Professional Accountant

Due to the fast-changing and uncertain business environment, organizations have to think about how they are going to adjust their strategies, business models, and practice to respond to the environmental challenges while providing business success for the shareholders. Today, the economy is never be the same as yesterday, it is not going to be “business as usual” for organizations or for managers. Managers will have hard decisions to make about their way in doing business and organizing employees. These decisions are likely related to how companies operate business, how they deal with the expectations from society to act responsibly and ethically, and the way treating employees. Professional accountants are an essential element of commercial success, by using their professionally valuable accounting or non-accounting knowledge to give their organizations or clients a competitive advantage. Coming with the competitive pressures in business industry, keeping a massive demands for professional accountants or management accountants and managers work closely together for successful and profitable business.

The Institute for Chartered Accountants (ICAEW) sets out the meaning of a professional accountant: a person who ‘professes’ to have skill resulting from a coherent course of study and training based on professional values, and who continues to develop and enhances those skills by experience and continuing professional education concerned with the measurement, disclosure or provision of assurance about financial information that helps managers, investors, tax authorities and other decision makers make resource allocation decisions.^[1] Briefly speaking, the function of a professional accountant in the organization is to support competitive and useful decisions for managers by collecting, processing and communicating information that helps management plan, control, and evaluate business processes and company strategies.

For decades, it implied that all management accountants need ‘hard skills’ like knowledge of accounting; but with the rapid change of the industry, management accountants were also suggested to possess ‘soft skills’ such as communication skills, leadership capabilities, and so on in addition.^[2]

According to the study “Are Technical Skills Still Important?”, the perceptions of CPAs, accounting educators, students and Fortune 500 executives have been studied and the majority of them have ranked communication as the most important skill in accounting.^[3] Communication is the transfer and understanding of meaning^[4] or the evoking of a shared or common meaning in another person.^[5] Communication is the way that employees can use to learn to do their jobs, understand the standards of their organization, also employees are given feedbacks regards to their work performance through effective communication^[6] and usually good communication skills are linked to emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is the ability to manage his or her own emotions, and recognize the emotions of other people, both individually and in groups. People with higher emotional intelligence find it easier to form and maintain interpersonal relationships and to ‘fit in’ to group situations; they are also better at understanding their own psychological state including managing stress effectively and being less likely to suffer from depression. Favorable communication quality can contribute to organizational efficiency, robust interactions between employees and employers, and positive relationship toward job performance and productivity. Poor quality or dissatisfaction in communication can lead to low feedback, absenteeism, employee burnout or stress and high staff turnover. Reading, listening, managing and interpreting information, and serving clients are among the interpersonal skills identified by the Department of Labor as being necessary for successful functioning in the workplace.^[7] Communication is made up of numerous different factors including language, sound, and tone, eye contact, body language, pitch, culture, norms, and so on. Interpersonal communication is important in building and sustaining human relationships at work and cannot be replaced by the advances in information technology and data management that have taken place during the past several decades.