to re-draft it.

By this I do not mean to imply that Committees should be manipulated into one specific direction. If the intent of the work before them is clear, it is also easier to reject it or send it back for more work. My personal experience with Committees is that they respect a well reasoned argument and will put a lot of energy into reviewing it if the information is brief and well presented. They will usually come up with comments that I had not considered, so that the end result is better than it would have been had I been working alone.

Which brings me to the topic of brevity. Churchill famously insisted that all briefs be reduced to a single page, but your Board / Committee probably wants a little more background than that. Readable writing is more important than just the length, although if a brief is perceived as being too long you run the risk of your Committee not reading it at all. If writing is not one of your strengths, by all means delegate! There are lots of freelance editors who will help you structure your thoughts. Here are some tips:

• Use bullet points - they break up the monotony of the text and make it easy to find the important parts of your argument,
• Use sub-headings - they organize your work -- try reading just the sub-headings, they should give you a feel for the whole document
• Keep your sentences short - avoid compound, complex sentences
• Avoid the passive voice - keep your prose active

What has your Board experience been like, whether from the staff viewpoint or the Board member's? Please join the discussion and leave a comment.

Accountants Can Be People People

In the March 14th edition of the Toronto Globe and Mail, Wallace Immen wrote the following under the title “Gaffes: Boneheaded ways to blow a job interview”:

Other interview-snuffing gaffes included: . . . An accountant who insisted she was a "people person" and not a "numbers person."

To that unfortunate fellow accountant held up to public ridicule, I can only say: take heart, you are not alone. Yes, I understand the problem. The interview was for a technical position and the candidate was apparently denying that she could do the job. But looked at from a broader perspective, the accounting profession needs more people people, i.e. accountants who focus on getting the message across to other people. I agree that getting the numbers right is our first priority, but what good are accurate financial statements if their message is not understood by the organization’s stakeholders?

People people make good educators and communicators and we need more of them. We need people who can report bad news in such a way that it is believed and acted upon. We need people who can decipher complicated or fraudulent transactions so that a jury can understand them. We need financial planners to help people cope with the regulations surrounding retirement savings. In my field of accounting systems, we need good trainers, planners, implementers and project managers, all of which require excellent communications skills.

Finally, we need people who can put a human face on our profession so that the public can understand and trust us. The stereotype of the green eye shade wearing accountant working in isolation, creating statements that nobody understands, has just got to go.

Getting the Message Across

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They say that confession is good for the soul. I have a confession to make: I never understood the value of graphics in financial reporting. I never created graphs in Excel. I even thought that it was all just window dressing for the published financial statements or sales presentations.

I missed the point.

Accounting is all about communications and, as an accountant, it is my responsibility to be sure that the message is understood. It isn't enough to expect that the users will look at my tables of numbers and draw the same conclusions that I have.

I attended a communications session by Eagle's Flight a few years ago. The trainer made the point that people tend to put their message out there and take the attitude "Well, I've done my part." If you want effective communications, you have to take responsibility for both the sending and the receiving of the message. You have to take into account how your stakeholders take in messages. Some people are just confused by spreadsheets. Take sales statistics for example. Rather than just presenting a list of customer sales sorted by city and decreasing amount, you can now plot your customers on a map of Canada with larger circles for higher sales and create a powerful visual that has an immediate impact.

Sometimes, it's just a question of presentation. I watched a demonstration of an Excel add-in for Microsoft Dynamics GP (Great Plains) where the sales person showed how the sales table with last year comparison figures could be automatically uploaded from GP and summarized for viewing and querying. Then he turned it around and asked, "Which customers didn't buy from me this year?" He then showed a graph of all the customers where sales this year were less than last year. There were audible gasps in the audience because the impact of the graph was clear: send a salesperson out to each of these customers. I could be cynical here and say that the table and the graph said exactly the same thing, because they did. The difference was that the table was just statistics produced by accounting and the graph was a call to action.

So, if you are an accountant and you feel your message to management is not getting across, I highly recommend you try a graphical approach. You'll be glad you did.