Cpa Ontario Future Forward

Finding your bearings as a mentor means learning from others. It’s helpful to have some quick and easy tips to follow, even if the advice surprises you. In this episode, coaching expert Michael Bungay Stanier and Liz West discuss effective tips for coaching others that may not be what you expect.

Coaching often comes down to understanding when to ask the right questions. Liz West sits down with coaching expert Michael Bungay Stanier as they talk about the best coaching questions to ask, when to ask them, and in what combination they should be asked to get quality results.

The instinct to jump in and help solve a problem is a good one, but when you’re a mentor, that instinct could hurt more than help. Coaching expert Michael Bungay Stanier joins Liz West to talk about why instinctual problem solving can be harmful and how to curb your natural tendencies in order to help others learn and shine on their own.

Conflict isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, even when you’re coaching. The key is to navigate conflict in a productive way and learn to control your own behaviour. Join our host Liz West and coaching expert Michael Bungay Stanier as they chat about how to avoid the common roles we fall into during coaching and conflict.

When you’ve got limited time to spend on coaching, how do you maximize your impact? How do you engage with someone who only has ten minutes to spare? Join our host Liz West as she speaks with coaching expert Michael Bungay Stanier about coaching myths, ways to build coaching into everyday interactions, and how to get the biggest impact with restricted time.

Coaching can be difficult, especially if you’re finding yourself in the coach’s seat for the first time. Join Liz West as she talks to coaching expert Michael Bungay Stanier about the reasons we use to hold ourselves back from fully engaging with those who look to us for guidance.

Organizations often must determine whether to outsource a service or perform it with in-house resources. Outsourcing makes sense in many situations, but the decision should not be taken lightly. In this episode, Laura Simeoni explains the benefits and risks of outsourcing, and provides some advice to companies that are considering outsourcing arrangements.

All employees have their own unique personalities, communication styles, and ways of working. Successful organizations recognize the complementary values of different personality types, and use them to build a better work environment, improve communication, and increase productivity. In this episode, Laura Simeoni talks about behavioral styles in the DiSC® model and how you can manage common communication problems.

Most employers know that employees want to feel valued, and they understand financial rewards alone are not enough. So, what can an organization do to walk the talk and show employees that they are indeed valued? Laura Simeoni answers this question with suggestions related to different types of recognition and appreciation that employees are looking for, such as advancement opportunities, mentorship, and work-life balance.

When hiring new staff, organizations must consider “fit” in terms of technical skills and enabling skills. Without the right fit, the staff could have trouble meeting job expectations or integrating into the organization’s culture. In this episode, Laura Simeoni draws on her extensive experience in training and professional development to unpack common staffing risks and different ways to manage them.   

Training is an important component of onboarding. An effective training program ensures staff understand what they need to do on the job, but just as importantly, why. One-size-fits-all approaches rarely work—each organization must develop a program that meets its own needs through a combination of different methods. In this episode, Laura Simeoni and Liz West discuss a variety of training practices that organizations should consider.

Effective onboarding goes beyond an orientation with human resources. It should help employees integrate quickly into the team and understand how they contribute to the organization’s vision. Companies, both big and small, can adopt onboarding practices that ensure new staff feel comfortable and welcomed. In this episode, Liz West sits down with Laura Simeoni to talk about elements of a successful onboarding process that engages new staff from day one.

A CPA’s career rarely unfolds as a straightforward path. As an educator who helps students transition from higher education to business careers, Quoc Hoang believes it’s important for CPAs to share their stories. Students need to hear these stories to appreciate the range of opportunities and challenges they will encounter. As such, Quoc shares his own educational and career trajectory, illustrating how his CPA training supported his career development despite some bumps along the way.

For many aspiring CPAs, the path beyond earning the designation is unclear. As an educator, Quoc Hoang helps his students navigate the possibilities with experiential education. One of his courses, called “Beyond the CPA,” aims to improve students’ ability to anticipate challenges associated with a CPA career path. In this episode, Quoc goes through the tenets of his experiential education approach, and he provides suggestions to listeners who are interested in supporting and educating future CPAs.  

Internship programs are one form of experiential education. They can be valuable to companies seeking to build a talent pipeline, but effective programs require significant resources to set up. Fortunately, companies that want to leverage experiential education but find internships impractical have other options. In this episode, Quoc Hoang and Liz West discuss some of the alternatives. Quoc also provides tips to help companies create high-quality learning experiences, for both students and their own employees.

Throughout his career as a management consultant and educator, Quoc Hoang witnessed a variety of challenges that prevent companies from forging meaningful relationships with colleges and universities. Many companies want to engage with higher education but don’t know how to go about it, and students lack the industry knowledge to assess career options for themselves. As a result, companies overlook pools of talent and students miss out on development opportunities. In this episode, Quoc shares how he facilitates meaningful company-student interactions that create value for both parties.

Future business leaders must be able to work across disciplines to solve complex and messy problems. In colleges and universities, educators like Quoc Hoang are constantly looking for ways to prepare students for the world that awaits them after graduation. In this episode, Quoc tells us how experiential education can help students build the skills, competencies, and dispositions to survive and thrive. But not all experiences are created equal. Quoc outlines the elements that are required to create impactful experiential education. 

As Director of Experiential Learning at The University of Alabama’s Culverhouse College of Business, Quoc Hoang creates opportunities for students to connect academic studies to real-world contexts, helping them better understand what it’s like to work in professions such as accounting. In a broader sense, Quoc considers himself to be in the business of “developing students’ heads and hearts.” In this episode, Quoc gives us a framework to understand what experiential education is and why it matters to students, educators, and businesses everywhere.

Cybersecurity and cyber risk involve many domains, including technology, business, operations and compliance. To protect our business, we need to understand its risk tolerance, build a suitable cyber strategy, and implement a sustainable cybersecurity program. Join Liz West and Bryan Li as they discuss cyber strategy, cyber risk tolerance and cybersecurity programs, as well as cyber strategies suitable for small and medium-sized companies that may not have the resources of large corporations.

Cybersecurity is a very broad topic which encompasses with many functional areas such as risk management, engineering, networking, operations and governance. It is important to understand how cybersecurity works within two important domains: technology and compliance. In this podcast, Liz West speaks with Byran Li on how cybersecurity intersects with technologies such as AI, blockchain, mobile devices and the cloud, as well as with compliance such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, the Payment Card Industry/Data Security Standard and more.