There has never been a more challenging chapter in the history of the accounting and financial services industries. Learning how to navigate personally and professionally, drive and lead change is now essential to survival and sustainability.

Embracing change is not easy for profession services firms, especially when you specialise on behalf of others by mitigating risks for your clients as a cornerstone of your expertise.

That said, accounting and advice professionals are extremely disciplined and diligent and as such, well guided, can and do cope with and successfully navigate change.

The most common change management issues accountants and advisers face are;

1) Fear of the unknown

2) Breaking free from comfort zones

3) Team resistance, engagement, and buy-in

Without a structured and rigorous support mechanism such as genuine third-party expertise, change management results are often short-lived with many reporting a sense of underwhelming results in terms of performance improvement.

Change is about habit breaking and the constant micro steps of continuous improvement in bite-size digestible chunks that the team can embrace, adopt, and sustain. Learning how to break these initiatives into short-term projects and team challenges that inspire and reward rather than punish and protect old ways of doing things.