Staffing issues continue to be the leading challenge for CPA firms of all sizes. While you and the other owners and leaders struggle to cope, there are steps you can take to improve the CPA firm staff experience—and your own.

Mentoring is a way to make both staff and partners feel more fulfilled, engaged, and—most important for the bottom line—productive. Suggestions from an industry expert about how to mentor and how to structure a mentoring program can help you and your fellow owners get one started this summer or expand the program you already have.

What’s the attraction? Getting and keeping staff is about more than just how much you pay them. Today, firms are selling a firm environment, including learning and growth opportunities. Rita Keller, chief operating officer and shareholder at Brady Ware (Dayton, Ohio), explained how to make it happen when she spoke at the AICPA Practitioners Symposium in Phoenix.

A people-centric focus is best for your recruiting and retention efforts, Keller said. Mentoring can show that you have that focus and can help your firm make the most of your staff.

"Mentoring and relationships bind people to your firm," Keller said, pointing out that "people leave their direct supervisor—not the firm." Mentoring doesn’t have to be a complicated process, and owners should take steps to make sure it doesn’t seem hard to participants. "Don’t make it difficult. It’s a natural, basic instinct, and anyone can do it. It’s about giving of yourself. But it doesn’t mean anything if your heart’s not in it," Keller said.

While traditional mentoring involves an "old" person and a "young" one, mentoring today can be young people mentoring older people in areas of their expertise, such as technology, Keller noted. Even juniors can and do mentor new hires who are fresh from college. And mentoring need not be one-on-one—group mentoring is an approach that Brady Ware uses with great success, she said.

Mentoring is about career development for individuals, but it is also about enabling them to contribute more to the firm and doing so earlier in their careers. It is also a way to instill your firm’s procedures and processes, to hasten new hires’ education in "how we do it here."

Mentoring defined. "A mentor is someone who helps someone else learn something that he or she would have learned less well, more slowly, or not at all if left alone," Keller said. In a CPA firm context, it is about developing individuals and directing that development in sync with the firm’s goals.

Mentoring can involve a lot of different activities. For instance, Keller encourages partners to take along a young staff person on a luncheon visit with an important client. "The client will be flattered," she said, and the junior staff person will learn about relationship building.

Why mentoring is especially important now. Although accounting is now gaining in popularity on campus as a major, there is still a dearth of experienced staff talent. A mentoring program is an attraction now and will be as those students complete their education and enter the profession.

For firms such as Brady Ware, the goal is to "grow our own" staff and future partners, so mentoring is especially crucial for the firm’s future plans. It also helps the firm avoid what Keller calls the two words of great concern: "desperate" and "mediocre." She explained that a desperate firm that can’t find good staff will make poor hiring decisions that lead to its becoming a mediocre firm.

Mentoring also dovetails nicely with the learning and training that younger staff crave. "You need a learning culture," Keller said. "Young people want to learn and they want training. They want to build their resumes—but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they will leave."

In fact, learning should be a continual process not just for new entrants to the profession, but for everyone at the firm. And being a mentor is as much a way to learn as being a mentee, Keller emphasized. Both involve acquiring new skills. "Ask yourself and your people every year: ‘What new skills can I acquire?’"

The new generation of entrants to the profession are a group that particularly prizes mentoring. "Millennials look up to their elders," she said. Your firm can use this to its advantage by building relationships. A mentoring program can also ease the transition for new hires from college into the workforce. It helps create an early focus on career development, teaches the firm’s values and standards, and helps to build more commitment and accountability.

All of these, in turn, contribute to retention of talent. And that talent develops discipline to achieve goals and continually improve their careers, resulting in even greater value to the firm.

It is important to get mentees to define success as they themselves want it, both personally and professionally. Setting and then exceeding expectations should be the goal. "You need to know what the expectations are," Keller said. Professional growth also requires feedback, which mentees have a right to expect.

Keller urges partners to give feedback quickly, especially to the millennials. "They grew up playing video games and getting an instant score," she pointed out. They "want to know where they stand" and will not be patient with mentors who don’t help them find out.

Brady Ware tries to maximize the opportunity for new hires to learn the firm—and learn what their place in it will be—by encouraging new accountants to spend a few years working as generalists. This approach goes against traditional CPA firm hierarchies that tend to push young staff to decide quickly if they want to be an auditor or tax accountant. But it gives staff the opportunity to learn more about the firm—rather than just a small slice of it—and helps them make more informed decisions about their future role in it.

Identifying needs. Keller advocates applying the "Art of Sucking Down," a phrase coined by venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki in his blog, "How to Change the World" (http://blog.guykawasaki.com /). With this approach—the opposite of "sucking up"—partners and those in power try to impress staff, instead of the other way around. Understanding the dynamic and the needs of the younger generation, making yourself important to them, treating them as though they are important to you, and making them smile are the components of "sucking down."

The easiest way to learn what matters to your staff is to ask them. Surveying helps; so does spending time in get-togethers like "lunch and learns." Make it easy for information to flow between partners and staff and you will learn a lot.

Mentoring guidelines. As with any other skills, mentoring requires training and preparation. Listening is perhaps the most important skill for mentors, and it won’t do any harm to your dealings with clients and fellow partners either. Other guidelines suggested by Keller include:

• Establish a positive atmosphere that invites participation.

• Clarify and confirm the agenda for the mentoring relationship.

• Create an ongoing communication flow, which involves listening and using questions to elicit information.

• Summarize, clarify, and plan.

Establishing the mentoring relationship is just the beginning, Keller said. Follow-up is crucial: She suggested that a mentor should "listen to the grapevine" about his or her mentee. "Ask around about the mentee: How’s she doing? You can get good off-the-cuff information that can help" the mentee.

Mentoring don’ts. Avoid these behaviors if you want your mentoring to succeed:

• Giving them all the answers. They have to learn for themselves, just as you did.

• Criticizing. "There’s no such thing as ‘constructive criticism,’" Keller noted.

• Intimidation. Fear is not a good motivator.

• Favoritism. Putting your mentee above all others is not helpful in the long run.

• Rescuing. Again, you are there to help the mentee to learn to do it for himself or herself, not to bail out your mentee.

• Impatience.

Mentees are expected to hold up their end of the relationship. They are also expected to:

• Commit to learning.

• Have genuine interest.

• Use active listening skills.

• Be receptive to feedback.

• Be willing to take risks.

• Desire career growth.

• Desire to develop a personal vision

Personal gain. Mentors who are partners and other firm leaders can benefit from mentoring in a lot of ways, Keller explained. While building the next generation of leadership is becoming a matter of survival to the firm, you will find mentoring a way to pass along your successes, practice interpersonal and leadership skills, become recognized, and just feel good about helping others.

Your mentees will benefit from your listening ear, valuable direction, filling in gaps in their professional education, and giving them a different perspective to consider. The last is especially important as firms shift their emphasis to developing a new generation of leaders, Keller noted. "Young people don’t hear the management side of the firm." They don’t know how billing hours are computed, how marketing ROI works, or any of the many other details of operating a CPA firm.

Finally, mentoring can be a relationship not only between partner and staff, but also between partners or even between firms. A mentor can be someone inside the firm or someone outside of it. All that matters is that a mentor offer a learning opportunity—and the support for the mentee to grow.

For more information. Keller (rkeller@bradyware.com) maintains a blog at http://cpamanagement.blogspot.com , where she discusses MAP issues including staffing and retention.

Use this checklist to make sure you and your fellow owners are ready to start a mentoring program:

• Have you identified the strategic objectives for mentoring to address? These may include leadership, succession planning, career development, workplace diversity, retaining top performers, training, best practices, or others.

• Do you have the active support of the managing partner for the program?

• Have you set realistic expectations?

• Have you developed an action plan to move from objectives to implementation and results?

• Do you have a realistic implementation schedule?

• Have you identified appropriate benchmarks and a way to measure the success of your mentoring plan?

• Have you discussed a budget with the managing partner to support the program?

• Do you have full support from partners and managers for implementing a mentoring program?

• Have you clearly identified the needs of both mentors and mentees, including the knowledge and skills that will be required?

• Have you developed a training plan that addresses the needs of mentors and mentees, and the logistical challenges of your firm? These include geography, technology, time, and budget.

• Do you have a way to provide mentors and mentees with the information they need to achieve their goals for the mentoring relationship?

• Do you have the support of line managers and supervisors in actively supporting and coaching in a mentoring environment?

• Have you thought about how you will communicate the purpose and plan for your mentoring initiative to the organization and participants before you roll it out?

(Source: Rita Keller, Brady Ware)