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“Star performers aren’t immune from accountability,” says Lisa Gilreath, Managing Partner at Acuity. “Often they perform really high. But you’re going to see the other half of your team suffer in terms of their performance.”
This frank observation cuts to the heart of one of accounting’s toughest leadership challenges—dealing with talented but toxic employees. It’s just one of many practical insights shared during this episode of the Earmark Podcast, recorded live in Atlanta during the Advisory Amplified tour.
Host Blake Oliver sits down with Lisa Gilreath and Valerie Heckman, Accountant Community Manager at OnPay, to explore what empathetic leadership really looks like in accounting firms. Their conversation goes well beyond feel-good management theories to address the real challenges firms face when deadlines hit and pressure mounts.
Why Empathy Makes Business Sense
When Blake asks Lisa why firms shouldn’t burn out their people, her answer is refreshingly honest: “They’re really hard to replace right now.”
This practical reality drives home why empathetic leadership isn’t just nice to have—it’s essential for survival in today’s talent market. Lisa explains that with staffing shortages and people tired of 60-80 hour work weeks, firms have to build healthier workplaces to succeed.
But deadlines don’t disappear. Tax seasons still come. Clients still have needs. The key is finding ways to meet those demands without destroying your team in the process.
Building Breathing Room Into Your Firm
Traditional firms plan for 100% utilization, assuming everyone will be productive every single day. Lisa takes a different approach at Acuity, planning for 75-80% capacity instead.
“You can’t run the people to the absolute end and expect not to be in a crisis situation if somebody has an issue,” she explains. This isn’t about accepting lower productivity. It’s about building resilience into your workflows.
Personal crises illustrate why this matters. “Personal crises, tragedy or challenges never check your calendar to see if you have time to deal with them,” Lisa notes. Over 20 years at Acuity, she’s seen it all—employees who unexpectedly passed away, team members losing spouses, medical emergencies that required immediate attention.
These aren’t rare events. They’re the reality of managing people over time. The question is whether your firm can handle them without falling apart.
Lisa recommends having your “phone a friend on speed dial”—an HR expert or advisor who can provide objective guidance when emotions run high. Small firms especially struggle when close relationships make it hard to separate business needs from personal loyalty.
How Systems Create Space for Humanity
Many firms see standardization as rigid and impersonal. Lisa flips this completely, showing how standard processes actually enable empathy.
“If you do have a standard scope of services for your transactional stuff, you can plug and play people,” she explains. “Paying bills is paying bills. Doing payroll is doing payroll. It’s just a matter of where you get that source data.”
When every client engagement follows similar patterns, any qualified team member can step in during an emergency. This protects both the employee who needs support and the client who needs continuity.
Acuity spreads work throughout the year using recurring CAS engagements rather than accepting the traditional feast-or-famine cycle. “We’re focused on being proactive in those interactions all year long,” Lisa says. This creates predictable workflows that allow for coverage when life happens.
The approach helps team members too. Lisa tells her people: “Build our workflows and build our communication patterns so that if you need to leave unexpectedly, we’ve got your back. Help us help you.”
Reading the Warning Signs
Technology provides new ways to spot problems before they become crises. But Lisa doesn’t just watch productivity metrics. She pays attention to communication patterns.
“I’m noticing when people are no longer engaging in Slack conversations at the same pace that they once were,” she explains. “They’re not showing up in meetings and being as talkative as they once were.”
These changes signal that something’s wrong before performance completely deteriorates. A normally responsive team member whose emails slow down. A strong performer whose deliverables lag. These whispers often matter more than what people explicitly say.
Valerie adds another important metric: PTO usage. “If people aren’t using it, that’s a sign,” she notes. “Are they afraid to use it? Do they feel like if they use it, they’re not contributing enough to the team?”
Her own mother exemplifies this problem, going years without taking vacation because she worried about work piling up. “She would never, ever take a day that payroll needed to be run or the day after in case there were mistakes,” Valerie recalls.
The flip side matters too. Excessive PTO usage might signal disengagement or job hunting. These patterns hide in payroll data most firms already collect but rarely analyze for team health insights.
The Toxic High Performer Problem
Every firm faces this dilemma eventually: what do you do with someone who delivers great results but poisons team culture?
“Toxic workers will take you down,” Lisa states plainly. While star performers deliver individually, the rest of the team suffers. The math is clear—protecting one toxic high performer often means losing multiple good employees.
But Lisa doesn’t jump straight to termination. “I start from a place of curiosity,” she says. “How did we get here? What’s going on with them?”
Sometimes it’s a personal crisis. Sometimes they don’t understand expectations. Sometimes they genuinely don’t realize they need to collaborate. Starting with curiosity creates space for course correction.
The same principle applies to clients. When Blake asks about unreasonable client demands on her team, Lisa’s response is swift: “They’re probably not going to be a client for much longer.”
Acuity holds both team members and clients to their values. “This is how we intend to operate,” Lisa explains. They regularly review their client base to ensure alignment, not just to cull unprofitable work but to protect team wellbeing.
Navigating Industry Change With Compassion
The pace of change creates another empathy challenge. Many experienced accountants built careers on consistency and process. Now they’re asked to develop entirely new skills.
“We liked that about them for a really long time—that they followed the process and they didn’t question the process,” Lisa observes. “Now we’re asking them to talk to clients, and they’ve never had to talk to clients. They just had to fill out the form.”
With AI transforming the profession, these changes feel overwhelming to some team members. The empathetic response isn’t to abandon these people but to “bring those people along at their pace as well as the pace of the industry.”
This is where hiring for adaptability becomes crucial. Lisa looks to new graduates who see AI as normal, not threatening. “They’re unafraid. They will just try anything,” she says. These digital natives may help bridge the gap for more experienced team members struggling with change.
Taking Action This Week
Valerie offers practical advice for leaders wanting to be more empathetic: pause.
“Taking that time when something happens, when there’s an experience with a worker or team dynamic and saying, okay, we’re going to sleep on it,” she suggests. This fights the instinct to immediately jump in and solve problems.
Pausing allows you to ask better questions rather than make assumptions. It could be personal challenges, professional struggles, or something else entirely. Without that pause, you might treat symptoms instead of root causes.
Lisa adds another suggestion: engage your team in discussing a problem and just listen. “They will often lead with things that are coming from a place of fear or concern,” she notes. Understanding these underlying worries helps you address real issues, not just surface problems.
Your Role as an Advocate
Perhaps the most important mindset shift involves how leaders see their role. “I am their number one advocate,” Lisa says about her team. “My role is not just to drive them to production, it’s really to advocate for their needs.”
This means creating multiple channels for support, recognizing not everyone feels comfortable approaching their direct supervisor. “If I’m not the person that you can reach out to, I promise you, I have paths for you to go raise your concern,” Lisa tells her team.
The business case remains clear throughout the conversation. In today’s environment where good people are “really hard to replace,” protecting team culture isn’t charity—it’s strategy. Firms that recognize their people as “the engine” and act accordingly will outlast those clinging to the burnout model.
Listen to the full episode to hear more practical strategies for implementing these changes in your firm. Lisa and Valerie share specific tips on creating buddy systems for coverage, working with HR consultants, and building workflows that respect both deadlines and humanity. Their insights offer a realistic path forward for firms ready to lead with empathy while maintaining business success.