Episode 90: You Can Be The Same Person At Work And At Home With James DeLeo
You can be the same person at work and at home and still be successful! People are searching for a workplace where they can be who they are. They want to be judged for their results, not for their identity. Amy Vetter’s guest in this episode is James DeLeo, Gray, Gray & Gray’s Leading Partner. James shares with Amy his journey of becoming one of the first to graduate college in his family. His transparent leadership allowed him to shape a world-class culture that attracts new hires who are passionate about their job. Tune in and let James inspire you to be authentic!
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You Can Be The Same Person At Work And At Home With James DeLeo
Welcome to this episode where I interviewed Jim DeLeo, Gray, Gray & Gray's Leading Partner. He also co-chairs the firm's Merger and Acquisition Practice Group. He has years of hands-on experience and diverse educational background that allows him to serve as a key contributor to clients' day to day accounting, tax and operational needs.
His unique combination of professional experience in business, accounting and tax training allows him to support management in all aspects of running their business. In addition, he works closely with many of the region's most prominent private equity firms, search funds, mezzanine lenders, and has demonstrated the ability to make introductions for clients in need of access to capital. During my interview with Jim, we talked about his journey being one of the first in his family to graduate college, learning how to be authentic as a leader to shape culture and encourage people to do the same.
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I'm here with Jim DeLeo from Gray, Gray & Gray. He's the Leading Partner there. I will hand it off to you, Jim, to give a little background on yourself before we get started.
Thank you, Amy, and thank you for having me. My name is Jim DeLeo. I am the Leading Partner at Gray, Gray & Gray. I've been the Leading Partner for years. I've been with the firm and public accounting for many years. I like to tell people I came with the furniture at the firm and I'm still here. I'm looking forward to this show and speaking with you.
Where I love to start on this show is going back to your beginnings, where you grew up, brothers and sisters, what your parents did. A little background on your beginnings and the start of your story.
I grew up in Watertown, Massachusetts. I have two sisters much older than me. My father was a postman. My mother stayed at home. A very much working-class family is where I grew up. Hard work, work ethic is very much instilled in me throughout my life. I went to school at Watertown High School, so I was public school educated. I went to Bentley University and I got a degree in Accounting there. Subsequent to that, I went to Suffolk University to get a Master's in Taxation and then I got my MBA at Babson College. All of which is the best things I ever did, quite frankly.
Your father was a postman. What was his family background? How did he end up in that career?
My father was a machinist by trade and then ended up working at the post office at the end of his career. He was a letter carrier. That's what he called himself. My dad was a very calm, even-keeled, quiet guy. I like to tell people, "You could never tell if my dad had the best day of his life or the worst day of his life because he was always the same." He's consistent, for sure. My mother, on the other hand, was the opposite. My mother was your stereotypical Italian mother. She had no problem telling you what was on her mind.
How did they meet?
My parents met at a dance that my father did not even want to go to. He went with his brother, my uncle, where both my father and my uncle met their soon-to-be wives. It's a nice story. It's a story you don't hear very often, but that was the story that was told to me.
Having a father that's a postman and a machinist, as far as when you were growing up, what did you think you wanted to be in life?
My mother told me early on in high school that that was about as far as she was going to be able to help me, and the rest was up to me from that point on. My parents did not go to college. Anything beyond high school, my parents would have loved to help both financially and in terms of insight, but they weren't able to. It wasn't their experience. As a result, it was very supportive. That was the environment that I grew up in, but also very much independent.
Was it your dream to go to college beyond high school? Was that something you saw? Was your mom or your dad saying to you, "You should go this route?"
I'm quite certain both of my parents would have been happy no matter what I did. I grew up in a working-class family, neighborhood and town. For me, it was always about, "Is there something else?" Not necessarily something better but, is something else out there? I can't say that I wanted to be an accountant my whole life because that would not be true, but I did want to be involved in business. I have always found business to be something that has piqued my interest. I find it fascinating. The interpersonal relationships in business were not something that I originally thought of when I thought about business. I thought about Wall Street, fast pace and making money. What you realize as you get older is that the biggest part of business and the biggest part of life is all the interpersonal relationships with coworkers, balance and all of that.
As you were getting involved with business or thought you wanted to be in business, did you see a TV show? Was there someone you modeled after? How did you even know this world was out there?
The way that I knew it is when I was a senior in high school, I took part in something that was called Young Entrepreneurs, which was sponsored by IBM at the time.
Same Person At Work: The biggest part of business, the biggest part of life, is the balance of interpersonal relationships.
Did someone recommend you for that?
I don't remember but I know I did it with a couple of my friends, which made it that much more interesting. What we did is we built a "company." We issued "stock certificates." I believe I still have the stock certificate. At the end of the day, it was a very high-level taste of what it would be like to be an entrepreneur. People ask me, "Are you an accountant?" I say, "No. I view myself as a business person and I would love to be viewed as an entrepreneur because that's where my passion lies for sure." I think it started at an early age when I had a brief taste of it, and then getting into school at Bentley only fostered that experience.
You have this experience of competition. You knew you wanted to go on business, but how did you know accounting?
Accounting has been a bumpy road. This was not something that agreed with me right off the bat. I could be called a lot of things, but I think how I would describe myself is super competitive. You learn that over time. When you go to a school like Bentley that produces accountants, they want the best of the best and they want their folks to be successful. I did not have that experience in my first couple of years. I was told, "Maybe you should major in something else." I tell that story to folks because for me, that put a huge chip firmly on my shoulder that has never left. I was told quite clearly that, "Maybe accounting isn't for you."
I look at it to think that I take that experience and I try to impart that. When we have folks right out of school that maybe aren't on the same fast track as some of their peers, I like to be hopefully, the voice of reason to say, "You're looking at a guy who maybe wasn't on that fast track either.” If somebody didn't give me a chance, chances are I would not be in public accounting for 32 years. I certainly wouldn't be on the managing part.
This is such a good leadership lesson because everyone gets busy, and then we get frustrated if people aren't keeping up, but our words matter. You are lucky to be a person that's competitive, can take that feedback and be like, "No. I'm going to show you differently." There are a lot of people that would be told that and walk away. We don't realize how harsh our words can come off, even if we're trying to be helpful.
Especially in such a high-paced environment like public accounting. I'll bore you with a quick funny story. The professor who told me at Bentley that, "When you're at your sophomore year and you're at that make-or-break points where you're either going to major in accounting and transfer to another major," that’s the same professor who had told me, "Maybe this isn't for you."
Many years later, I was back on campus, increasing the firm's visibility on campus. I happened to have a brief encounter with that same professor who did not remember me, but I certainly remembered that person. It's funny how things happened because, at one point in time, that was a person that was doing their job saying, "Maybe you might want to consider something else." I believe what they said to me was, "I would rather be the best at what I do than just average." Many years later, on that brief encounter, that person had heard that I'm the managing partner and had a very different view. It's the same person, much older for sure. It's interesting how perceptions can change.
They don't know who remembers them. It's so funny. I have a similar story. Going into public accounting, I had a manager that on sight, didn't like me. They would try to make my life miserable in any possible way they could. Being an assistant, when you walk in, you have no control over and you don't know what's right or wrong. They were leaving the firm after a busy season. I went to their going away party. They were part of my hiring. I'll do the nice thing. They took me out of the room at their party and said, "Successful women don't look like you."
Personally, that person might have been thinking they were helping. They walk away from that conversation but those things stick. It was ten years later that I had won this award. I was a partner in a firm and won an award for Up and Comer. I didn't know that you'd have to make a speech. I was the first one to go up. I was so shocked I won the award. They're like, "Say something." I was like, "So-and-so said successful women don't look like me." It was the first thing that came out of my mouth.
It is funny you say that because I had a similar experience when I first started out. I was told that I am the same person in the office and outside of the office and in order to be successful, you can't be that way. You take my background. I didn't know any better. It was a working-class background. I was just who I am. Whether we were at lunch, sitting in a conference room or after hours, after work, I was the same person. Very quickly, more than one person told me that, "If you want to be successful, you have to be one person in the office and whoever you really are outside of the office." I got to be honest with you. I have always been me and that's part of the chip that's on my shoulder, which is always one of I think I can be me and still be "successful."
When I went through that process, she was putting down my looks. I had gone and changed my makeup. I changed all this stuff because I thought from her that was what I was getting the perception of. For a few months, I stuck with this and I felt miserable. It wasn't even the work. I was so miserable every day not being me. I was like, "Screw this if they're not going to like me. I'm doing such a good job and running complicated jobs that no one wants to do." A couple of years later, I was in a discussion with another manager. It came up and he's like, "No. That person was a jerk. No one said that." For years, you think that's what people are thinking. Overcoming that is important. When you're saying, "I believed that I could be me," why did you believe that?
The other piece of it is being happy too. Did I know that I could be myself and have my personality at all hours of the day? No, but at the end of the day, I was always searching for the place where I could be and would accept me for who I am, and judge me for the job that I do. Thankfully, Gray, Gray & Gray has been that place for a long time. It's a family-first environment and that's certainly was the initial attraction for me because I had worked at places before that were all about, "Did you get the work done?" They could have cared less about who Jim DeLeo really was. We try to be, and I say try because nobody is perfect at it.
Everybody has a different expectation of what that is.
We pride ourselves at the firm of being that place where you walk by somebody in the hallway. We have 120 people in the firm. We're big enough where we have some critical mass, but we're not so big that you can't walk by somebody in the hallway and know their name. If you don't, you certainly should stop and say, "I'm sorry but I don't know you. Why is that?" I like to believe we're comfortable doing that, which makes it a special place to work, especially when you're working nights, weekends and busy seasons. There are many things that we can't change in public accounting so we try to focus on so many things that we can change.
Maybe you can get into more detail on that under the covers of family first. What does that mean as far as your culture? How are you implementing things in your culture to protect that? You can say those things a lot of times, but if it's not monitored and so forth, that can go off the rails. A new person comes in and says they believe in it, but it goes in their own way of culture from before and it doesn't work. How do you implement it and protect it?
Same Person At Work: We've done summer Fridays for many years now, and it's been a big part of our culture.
It's hard for sure. For us, culture has always been critical and our primary focus because at the end of the day, the only thing that we have as a firm is the people. That is what makes up our firm and many others. We're constantly monitoring culture. How do we do that? We do multiple town hall meetings with the COO, myself and a small group of people. It isn't a large group. We're not asking people to get in front of 120 people and say, "Here's something I don't like at Gray, Gray & Gray." We're asking them amongst their peers of half a dozen folks to have a conversation. What we do is we take the primary themes.
I'll give you an example, the two primary themes out of our last town hall meeting. We do hundreds of employee benefit plan audits. At one point in time, one of our auditors raised their hand and said, "I am working on employee benefit plan audit after employee benefit plan audit. What I notice is everybody's employer match is higher than us. I'm curious as to why that is." The candid answer to that person was, "I have no idea." We looked and sure enough, we were below market. It was addressed appropriately by the person. They didn't say, "Everybody else on the planet is getting a bigger match." By the same token, we were equally as upfront about the fact that as the managing partner, I wasn't even aware. My point to the whole firm was this affects everybody. This is partners and employees. This is something that needed to be addressed and was addressed.
I'll give you another example of something very positive. We've done summer Fridays for many years. It's been a big part of our culture, which is on Friday, it isn't just Amy's going to have Friday off or every other Friday off. It's Amy and her entire department. You can take the day off and not have your manager or the partner in your department calling you, emailing you or what have you. What this person had mentioned was that this was one of the primary drivers why they came to the firm where it was something different than they were used to. What they really enjoy is the fact that through COVID, through ups and downs, we've never "threatened" to take it away because it's a big part of who we are. There was a time where we were the only ones doing it. That time has since passed. A couple of folks have said, "That was a cutting-edge idea. We'd like you to come up with more of them."
I wish we could on a daily basis, but those are easier said than done. Those are two nice stories because one was something that was so obvious that we didn't see. If we're not talking to our people and they don't feel comfortable bringing those things, we would have never known that and the perception would have been that we didn't care. The other piece is when you do have ideas where you're spending time trying to be a little bit different and it's hard to be different, but when you can for at least a moment in time be different and do something that nobody else is doing that people appreciate, it makes you want to do that much more.
What about on the reverse side? A lot of times, when you would talk about transparent leadership and being authentic, people can surface things that you can't change. How do you address those things so people still feel heard, but they understand why?
What we'll typically try to do is be very upfront. For example, we'll accumulate in these town hall meetings the themes, but then the one-offs, we'll address individually with that person. That person knows that their questions, concern and issue have been heard, but it's not something that we can address firm-wide. We try to give them some level of detail into that because at the end of the day, right, wrong or otherwise, our motto is, "We're always 100% transparent." We tell our firm, "We are in business to make money and we're not going to apologize to anyone for that." At the end of the day, we're not greedy. We're not solely driven by money but it is certainly one of the reasons why we're in business.
We spend a great deal of time trying to articulate that. We love to have fun. People will tell you about the amount of weight that they've gained during COVID. I would argue that every single person at Gray, Gray & Gray has lost weight because of COVID because we had so much food in our kitchen, morning, noon and night, 12 months a year, 7 days a week. At the end of the day, between the birthday parties that we hold every month, between the food that we have, between the outings that we try to do at team building events, I would argue that we try to live that whole culture. It's one thing to say but nobody believes you when you say it. We all know that.
You have to live it. All your partners have to live it because it permeates from the top down. For us, we are doing a good job in that. We're not perfect for sure. We have work to do like everybody else, but we're doing a good job with that. The partners have got to the place where we can go to a partner meeting and we can voice our opinions. If we're in the dissenting view, we can voice our concerns, walk out of that room, and speak the party line so that the partners look like they're unified, which we are and make sure that the staff knows that. At the end of the day, that's leadership. Leadership is, "I might not agree with it but I support it."
Through COVID, there were a lot of things thrown at firms like yours that you've never experienced before. People have worked more than ever. What were some things that you were doing during that time to make pivots and changes? How did you evaluate it when it was coming at such a rapid pace and not knowing what the future looks like?
The first thing that we were concerned about was taking our work remotely. The reality was in accounting, we all knew we could work remotely. We just didn't want to. When COVID first hit, our major concern was, "Is everyone going to be able to work from home? Are they going to be able to dial in? Are they going to be able to do their work? Are they going to have a good functioning laptop?" To be quite honest, in hindsight, that wasn't something we should have been worried about at all because we had all of that. One thing we've done very well is we invest in technology. We have a world-class IT department.
That was seamless, but the one thing we started to realize very quickly that we needed to address was we had people working at home alone, working alone with multiple roommates, working at home with little children running around the house. Each one of those dynamics was different and posed its own individual challenges. What we quickly pivoted towards was we did things like everyone else. I've heard these virtual happy hours. We certainly did those and they have a shelf life. They're good for 2 or 3 times and then everyone's looking at one another saying, "Maybe this is not a good use of our time."
We pivoted and we did what we call the good news challenge. Day in and out at the beginning of the pandemic, you could turn on the news and all you would hear is bad news. We did our own. We called it the good news challenge, which morphed into pictures of newborn children and new pets. It was fun. It had a shelf life for sure but it was fun. It was nice to see how people were connecting with their families during the pandemic. It was nice for them to share it with the firm. Our in-house recruiter is also a personal trainer. We had Rita's workouts at noon time every day. Those were good for the mind, the body and the soul. Rita has a passion for this and it comes through in all of her workouts. That was very well received. We did some virtual gatherings. We had a virtual game show firm-wide where we put people on teams.
We did that as a way of connecting. We had snacks sent to everyone's home and things like that. I'm sure we're not the only ones thinking of these things, but we were trying to find ways to maintain what we feel was a world-class culture before COVID hit, and we were trying to maintain that through COVID. Part of that were interns and new hires, those poor folks. The good news for our internship program in 2020 was that we kept it. We did not cancel our internship program. The bad news as I told all our interns on their last day, "I apologize that you missed the best part of the firm, which is the people. While you can get a little bit of that virtually, it doesn't tell the whole story about Gray, Gray & Gray." I'm a people person. I am not the best accountant on the planet, but I do think I have certain skills that I bring to the table. One of which is being able to communicate. That was our focus and it continues to be our focus as we try to migrate back to some sort of normal.
What does that migration look like now that you're in this stage?
We've been very transparent with our workforce that we were not going to force people back to the office. We never did that. Also, we're not going to tell people when they needed to work in the office and when they needed to work at home. We took a view, which was at the end of the day, your hybrid schedule, in some weeks, it will depend on the department you're in and the deadlines that they're under. In other weeks, it might depend on the level that you're at in the firm. It may depend on what you're working on.
What we told folks is, "Your hybrid schedule is going to constantly evolve. It's going to evolve with your workload and teammates. You should not be concerned with the person sitting next to you, how their schedule is unfolding because their schedule has nothing to do with your schedule." Is that the right approach? Is that the wrong approach? Candidly, I don't know but I do feel comfortable telling folks that Gray, Gray & Gray or Jim DeLeo is certainly not going to tell you where you're most efficient and where you're most productive. That is going to evolve based on how your workweek evolves.
Same Person At Work: We were trying to find ways to maintain a world-class culture before COVID hit.
Another point you've brought up a couple of times is your strength is in entrepreneurship. You're a good accountant, but the entrepreneurship side of your personality is what you've known as your strength. Talk about how you've gained confidence in that and how that's helped you in your career. Everyone thinks they should be the same type of accountant to be successful. I started as an auditor. I remember looking at the managers and partners going, "There's no way I'll know every reg like they do." That's not the way my brain works, but I can solve puzzles. It's trying to figure out where your path is and not compare yourself to the person next to you.
My story is I learned early on that I probably wasn't going to be that person that's reciting code sections or FASBs. You have to be technically competent. You have to know what you're doing. We all know that, but the question is, "Do I have to be the smartest person in the room to be successful?" I'll speak for myself. I always thought that I did. I always thought that I had to be the one doing all the talking and I had to be the one that knew the most in the room.
As you get experience, which is code for getting older, you realized that the last thing that you need to be is the smartest person in the room. If you're doing your job, you're not the smartest person in the room. You don't have to do all the talking, but it takes quite a while to realize that. It's okay for the person sitting next to you to have a better idea or have an idea that you wouldn't have thought of. At the end of the day, it's a team approach and you all look good. Somebody's good idea makes Gray, Gray & Gray look terrific.
Is there any moment that you can think about where you got that a-ha moment that’s like, "I don't have to be the smartest person in the room," and you were successful or something that was a trigger point of like, "No, this is my superpower and I'm going to be fine in this profession?"
There was no a-ha moment for me, but the way that I look at it is you take little bits and pieces from all of the people that you have worked with throughout the course of your career, the good and the bad. I can remember working on jobs where I would look at how the manager or how the partner was handling a particular situation and I would say, "I never want to handle it like that." It's just to myself. At the end of the day, you take those little bits and pieces with you and they mold you into who you are. I always gravitated to those folks that were great communicators. The ones that could be telling me something so mundane and I would find it so interesting with just the way they presented it, whether it was their passion for it, their interest in it, or their love of the particular topic. Whatever it was, it held my interest.
Let's face it. Most people look at accounting as being boring, that we're these super mathematicians, which I have never been in my life. I look at it and I say, "If somebody can make it sound cool, then I want to be that person." That's how I've always approached it. I'm the first one to tell my clients, "You're not doing business with me for sure because I am the best accountant on the planet, but I do think I'm a good business person and I certainly know where to find the right answers." I might not know them off the top of my head, but I know where I can get them.
Getting comfortable saying that is an important skill.
It is a skill for sure. I certainly wasn't doing that when I was 25, 30, even 35 years old. I was not telling clients that, "You could probably find a smarter accountant than Jim DeLeo." I certainly was not doing that, but at the end of the day, what you realize is it's all about personal relationships. If you have the right relationship with the clients, clients are completely fine with you making that statement because they know who you really are. There was a time in my career where I thought I could solve everybody's problems. It took me a long time to realized that you can't. You can solve people's problems that are aligned with the way that you think. For those that aren't, you need to show them to somebody who thinks like they do. That might not be you and you might not have that person in your firm, and that's okay.
Was it always your goal to become a managing partner?
The answer is that has ebbed and flowed. I would go to partner meetings and I would say this on certain occasions, "I want to be the managing partner someday." I would go to other partner meetings and I would say, "Not for all the money in the world would I want to be the managing partner." If I'm being honest, part of my competitiveness, I was told as a twenty-year-old that, "Maybe this isn't for you." In my own head, maybe the top of the profession in public accounting is to be the managing partner and to have others believe that you can take the reins and lead the firm.
Part of me says, "I want to be the managing partner,” because in my own mind, I want to validate the fact that that was a little premature to tell me at twenty that maybe accounting or business wasn't meant for me. There's certainly part of that. The other part of it is I was a member of Vistage for a period of time. My Vistage coach said, "What's the best thing that you like about being the managing partner?" I said, "I love strategizing and being that thought leader." What they said to me was, "That's great. That's 10% of the job. What do you think about the other 90%?" It has to do with all the people that are looking for guidance and leadership.
That was also a sobering moment. What you realize after doing this for long enough is that that is where the focus has to be. All the other stuff is cool and fun. It's terrific to see a deal come together and it's impactful, but it's even more impactful to see a group of new hires come through the firm, love their job, have four other roommates that are also working in public accounting, and not seeing the same level of enthusiasm because maybe they're not treated the same way and maybe they don't have the same values.
What has been your biggest stretch in learning? How have you overcome it?
The biggest stretch is always to get out of your comfort zone. It's easier said than done. There are certain things I take from both my parents. My father was always very reserved. You could never tell if he was having a great day or a bad day. I have that quality. My mother's personality was she had passion in everything that she did. You had to know who she was to understand. If you didn't know my mother, you might have thought that maybe she's yelling. I realized quickly that there was yelling and then there was a passion because of something that she believes strongly.
I have that same quality as well. I have been accused in meetings of yelling. I would always have to take a moment and say, "I'm sorry that that's how I'm occurring for you. For me, that's not yelling. That's passion. I love what we're talking about and I want to make sure that I'm speaking clearly." I do it every once in a while. I have to remind myself that I can come off to others as yelling when I'm just trying to be passionate about the subject matter. Those are interesting things for me. Those are challenges because they are out of my comfort zone because they come naturally to me.
Sometimes we don't know how we're perceived. A lot of times, I do sessions on personal brand and that's one of those things. They keep coming up against things until we listened to what people are saying like, "That wasn't the energy I was intending to put out." I've got to monitor that because that's not how I wanted someone to feel when they walked away, but you never know what yelling triggers in somebody that has a background of people yelling at them. You don't know what someone's dealing with walking in a room.
Same Person At Work: It's even more impactful to see a group of new hires come through the firm and love their job.
Not until very recently have I gotten coaching. It's funny because there would have been times in coaching sessions where I would have said, "This meeting went sideways and here's what I said." My coach would come back and say, "This is what I heard." I was like, "That's what everybody else heard." That's not what I was trying to say. What happened in the message? What happened between this great idea in my head? It did not get communicated properly. Every once in a while, it is helpful to have somebody say that to you. It's not an easy thing to hear when somebody says, "That came out awful."
Having that third party that doesn't have skin in the game, but they can say how it is.
It's usually helpful yet hard to hear.
You have action. You have to be open. I've been a speaker most of my career until a few years ago, I decided, "I'm going to go to an intensive speaker training program." I've never gone to speaker training. In that speaker training, it’s all different professions. I'm used to the accounting profession, but there are a lot of athletes. What they would do is have this master speaking session. The speaker coach would be up there and then you'd start talking. They keep stopping you, "Change this."
One of the athletes, when he was coaching her, she was intensely listening to the coaching. He turned to everybody else and said, "This is why I like to coach athletes because athletes don't take it personally." They know if they get coached, they're 1% closer to winning. They don't ever take it personally versus like us in professional roles that we're constantly being evaluated. When we get the next promotion, we'd take any coaching personally, instead of like, "Will it make us 1% better?" It's our natural defensive mechanism. I thought that was interesting because it was such a difference to watch her get coached.
It's nice too to have that support system in place where people can feel that level of comfort as they're getting coached. I was talking to one of our new hires. They went to a big university and so on. Quite frankly, she could have gone to work anywhere. Her comment to me was, "I came to Gray, Gray & Gray because I felt that it was more than just a cliché that people would know who I am and I would have a voice. I wouldn't be just a number walking down the hallway." I like to think that we have a culture that makes people feel comfortable that way. If you're taking coaching on a job, it's not personal. It's all about making that person better and helping them succeed and so forth. My hope is that we're creating a support system where people can feel vulnerable without feeling stressed as they go home.
They're going to lose their job because of it, which is sometimes so much of an issue in accounting. You'll be in the meetings where they're talking about this person. They’re like, "Three years ago, this person did this." It's like, "Please let that go."
You try to create an environment. There'll be some times where I'll say in a meeting, "I'm not sure." Maybe I'm sure. Maybe I think I know, but it was nice for me to hear partners say, "I'm not sure how to handle it." What you realized as you gain more experience and you get older is that the person that has all the answers really doesn't have any of the answers. You appreciate that person that on occasion, will say, "I have no idea how to handle this. I've never dealt with this. What do you folks think?" That's how we learn in a situation where you say, "This person is telling us that they don't have the answer. They can't recite the FASB off the top of their head." That's okay. It means we're human.
I love to close with some rapid-fire questions. You pick a category. It's either family and friends, money, spiritual or health.
Family and friends always.
Things or actions I don't have that I want with my family and friends.
You can never spend enough time. I think of all the regrets that I have as opposed to all the things that I've done. It's a character flaw but for me, it's always about spending more time. Not more but quality time.
Things or actions that I do have that I do want.
The actions that I've always had and I think it served me well. You always have to have those outside interests. I'm the first one and I was able to do it better when I was younger. I could work through all hours of the day and night. I was proud of that at one time. Now, I realized that that is nothing to be proud of. Every once in a while, you've got to step away. Whatever that is, you've got to engage with your family and friends, go workout and get away from what you're doing because it makes you better. I have been able to do that in my career than early on. That's something that I never want to lose. I was the type of person that would crank away. Sometimes it just wasn't productive. It would burn you out more than it would be helpful. I will take that with me, hopefully.
Things or actions that I don't have that I don't want.
I am not presumptuous and I don't want to become presumptuous because in business, in life, in a fast-paced environment like public accounting, first impressions certainly matter, but they're not everything. I very rarely judge clients, a colleague or a situation based on the first impression. I know lots of people that do and they've been very wrong in the assessment that they've made. In some cases, the firm has benefited from that. That's a quality I don't want because it's easy to acquire.
Same Person At Work: First impressions matter, but they're not everything.
Things or actions that I do have that I don't want as far as family and friends.
I'm the most impatient person on the planet. I'm the guy that looks at everything and says, "We can get that done in two days." That's a two-month project. Everything seems like it should be easier than it is, and the reality of it is nothing is easy. Everything takes work. That is a quality and a virtue that I am still trying to learn.
I'm similar. When you're more the visionary person, you need the detail-person right next to you who would be like, "That's not possible because we have to do this."
I have Hank Wolfson who's our COO. He is the person that says, "You're not being realistic here. The rest of us are very realistic."
Your stories have been so helpful. Is there anything that we haven't discussed or something that you want to conclude with as part of your story or your message?
The journey has been we all need to learn who we are. Sometimes we can't be the people that we admire in our firms, but we can be the best version of ourselves and that's okay. It is a lesson that does not come overnight. We need to be able to accept rejection. I've had a lot of that. I've had my share. There are a number of occasions in my career. In my many years in public accounting, there are at least a dozen times where I could have said, "This is it. I'm done," and not even get into it, to begin with. The message that I have to folks is we all have our own trajectory and skillset. We need to find out what our trajectory and our skillset is, and then we need to find the place that's going to help grow and foster that. That place does exist. Some of us have to go through multiple iterations before we find it, but that place does exist for sure.
Thank you much for sharing your story. There are so many great lessons for people. I appreciate you being on.
I appreciate you having me. Thanks for the time.
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Now for my Mindful Moments with my interview with Jim. His background was important to understand who he has become as a leader in his accounting firm, but also in how he supports the people around him. It began with his family and parents. They're focused on being happy no matter what. Work wasn't necessarily the first focus but they were hard workers. They're very supportive of him in what he wanted to do with his life.
Being one of the first in a family that gets a college degree, he didn't have the examples in his parents of moving on through education and in business. He looked to the outside of finding mentors and learned how to build interpersonal relationships very early on. What he found even as a young person in high school when he became part of this Young Entrepreneurs group was how important it was to develop these relationships in order to create the success that you want in life. It's very hard to go it alone, but it's also even harder to try to be different or what you perceived as success, and come off as authentic to people. When he got down to it and his background of working hard to get what he wanted, that was a very entrepreneurial background.
When we go into accounting firms, a lot of times, that entrepreneurial mindset isn't necessarily a part of why someone picks accounting. It's important to figure out who we are so that we don't try to compare ourselves to others. It was interesting when he gave the examples of a professor telling him that he wouldn't make it in accounting and trying to find ways that he could be accepted, but because of the hard work he had done in the past and his confidence in himself, he used relationships and made sure to move forward in different ways.
This example is important because a lot of times, we think that there's only one way to be successful or one way to become a partner, but his entrepreneurial mindset is what has helped him in becoming a leader. Thinking a little bit differently, knowing what he is good at and what he's not good at, and making sure that he emphasizes the things that he's good at in order to achieve success, but also in working organizationally.
We talked a lot about how even during COVID, he needed to unify the staff and make sure that they were still happy as things kept changing. It wasn't the way that people were used to in their everyday life. When you take work remotely, how do you still guard the culture? Coming up with creative ways to be able to create that happiness and camaraderie are important even when we're virtual. Although some things worked in the beginning when virtual was newer to everybody, what we talked about was making sure that there's a constant review of what makes people happy and not. A lot of times in leadership, we find things that work and then we stick with them versus assessing, "Are these things still working?"
As people are being moved back to work in offices, how you assess what makes people happy is by over-communication. It’s going around listening to people and making sure that you listen to the issues that people are having, not necessarily just from a leadership perspective, but at all levels of the organization so that people are heard. As a leader, you're addressing the issues that are most important to everybody.
It is also important that you know as a leader that you can't solve everyone's problems. As long as you're addressing it and being transparent about why decisions are being made, then you still have that authentic feel to your leadership. You're not acting as if only certain levels of people can know certain things. You are respecting people's lives and the human side of them by over-communicating, but also saying why certain things aren't happening.
What's important is understanding where these strengths come from. When we talked about it, it was his own deep understanding of himself that he took two things from his parents. One, his father being more reserved and calm, his mom being passionate, and how he could meld those two features together in an authentic way for himself but also as a leader. Being aware of when he gets too passionate about things and how he can tap into an example of calmness like his father is important. When we can look to people around us to find the skills that maybe we lack or that we want to achieve, it's important that we understand what that looks like in somebody else so that we know what we're trying to get to. If we just say that we want to be calm or passionate, it's important to understand where we see those examples, what we like and what we don't like.
We ended with him talking about how important it is to create boundaries between work and life, and making sure that you have outside interests and engaging with your family. There's always going to be plenty of work to be done. It's important that we allow for those boundaries so that we can create the energy that we want for ourselves and be better for the people around us, whether that's our clients or our team.
Important Links:
Jim DeLeo - LinkedIn
About Jim DeLeo, CPA, MBA, MST
In addition to serving as Gray, Gray & Gray’s Leading Partner, I co-chair the firm’s Merger & Acquisition Practice Group. Having over 25 years of hands-on experience and a diverse educational background allows me serve as a key contributor to client’s day-to-day accounting, tax and operational needs.
My unique combination of professional experience and business, accounting and tax training allows me to support management in all aspects of running their business.
In addition, I work closely with many of the region’s most prominent private equity firms, search funds, and mezzanine lenders, and have the demonstrated ability to make introductions for clients in need of access to capital.