Insights from CPA Australia’s Leadership & Culture Session
By Paul Dove
In the days after CPA Australia’s Leadership & Culture session in Brisbane, I kept finding myself in conversations that had started in the room but were clearly not finished. The question that kept coming up was not how to improve performance. It was something more specific, and in many ways more unsettling: why, in teams that are already technically capable, does performance not always hold?
Most of the leaders I spoke with were not looking for a surface-level answer. The root cause, as it turned out, was not what most of them expected.
Priorities were clear, the work was moving, and their people had the skills to do the job. From the outside, there was little to suggest a problem. Yet when the conversations went deeper, a quieter pattern began to emerge.
Performance Evaluation: What Leaders Are Actually Observing
Performance was not absent in these teams. It was uneven. Certain individuals or parts of the team were carrying more of the load, particularly as pressure increased or work became more complex, while others contributed at a different pace. This kind of unevenness is almost always labelled a capability gap. In most of the situations leaders described, though, that was not the case. The capability was already there.
How that capability was showing up in day-to-day work can vary depending on the conditions the team is operating in.
Leaders described expectations that were documented but not always understood in the same way. They described feedback that existed but did not arrive early enough to actually shape outcomes. They described accountability that was defined on paper and visible in reports, but not consistently experienced across the team. Individually, these might seem like small gaps. Over time, they accumulate, and what begins as variation quietly becomes inconsistency.
This pattern was consistent across firms of different sizes and structures. It pointed to something shared in how performance is experienced in practice rather than isolated circumstances. The Australian HR Institute has long identified trust, communication, and coordination as central to sustained team performance. What the CPA Australia discussions added was a clearer view of just how unevenly those elements are experienced from one team to the next.
The Brisbane Lions Example and What It Means for Accounting Team Performance
One example that resonated most during the session was the story of the Brisbane Lions under Chris Fagan, shared by Matthew Vandermeer. It was a period many would recognise as a significant turnaround, though not because the club lacked talent. The talent was already there.
The shift began not with a change in game plan but with a reset in how the group functioned. Behaviours that had been quietly undermining trust were surfaced and addressed. A clearer, more shared understanding of expectations took shape. Accountability became more visible and was reinforced through everyday interactions rather than one-off conversations. Leadership extended beyond the coaching staff and across the playing group itself.
The performance that followed was not immediate, but it was sustained. The club did not try to achieve a turnaround through a single intervention. Instead, it built on changes in how the team operated day to day, discarding the structures of the past that had quietly undermined trust. Tracking progress became a shared habit rather than a management function, and the results reflected that shift.
What struck me about this example was not the sporting context but how precisely it mirrored what accounting and finance leaders were describing in their own teams.
Why the Pattern Persists Beyond Performance Management
The conditions that allow performance to stay uneven are rarely dramatic. They are often subtle, easy to overlook precisely because the team is still functioning and work is still getting done.
Performance expectations that are documented but interpreted differently by different people create misalignment that accumulates gradually. Feedback that arrives after a project is complete rather than during it loses most of its ability to change outcomes. Accountability that lives in a performance review cycle rather than in everyday behaviour becomes something people think about twice a year rather than consistently throughout their work.
CPA Australia’s own guidance on performance management reflects a similar shift in thinking, pointing toward more continuous, embedded approaches rather than periodic structural ones. The firms navigating this pattern well tend to treat accountability and feedback as operational habits rather than management processes. This is especially essential in areas like regulatory compliance, where the cost of inconsistency is not just operational but reputational. The risk of allowing these gaps to persist is not always visible immediately, but it accumulates in the same way the performance unevenness does.
Where the Conversation Around Business Units Is Starting to Move
Across the discussions that followed the CPA Australia session, I noticed a shift in how strategic leadership is approaching the issue across business units.
The question is moving away from how to build more capable teams, because for most of the firms involved, capability is already present. Accounting and finance professionals are increasingly expected to act as business partners rather than back-office functions, and that shift raises the stakes considerably for consistent delivery. The quality of decision making and decision support an organisation can rely on depends directly on whether the people providing it are operating in conditions that allow their capability to show up consistently. That is where the real motivation for change is coming from, and it is shaping how leaders across the industry are thinking about their teams. Attention is turning instead toward how work is actually experienced inside teams, and where inconsistency quietly takes hold.
Leaders are looking more closely at how expectations are made visible in real tasks at work, not just in job descriptions or annual conversations. They are thinking about how feedback can be embedded earlier in the process, when it can still influence relevant outcomes rather than simply record them. And they are asking how accountability can be reinforced through shared ways of operating, through everyday interactions, rather than through formal structures alone.
This is a meaningful shift. It moves the focus from what is designed to what is consistently practised, and from what is documented to what is actually lived. Building that kind of trust and consistency at team level is not a one-time exercise. It requires ongoing attention to how people experience their work, not just how their work is structured.
Strategic Insight: What This Means in Practice
For accounting and finance leaders, the environment is not getting simpler. Work is becoming more complex, particularly for firms navigating rapid growth or expanding service lines. Client expectations around financial reporting, financial planning, and decision support are increasing, while capacity remains stretched across many firms. In that context, even small inconsistencies in how expectations are understood or how feedback flows can have a real impact on what gets delivered and the effort required to deliver it.
Through ongoing operations work with accounting and finance teams at Cloudstaff, this pattern continues to surface in practical ways. The teams that sustain performance tend to have clearer role definition, more structured workflows, and feedback loops built into how work is delivered rather than added after the fact. Where those conditions are in place, capability translates more consistently into outcomes. Where they are not, performance becomes dependent on individuals rather than on the system around them.
The insight from the CPA Australia session was not a new methodology or a fresh set of tools. It was a shift in what business leaders are paying attention to. Finance staff capability is there and if there were any skill gaps, these can be addressed through development and employment of the right people. The deeper question is whether the way accounting teams are operating is actually allowing that capability to show up consistently in financial reporting, in the quality of analysis they produce, and in the decision support they provide. Ultimately, how a team functions day to day shapes the company’s financial health as much as any strategy does. That is where it is worth focusing.
About the Author
Paul Dove is General Manager, Financial Services (APAC) at Cloudstaff, where he leads strategy, client success, and talent innovation for accounting and finance teams across Australia and the region. With deep experience in advisory, compliance, and organisational growth, Paul helps firms build hybrid teams that thrive in an increasingly complex environment.
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Supporting CPA Australia as part of the Leadership & Culture series is Cloudstaff’s commitment to creating space for practical, experience-led conversations about what actually drives performance in accounting and finance.
Visit Remote Finance & Accounting Outsourcing Solutions – Cloudstaff to connect with Paul and explore how your team’s delivery environment could be working harder for you.