For this week’s Scaling Stories podcast, we were delighted to speak with Alex Seiler, the Chief People Officer at GHJ, an accounting, tax, and advisory firm that partners with clients to help grow their businesses.”

Alex is a savvy people and talent leader who has developed countless approaches that connect organizations’ business strategy with their people strategy.

Alex has cut his teeth at what he calls “declining industries”, namely publishing, and learnt a great deal about scaling up (and down) from working in a resource-challenged environment.

A long-term strategic thinker, Alex describes accounting as “not the sexiest profession out there”, but invites his team on retreats where they can discuss how they can “defy convention” and change how people perceive the industry. “How do we attract more early career professionals to actually want to have a career in public accounting?”

A recent Wall Street Journal article, ‘Why are so many accountants quitting?’, touched on some of the industry’s challenges. As the author stated: “The field still suffers from a stigma that it is unappealing, with tedious work and daunting hours… The huge gap between companies that need accountants and trained professionals has led to salary bumps and more temporary workers joining the sector.”

Part of the solution, Alex suggests, is to be “purely focused on our staff and getting brilliant at the basics”, or in other words, “how do we refine and do things even better for them”.

This includes everything from pay transparency to resisting the temptation to force everyone back to the office. 

“All the data that’s out there says that people at the end of the day want a hybrid working structure,” Alex says.

Alex’s experiences have taught him the value of picking your battles and understanding the intricacies of each sector. Time-starved accountants and auditors, for example, don’t have time to absorb information about new strategies and concepts when they’ve got a hard accounting deadline coming up.

“That’s what I talk about when I say not taking a cookie cutter approach,” says Alex. “If you don’t understand the business you’re in and you try to roll things, you’re gonna get pushback if it’s got an adverse impact on the employee.”

Moreover, at a time of layoffs and market uncertainty, Alex says it’s crucial to ask, “how are you continuing to upskill your people?”

For example, GHJ have introduced “high performance teams training that can scale across the organisation”, plus a “durable skills curriculum”, where staff can upskill on things like leadership or critical thinking as an alternative to “traditional manager training”.

Finally, Alex is a skilled operator who knows how to keep the C-suite sweet. He dismisses the idea that “all roads lead to the CEO”, adding that recruiters should develop “one-on-one relationships with each member of the C-Suite. And even before you’ve presented a strategy, start socialising your ideas”.

It goes to show that talent and people teams are more than just nice-to-haves, but rather, a strategic partner at the heart of a successful business. Similarly, when we spoke to Mafalda Garcês, the Country Leader and Senior People Director at Dashlane, she remarked how HR should be viewed as “a central piece of solving business problems”.

It was great chatting with Alex, and if you’d like to check out more of our Scaling Stories podcasts, you know what to do.