Making Your Career About More Than Just You

There are countless books published each year under the heading of personal development, self-help, or psychology offering quick bullet points for achieving succeed. While the titles and tables of contents vary, many of these books talk about the same thing....you You YOU! But success in your career and life does not occur in a vacuum. It's important to recognize your obligation to invest in others as you advance in your profession.

Only after you've secured the corner office do you have an obligation to give back to the little people right? Wrong. U.S. Senator Sam J. Ervin, Jr. once said that "a person who is worthy of being a leader wants power not for himself, but in order to be of service." Even if you are early in your career and have a long list of professional benchmarks and goals ahead of you, a prescient indicator of your leadership potential is your willingness to invest in others. This is because someone who is always looking to share what they have learned with others is investing in something bigger than themselves, which is exactly what leadership is.

The accounting profession would not be held in such high esteem by clients and the capital markets if experienced accountants ignored their obligation to mentor less experienced professionals. You may only have one or two years of professional experience on your resume, but think of how much you learned during that short time that an intern or college student could benefit from knowing. While working in public accounting, I had the opportunity to participate in a national intern training program as an instructor. I only had 3 years of audit experience at the time and wondered how I could have anything of value to share with the interns who were used to hearing from college professors with PhDs and decades of expertise. My co-instructor and I incorporated into the curriculum many personal client examples and real-life experiences from our own careers. At the conclusion of the training, our students asked us how we knew so much, and if we had been formally trained as teachers. They were awestruck to learn that we had only minimal training as instructors, and had merely been sharing all that we had learned on the job in a few short years. They exclaimed that our class had been more informative than any college accounting course they had yet taken.

Having gone through any professional experience, whether it be passing Intermediate Accounting, getting recruited by an employer, sitting for the CPA exam, or surviving your first day working with a client, there is always someone new behind you who has not yet lived through these things and could benefit from a kind word of encouragement or piece of advice. The only way you yourself can succeed is because of the teachers, senior students and professionals, and mentors in your life who shared with you their knowledge and experiences. You have an obligation to make that same contribution to the accounting profession, so that the profession will continue to develop strong business and community leaders.

A leader always makes time for others.