Picture two colleagues.
The first is a new equity partner. He’s been with your firm for two years and is an excellent salesman. He’s personable and good at training his subordinates. He’s also strict about meeting client deadlines, realistic or not, and expects his employees to treat client deadlines with similar respect.
The second is a senior manager. She’s been with your firm for nine years, ever since she was an associate. She’s also personable and good at training her subordinates. She’s strict about creating quality work products and expects her colleagues to be similarly meticulous with their work products.
Now let’s imagine these two individuals have a disagreement. It’s Thursday night. The client wants a workpaper by Friday at 5:00 PM, and the partner has agreed to deliver. The senior manager wants to perform substantive edits to the workpaper before delivering it to the client. She has a reputation to maintain, and she feels like the current draft of the workpaper is nowhere near client-ready. The partner won’t yield on the deadline, won’t even broach that topic with the client, and tells the senior manager to get it to his desk by Friday at 4:00 PM so he can review before delivery. The senior manager, knowing she can’t do all the edits herself in the remaining time, calls in a favor from a friend in the scheduling department. She’s able to enlist the help of two senior associates from another team to deliver the workpaper in time.
There are two types of power on display in this situation. The first is hard power, or authority. The partner tells the senior manager to deliver the product on time. Due to his loftier position in the hierarchy, he can make reasonable demands like this and expect his subordinates to comply.
The senior manager displays soft power, or influence. She uses her relationships with colleagues and business knowledge to enlist help. Thanks to her tenure at the firm, she knows who to call when she has a problem she can’t solve herself.
Put in associate-friendly terms, hard power is what you know (your tenure in the industry correlates heavily with your position in the public accounting hierarchy), while soft power is who you know (your ability to recognize the power brokers in your firm and exert influence over them). Let’s dig into the specifics.
Hard Power
Hard power is easy to understand in public accounting. With limited exceptions, if someone is higher in the hierarchy than you, they exert authority over you. Partners outrank any non-partners, and the remaining hierarchy correlates with (but is not necessarily a result of!) tenure in your field.
The lowest role in the public accounting hierarchy that can reasonably exert hard power is the manager. Managers have associates and senior associates assigned to them, and can direct them in how to perform work. Senior associates, while outranking associates, are generally not given the authority necessary to compel associates to work. They can ask, and cajole, and needle associates to convince them to do something, but they can’t realistically order them to perform a given task. That’s because hard power is given. It’s a feature of the system in which you work, and the powers-that-be determined that managers are the lowest-ranking individuals that can make business demands of subordinates.
Because authority is given, it can be taken away. If the senior manager royally screws up, she can be fired or moved to a role in which she doesn’t manage people. Even the partner can be fired or removed from his important projects and positions. How much hard power a person wields, and over whom, is determined exclusively by their position within the firm hierarchy.
Soft Power
Soft power is subtle. It can be difficult to determine who within your organization wields it. Soft power results from an amalgamation of tenure at the firm, career experience, business savvy, and good ol’ fashioned networking. If you’re feeling cynical, it also includes nepotism and garden-variety favoritism. Consider soft power as your ability to influence your colleagues to act according to your wishes.
Your position within the hierarchy certainly has an impact on soft power. Hard power can be used in conjunction with soft power, and it’s much easier to exert influence when you outrank someone. But hierarchy alone does not determine the amount of soft power you can exert.
Industry and firm tenure also have a significant impact on soft power. If you know what you’re talking about (due to working in the industry for a long time) and who to talk to (due to working in the same firm for a long time), you have the capacity to wield much more influence than a newer employee.
Soft power is also dependent on your ability and willingness to “play politics” within the firm. Playing politics in this case doesn’t mean rigging board elections or delaying your rival’s partnership promotion. Instead, it deals with your tolerance for dealing in favors. You can’t command someone to do anything with soft power, as commands are linked to hard power. You can suggest, or negotiate, or trade using soft power. Your position in the hierarchy can determine how much soft power you are able to wield, but once you begin using it, your rank is largely irrelevant. Soft power requires you to sacrifice something to wield it, often in the form of favors or information.
Finally, soft power is earned. It is difficult for someone to remove your soft power, as they would have to undo your friendships and business relationships within the firm. Because soft power is earned and subtle, it should be your preferred currency for getting things done that don’t pertain to client deliverables.
Wielding Hard and Soft Power
A savvy employee should have a clear understanding of who has authority over them within the firm. How someone wields hard power is reflective of their character more than their position. You will undoubtedly find a superior during your career who wields their authority like a hammer. They are blunt and direct in assigning work and ensuring their tasks are completed to their standards. Any critiques they provide will be handled in a similar manner.
Some superiors wield hard power more gracefully. They couch their orders in the form of questions or requests, but there is always the underlying implication that their wishes will be satisfied as intended.
Since hard power is a function of the system, it does not deteriorate or change when used. In our original example, the partner could have made 20 more requests of the senior manager, and he could reasonably expect the senior manager to comply.
Soft power is a finite resource. In our example, the senior manager is a skilled wielder; she knows who to talk to and how to get things done quickly. But if she requested the same thing every day for two weeks, eventually the other party would decline. She can’t make them assign her help, especially if other people need those senior associates’ time as well. By asking for a favor, she is burning through her goodwill with the assignor. One request won’t cost her much, but repeated favors in a short period will deplete her ability to influence the assignor.
The most skilled soft power users will always try to trade for influence rather than ask for a favor. By trading influence, they can recoup some of the soft power they used seeking help. For instance, if our senior manager had told the assignor, “I need these two senior associates for 12 hours tomorrow, but I will set aside some of my manager’s time next month for other teams to use,” then she would be trading influence. She gets what she needs right now, the assignor gets access to a valuable resource in the near future, and the senior manager can rely on an infinite resource (hard power) to compel her manager to perform tasks for another team next month. An additional perk of trading influence is that the relationship between the senior manager and the assignor will strengthen due to this mutually beneficial agreement. The assignor will be more willing to work with the senior manager in the future.
Impacts on Your Career
If you’re an associate or senior associate within public accounting, this information is largely theoretical. You can watch the power dynamics unfold and better understand how your labor will be used, but you cannot wield hard power yet. You can start trying to wield soft power, but it’s unlikely that you have the clout or reputation to be effective outside of your immediate team. Your goal is simply to recognize these power dynamics in action and protect your reputation so you can participate quickly once you reach manager.
If you’re a manager or above, you can begin gaining practical experience wielding hard and soft power. If you’re a new manager, the temptation to wield hard power will be immense at first; you’ve never had access to this authority before, and you’ll pressure yourself into trying it out. For new managers, we recommend using hard power sparingly. Even though hard power is unlimited, its use is not without consequence. People who rely too heavily on their own authority will harm their reputation and limit their ability to accumulate the influence necessary to wield soft power. No one wants to grant a favor to the office jerk.
Because soft power is finite and based on your reputation, it also has a tendency to flatten the hierarchy. If our senior manager controls a valuable resource, such as a proprietary piece of technology, anyone who wants to use that tech must go through her. It doesn’t matter if that individual outranks her or if they’re her subordinate. Her position as an expert of this technology means that she has influence over every would-be user, and she can employ soft power to earn influence with people above her. If you can control a valuable firm resource, you can use your position to accumulate influence with a variety of individuals.
Other Considerations
Another major consideration related to authority and influence deals with moving between teams or between firms. In public accounting, it’s not uncommon for partners to move firms and take several subordinates with them to their new job. If you’re one of those subordinates, this is a very flattering situation. Your partner thinks highly enough of you that they want to continue working with you at a new firm. It’s easy to think that your team and structure will remain the same as before, except for sporting new branding on your matching polos. Unfortunately, soft power doesn’t transfer.
The longer your partner had been at your old firm, the more internal influence they had accumulated over their career. A partner who had been at one firm for ten or more years certainly wielded an immense amount of soft power, simply by building relationships among the firm leadership. Moving to a new firm eliminates the benefits of understanding the old firm’s dynamics and the accrued benefits of those previous relationships. That’s not to say that a partner can’t rely on their industry reputation to quickly build soft power at the new firm, but their ability to drive change and support their team will be much more limited.
What this means for associates, senior associates, and managers is that some of the perks and benefits you grew accustomed to at your old firm may no longer be available. An experienced, well-respected partner has a lot of freedom to run their team how they see fit. Maybe your partner let you leave early on Fridays, or was able to secure the best projects from the office managing partner, or was a trusted advisor to the CEO of your public accounting firm. These little benefits, many of which may be unknown to the partner’s subordinates, can dramatically impact the morale and efficacy of a public accounting team.
A partner that recently joined a new firm has to rebuild their soft power reserves. They may not want to risk their reputation by giving their subordinates special treatment, and they may not be as close with the senior leaders in the new firm. That basket of intangible benefits will likely disappear, if only temporarily, when you move follow them to a new firm. And this “soft power reset” occurs at every level in the hierarchy. Unless you’re stepping into a position where you already know and have a strong relationship with the existing power brokers, you will not be able to wield as much influence at a new firm or on a new team.
Our final point is in the value of recognizing adept wielders of soft power. If you see someone on your team who is regularly working with people higher in the hierarchy, you can safely assume they are skilled at exerting their influence. These are good people to know and better people to learn from. We encourage you to seek these folks out as mentors when you recognize them, as their reputation can be contagious and help elevate your own ability to wield soft power. Authority and influence both increase over time, so it’s best to recognize and practice using both as early as possible.