Episodes

Episode #10: The goal of empowerment is to develop, grow, and then trust your team members to complete tasks and eventually make decisions on your behalf. This requires you to take risk and have the long-term view of what your team can accomplish. Episode outline: 1) What drives you as a leader? 2) How empowerment can encourage your team to excellence, 3) The two types of micro managers. The original show notes are no longer available. Please connect with me on: 1. Instagram: stephen.mclain ...

Episode # 9: Invest in your personal development. Don't wait on others to invest in you. Commit your plan on paper, set goals, and develop a timeline for completion. Track your progress and re-assess your development needs. Episode outline: 1) The need to personally invest in your development, 2) Leaders need to set the example by emphasizing personal growth and development, 3) Developing your leadership can set you apart from your peers, 4) Leaders are readers. Please enjoy the episode! ...

Episode # 8: Values make up our personal character. This week's episode is about the seven key leader values that we should strive to improve daily. These values show how we lead, and how we deal with tough decisions. Are we fair? Can we be humble? Are we an expert in our field? We are discussing humility, professionalism, technical competence, respect, duty, integrity, and courage. How you approach your duties affects your team members. We must be working to have a personal character...

Episode #7: There are tools that can help you lead and manage the team better. This week, we talk about time management, prioritizing, back briefing, backwards planning, and delegating. One of the most important topics I discuss is about prioritizing the many tasks you have. Tasks and requirements come at you and your team constantly. Spend the required time to capture and properly sequence the tasks across the team, then communicate that priority to everyone. The original show notes are no lo...

Episode #6: Complacency helps you lose on opportunities for growth, innovation and seeing necessary change to keep up in your organization and industry. When you get comfortable, you miss out on opportunities. When you don't change, you fall behind. Challenge the status quo daily so you can improve, innovate and grow daily. In this episode, 1) I walk you through a mini-scenario about the complacent habits of Michael, a new manager, 2) The dangers of complacency, 3) How complacency gets rooted ...

You can have a great Impact as a Leader in your organization. In this episode, I talk about why I love to lead, and the positive impacts we get to make in our organization. While we perform our Finance and Accounting duties, we can get overwhelmed while delivering financial projections, completing our journal entries, and conducting monthly close procedures, but we also have a great responsibility to create an environment where our team can grow and thrive. As leaders, here are a few significan...

Episode #4: Your mindset determines your outcome. How you view yourself and how you view the world will affect your career potential. Episode outline: 1) Leadership is the embodiment of making the impossible possible, 2) Mindset determines everything, 3) What is holding you back? 4) You can only control yourself, and how you view your abilities, 5) Remove negative influences from your life, 6) Our team will adopt our mindset, so we need to be self-aware of our own. The original show notes are...

Episode #3: Effective leadership is built on trust. Teams and relationships are built on trust. Once trust is lost, it will be difficult to recover. It takes time, and you may never get it back. In this episode, we discuss the following: What happens to a team when no one trusts the leader, and they can't trust each other? We must personally set the best example of character and work ethic, We must clearly communicate relevant information quickly, We must deliver results within the deadlines...

Episode #2: Leadership can be your defining characteristic to help advance your career. In this episode, I talk about the four key areas of responsibility that Finance Leaders must be doing every day: 1) influencing, 2) growing your people, 3) achieving results, and 4) seeing the future. Influencing is about achieving buy-in about a big idea you have or creating positive change in your organization We continually grow our people to mentor our team members to achieve their goals, become better ...

Episode #1: This podcast is for Finance and Accounting professionals to develop and enhance leadership skills. You are working in a complex and critical organizational function with very tight deadlines and most likely a hectic monthly close process. You are forced to use old accounting and finance systems that do not work to serve the current needs of the business. We are going to build a great community so we can all grow! In this premiere episode, we will lay the groundwork for how you can m...