RSS feedsThe biggest problems we encounter in running a busy practice are not related to technical issues, or even to difficulties with clients, but to the efforts made by our own staff - the people who should be on our side - to sabotage the business.
Of course even I, as a cynical managing partner of many years' standing, do not believe that they do it on purpose. The problem is that our partners are spending so much time managing the business that there is very little time left to manage the staff.
The result is that they are left to their own devices for far too much of the time and, no matter how competent they may be, even the most senior staff need supervision and direction. A quick look around our offices is enough to identify several situations which are causing us problems because they have been left to fester for too long.
We have a manager in the audit department who has been with the firm for over ten years and is well known and well liked by many of our most important clients. He likes to deal with things himself and as the age gap between him and the rest of the department has grown he has found it increasingly difficult to delegate. He is also extremely disorganised with a comprehensive floor filing system.
Recently, quite by chance and partly as a result of client queries, a number of serious mistakes have come to light: unfiled statutory returns were found gathering dust on his carpet; incorrect VAT returns; no trace of correspondence, working papers or email communications on the file. Any one of them could put us at risk.
We also have a senior manager who has his own portfolio of work. Some years ago when we acquired the practice he worked for, we were not interested in some of the very small ticket work and he asked if he could take over his personal clients. We agreed, but he now seems to be spending an increasing amount of our time on them. If we challenge him he threatens to leave and as we can't afford to lose him, we don't face up to the problem. Indeed, we have raised his salary in order to keep him.
Disciplinary tactics
How do you deal with someone who refuses to toe the line? At the beginning of last year we purchased the business of a sole practitioner with a small office in a nearby town to boost our presence there. Due to ill health he was keen to retire early and as his senior manager has been virtually running the office for some time, we decided to leave her in charge of the day-to-day management as well as making her responsible for implementing our systems and procedures. Unfortunately, she had other ideas.
It has become obvious that she intends to carry on exactly as she always has done. Her view is that the systems and procedures she has put in place work and, although they create cost and efficiency problems, she has no intention of changing them.
Recently, she has progressed from prevarication and procrastination to outright refusal. Thanks to the conditions of sale we cannot simply get rid of her; and even if we could, her close relationship with the client base means we could lose them as well.
As partners, we have found ourselves in the unenviable position of being dictated to by an employee. One of my partners has suggested bribery in the form of a huge salary hike in return for her co-operation, but I can just imagine the effect on the managers in our other offices. Fundamentally we must face up to all this. We have ignored the warning signs on all these issues for far too long.
The problems that are most difficult to resolve never seem to go away, do they?
