To people outside the profession, it may seem like accountants are just “numbers people.” It is true that most accountants are adept financial managers, yet their skills do not stop there. The successful management accountant possesses several skills and characteristics that reach well beyond basic analytical abilities.
MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTANTS MUST WORK WELL IN CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAMS AND AS A BUSINESS PARTNER. In addition to being technically competent, the best management accountants work well in teams, learn about business issues, understand the motivations of different individuals, respect the views of their colleagues, and show empathy and trust.
MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTANTS MUST PROMOTE FACT-BASED ANALYSIS AND MAKE TOUGH-MINDED, CRITICAL JUDGMENTS WITHOUT BEING ADVERSARIAL. Management accountants must raise tough questions for managers to consider, especially when preparing budgets. They must do so thoughtfully and with the intent of improving plans and decisions. Before the investment bank JP Morgan lost more than $6 billion on “exotic” financial investments (credit-default swaps), controllers should have raised questions about these risky investments and the fact that the firm was betting on improving economic conditions abroad to earn a large profit.
THEY MUST LEAD AND MOTIVATE PEOPLE TO CHANGE AND BE INNOVATIVE. Implementing new ideas, however good they may be, is difficult. When the United States Department of Defense (DoD) began consolidating more than 320 finance and accounting systems into a common platform, the accounting services director and his team of management accountants held meetings to make sure everyone in the agency understood the goal for such a change. Ultimately, the DoD aligned each individual’s performance with the transformative change and introduced incentive pay to encourage personnel to adopt the platform and drive innovation within this new framework.
THEY MUST COMMUNICATE CLEARLY, OPENLY, AND CANDIDLY. Communicating information is a large part of a management accountant’s job. When premium car companies such as Rolls Royce and Porsche design new models, management accountants work closely with engineers to ensure that each new car supports a carefully defined balance of commercial, engineering, and financial criteria. To be successful, management accountants must clearly communicate information that multidisciplinary teams need to deliver new innovations profitably.
THEY MUST HAVE HIGH INTEGRITY. Management accountants must never succumb to pressure from managers to manipulate financial information. Their primary commitment is to the organization and its shareholders. In 2015, Toshiba, the Japanese maker of semiconductors, consumer electronics, and nuclear power plants wrote down $1.9 billion of earnings that had been overstated over the previous 7 years. The problems stemmed from managers setting aggressive profit targets that subordinates could not meet without inflating divisional results by understating costs, postponing losses, and overstating revenues.