kassi rushing: leadership gaps, not motivation gaps, hold firms back | gear up for growth

employee experience is no longer optional; it’s a strategic imperative, says kassi rushing, ceo and owner of kassi rushing consulting. appearing on gear up for growth—hosted by jean caragher, president of capstone marketing, and powered by 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间—rushing shares practical insights for firms aiming to attract and retain top talent.

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the episode highlights two critical shifts firms must embrace:

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1. employee experience drives business performance. “culture is not a ‘nice to have.’ it’s the foundation of your strategic plan,” rushing said. she emphasized that employee experience directly impacts client outcomes, innovation, and growth. firms that invest in meaningful work, purpose-driven storytelling, and individual support see stronger engagement and retention, particularly among younger professionals.

2. leadership must evolve with generational expectations. today’s workforce is looking for more than titles and promotions. “we’re not facing a motivation gap; we’re facing a leadership model gap,” rushing explains. she urges firm leaders to move beyond traditional command-and-control approaches, instead focusing on “power skills” such as empathy, clarity, feedback, and trust-building. these skills, she says, are essential to creating workplaces where people want to stay and thrive.

more highlights:

• firms that prioritize employee experience gain a competitive advantage in recruitment, retention, and engagement. 
• firms should tell better stories about their client and community impact to help employees connect to the greater purpose of their work. 
• work is a subset of life, not separate from it. employees want relational – not just transactional – experiences at work. 
• leadership must shift from “project managers” to people developers, e.g., mentors, coaches, and communicators. 
• culture is always local, shaped by team-level interactions more than firmwide edicts. 
• personalizing the employee experience at the team level is more impactful than firmwide policies. 
• great managers know their people, their goals, struggles, and what success looks like for them. 
• only 6% of gen z want to reach the highest level of leadership, highlighting a succession challenge. 
• firms must offer growth that isn’t just a title change, think new skills, new responsibilities, and creative opportunities. 
• the biggest challenge in hybrid/remote work is not location, it’s leadership capability. 
• the profession was already weak at developing people before the pandemic; remote work has only magnified it. 

more about kassi rushing
kassi rushing is the ceo and owner of kassi rushing consulting. for more than two decades,  rushing has helped organizations with workplace culture, employee experience and engagement, and team achievement and alignment. she specializes in accounting firms and finance organizations and has worked in the accounting profession since 2007.?she is a strategic partner, facilitator, and designated thought leader at the business learning institute, a division of the aicpa-cima. 

transcript
(produced by automation. not edited for spelling or grammar.)

jean: hello, and thank you for joining gear up for growth powered by 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间. i’m jean caragher, president of capstone marketing and your host. i am delighted to introduce kassi rushing, ceo and owner of kassi rushing consulting. for more than two decades, kassi has helped organizations with workplace culture, employee experience and engagement, and team achievement and alignment. she is here to talk to me today about building places people want to work. kassi, welcome to gear up for growth. 

kassi: thank you so much for having me. i’m excited to have this conversation. 

jean: i am too. and we’ve just… you know, part of growth, we know, is having the right people, right? and retaining the right people, and making sure that they’re happy and engaged. and i know you have lots of information that you’re going to share with us today on that topic. so let’s start with your definition of a great employee experience. 

kassi: yeah. i think a great employee experience is one where individuals are connected to the organization’s overall mission, and vision, and core values. and where they are able to bring their unique strength and talent, and see how they contribute directly to where that organization is trying to go. and so, there’s a lot in that, right? and i think it’s a connection. it’s a sense of purpose. it’s a feeling of contribution. and that in and of itself is kind of the heart of a great employee experience. 

jean: do you think the younger generations are pushing this concept along for the older generations? 

kassi: yeah, i do. and, you know, some interesting… i’m a very data-driven person when it comes to approaching this, right? so, while i have a gut instinct and while i have the observations, i also like to see, like, what does the data really say around this? and so, yes, it’s definitely being forced along by just changing expectations of work. if you aren’t familiar with, or our listeners aren’t familiar with deloitte gen z millennial study, it’s gold. like, every year, i can’t wait for it to come out. and one of the really surprising, maybe not surprising, but one of the things that came out as an insight this year, that was very, very telling was, when you look at our millennials, our younger millennials, especially… and they’re not young anymore, right? we’re talking mid 30s. and then our gen z, which is coming off college campuses now. they really say that, in their careers, they’re looking for three things. yes, money matters, but it’s money, meaning, and well-being. 

and so if you kind of backtrack that through your gen x generations or your baby boomers… i came into the workforce scene with, baby boomers were all of our leaders. and it was a very different vibe, not right or wrong, just different. and now purpose, and meaning, and how work feels is a generational expectation. and so, it’s something employers have to be ready and willing to deliver on. if we’re going to talk about talent pipelines in the profession, we can’t just talk about attracting people into the profession. we have to talk about what happens once they get here. and so that’s when employee experience becomes a differentiator. it becomes a competitive advantage in your overall strategic plan. 

jean: so how do you… you know, i’ve got lots of questions here for you today. 

kassi: sure. let’s go. 

jean: how can you help employees find that personal meaning in their work, if their roles are more transactional? and of course, that’s the accounting profession, right? and as they advance through their careers, they’re meant to become more advisory and less transactional and all, but there’s lots of folks that either show up in their office or in their home office, you know, just doing transaction after transaction. what can we do for them? 

kassi: yeah. okay. so, jean, i talk about big p purpose and little p purpose. big p purpose is what a lot of people go to when we think about finding meaning in our work. and that is very fulfilling. and for some of us, we take career even further, right? we get into it. we might even find that our life’s purpose is really wrapped up in who we get to serve and how we get to help. that’s great. however, you know, early on in our careers, even that little p purpose is meaningful. so, how does my transactional role fit into the bigger picture? how and why am i doing this as part of a larger client engagement? 

many times, what we see real boots on the ground in firms is that, our youngest staff, our associates really don’t conceptually understand how, you know, a financial statement or how a tax return is fitting in to the larger component of service for a client. and so, little p purpose matters too. i don’t think employers have the responsibility of helping people find their life purpose necessarily, but meaning does matter. so meaning in the task. and then even telling those more compelling stories around, how do clients benefit from the way we serve them? how have we impacted lives because of our relationship with an organization, or a nonprofit, or a client, whatever it might be. so, that is part of meaning for our workforce. 

jean: right. that is so powerful because i would like to think that, you know, back in the day, what you were giving back to the community or whatever cause you might support, was coming from you individually. and it wasn’t being driven by your place of work. you know, in this case, from your cpa firm. and you do see more and more nowadays, firms promoting their activities out in the community or organizations they support, the teamwork of the people contributing and doing whatever they’re doing for those organizations. 

kassi: absolutely. and that is…again, i think that is a strategic choice around employee experience. when you look at mckinsey’s most recent data on gen z, when they look at what employees or future employees are looking at around selecting a place to work, 93% say they look at the impact that the organization is having on society. and that’s before work-life balance. i don’t like the word balance, but work-life integration. that’s before inclusion. that’s before competitive salary. ninety three percent are looking at impact on society. now, does that generalize specifically to the accounting population? maybe not at 93%, but it’s still a very significant factor. so, how do we do that? and the great thing is, is that, the work that the profession does is so aligned with that desire. part of it’s just about telling a better story. it’s about highlighting that impact. so it’s not that we have to go create this kind of impact in a new way. most firms are already doing this. they’re just not telling the story in a way to help their own employees even really fully grasp what a difference that they are already making. so i think that’s an important thing to think about on purpose. 

jean: yes, it is. and for listeners and viewers, there is at least your first hot tip of the day. i think firms are more accustomed now to creating client testimonials or case studies about the work they do for the clients and the impact that they had. and that could easily be transitioned to what the firm is doing for clients, what they’re helping the clients achieve, the connections that they’re making. and what a recruiting tool… 

kassi: yes, absolutely. 

jean: okay, we’re going to stop there because… okay, we’re going to… just in the recording, we’re going to start. you got stuck there for a second. but i’ll just make a note. and actually, it’s due to my internet, so i apologize for that. so we’re at about 10… i’m just going to make a note, so they’ll cut that out. okay. 

kassi: perfect. 

jean: right. so i’m just going to start again with, you know, collecting client testimonials or case studies is something that firms are used to collecting and sharing, and using that for marketing purposes. and collecting the community related or the meaningful work that firms are doing could be a great recruiting tool. 

kassi: absolutely. i’ve really challenged firms to think about their employee value proposition. how do we articulate that the same way we do our client value proposition? and is that coming through in our recruiting materials, on our website, in our social media? the thing about the employee story that i think we do need to connect there for listeners, jean, is that the employee experience is not separate from the client experience. so, when we look at, again, the data here, the employee experience drives the client experience. and i like to say, you can’t have a client experience that’s better than your employee experience. and in many cases, when i’m working with an organization and i’m seeing client service failures, what you can point that back to is really employee experience failures. and that’s solvable. but we don’t need to think about employee experience as a… it’s not a fluffy component. culture is not something that is a nice to have. if we’re going to think about longevity, and we’re going to think about growth, and we’re going to think about client success, it really starts with your human capital. so we have to be as intentional in planning for that as we do in the other aspects of our business. 

jean: right. one thing you mentioned a lot is the fact that work is a subset of life and not separate from it. i think that’s a bit what you were just talking about. so how do you get that? or how do you make that tangible, whether that’s through benefits, or leadership, or different policies? you know, talk to us a little bit about that. 

kassi: so when you think about generational shifts, i think let’s kind of like set the context here. so if you go back a couple generations, we might could even think in our mind about former leaders that we had who might say something like, work is work, leave that at home. and that’s just not the way most people are coming and showing up to work now. and especially, again, millennials and gen z see work as a subset of life. i talk about it being like spaghetti. it’s all intertwined. and the thing about that is, that means purpose and meaning aren’t just about what happens after they close their laptops. purpose and meaning are happening in every interaction. but interestingly enough, with that work is work, life is life kind of former mindset, we also saw that a lot of the attempts at creating a better place to work was around benefits. it was around the transactional component of the employee experience. and not to say again, these things don’t matter. they matter. but extra pto or supplements for the gym, those transactional pieces, those are benefits and features. what we see is people are much more interested now in the relational components of the workplace. 

so do i have a mentor? do i have someone who helps me see my career potential? do i have someone who is coaching me regularly and giving me feedback in a way that helps me grow? and maybe even more basic than that. do i have a really clear set of expectations for my role? do i know what right looks like for this project? and we miss the mark on that a lot. you know, the profession itself has not been great historically at training managers to be leaders. we might manage a project well, we might manage our capacity budget and our project timeline like masters. but that often ignores the human components of all of this. and so, navigating the nuances of people, and preferences, and personality, all of that is also an incredibly important role in being a place that people want to work. that i’m seen as an individual, that i’m understood for my strengths, that i’m valued for my contribution. but we aren’t training or teaching that level of skill set at the rate that we need to be doing that yet to make real impact on, you know, public accounting, finance organizations, really being a place that people want to work. 

jean: right. so tell us the challenge that work from home or different work policies, because let’s face it, lots of firms aren’t requiring their people to be in there every day. although i know there are firms that do and they’re really trying to pull them back every day. what kind of challenge does that add to the mentorship and the coaching you were just talking about? 

kassi: oh, it’s making it extremely challenging for a couple reasons. one, we weren’t good at it before the pandemic when everyone went home. okay? but it is easier when you have people kind of in your three or six foot radius. you see them and that does at least remind you, oh, i need to tell them this. so the intentionality that is required to develop others in a hybrid or a remote environment is significant. but a couple things i do want to touch on here, because beginning of the pandemic, jean, we were all guessing. i would laugh because three months in, we had people who were experts in remote workforces and hybrid work. and i’m like, nobody is an expert in this yet. but now we have a lot of data. and one of the things that i am seeing and i want to really just raise my hand and say, let’s consider this, is that return to office requirements are not working. what we’re seeing is that about 10% of employees are voluntarily quitting when we see that as… now, that’s across professions. that’s not public accounting [inaudible 00:17:17]. the majority of that are women. and that of course then undergirds a lot of the other challenges that we’ve tried to overcome in the profession around not losing women at that manager level, growing them into senior leadership roles. 

so the other side of that data is that, organizations are not suffering because of the work from home component or the hybrid component. what we’re actually suffering from is the inability to lead and manage people well. and that doesn’t matter if it’s in the office or behind a screen. the concepts of leadership are, you know, location agnostic. so it’s really a matter of, are we thoughtfully setting expectations? are we available for coaching and feedback? are we able to hold people accountable and have difficult conversations? are we creating space for real connection? are we making meaning a priority in task assignments? so whether that’s through a computer screen or whether that’s sitting next to someone in the workplace, location doesn’t necessarily guarantee either of those things are going to take place. 

jean: right, right. that’s an excellent point. what is the biggest misconception leaders have about what their people need to feel engaged? 

kassi: it’s a really great question. so i’m going to go back to that deloitte study, because i think it’s just full of information. so, gen z and our millennials are very, very focused on growth and learning. and career development is a component of that. although this is very kind of eye-opening, only 6% of gen z said that they wanted to reach the highest level of senior leadership. which that is a huge red flag. firms need to be thinking about that. succession planning. i mean, i’m losing a little sleep over this at night. but engagement is not this elusive term that we need to be chasing. i would just tell you, engagement is a measurement of how well we’re connecting people to the organization. are we giving them growth and development opportunities? and growth isn’t a promotion. that’s also something i’ve really tried to help people understand. we’re not just talking about changing a title. we’re saying, are we helping them learn new skills? are we giving them some opportunity to dig into things that really spark their own interest? 

and i’ll give you a practical example. it’s happening in firms across the country right now. obviously ai is one of the hottest topics in every conversation. and what i see is that we’ve got, often a senior leadership team or an executive committee, that they’re sitting in a room and they’re trying to think about ai implementation and practices, policies. and then you’ve got a group of employees who are in the trenches and they’re saying, if you’ll just let me try, let me get my hands in this. and so we’ve got this push and pull, and not understanding that by kind of saying, hold your horses, tone it down a minute, we’re actually hindering their innate desire and need for that development and growth, and to learn something new, and to bring that in and be able to then turn around and say, look what i can do. look what we could do together with this. so that’s a really practical place. it’s not classroom training. not that it doesn’t have a place there, but it’s, am i learning something new about how to accomplish this task? am i able to be creative in how i go about the work itself? those are all things that lead to engagement. 

now, there’s other things as well. i think it is important that we talk about well-being. that is one of those kind of, again, nebulous terms. but what we really are talking about there, i think, is really autonomy. it’s really about the ability to have some control over when, and where, and how we work, even what we work on. mental health is something that’s definitely entered the corporate culture in a way that it didn’t really exist before the pandemic. and i think that’s a really positive thing. but i think, again, employers attempt to create a program around it. let’s give them a benefit. and part of that well-being is just, what does it feel like to work in this organization? what does it feel like to work with you as my manager or as my partner? and it’s much more relational driven. you know, i want to know as an employee that people care about what’s going on in my life, that they care about all that spaghetti, right? we’re not one-dimensional people. we’re not only workers. i’m a mom. i’m a caregiver, an aging parent. i’m a volunteer. i’m a board member. and many other things i’m probably blinking on right now. but it’s all of that combined. 

and engagement increases when employees feel like all of that is honored about what they bring in to the workforce. and let’s be honest, that creates much more well-rounded employees when we have those varying dimensions. and so, for us to try and put, you know, these boxes around people’s roles, it really, i think, limits how cared for they feel, which is directly tied to engagement. the flip side of that is care and belief that others have your best interests at heart. it’s also a really important part of trust. and if we want employees to come in engaged and, you know, given that discretionary effort that everybody wants to talk about, given that extra, trust has to exist. and so it’s all really intertwined in these human relationship elements that, again, we’ve not always been good at addressing or teaching in the profession. but i don’t think we’re alone in that. i think that’s probably across industries and professions. 

jean: yeah, i believe that too. yeah, because we can say some possibly negative things about the accounting profession. but in this instance, i think businesses of any kind are dealing with these same issues about employee engagement. yeah. so i think you may have touched a little bit upon this next question, and i’m going to ask it anyway. what behaviors do you observe in leaders that are really good about recruiting and retaining people? 

kassi: yeah. so this is a place where i think we make it so much harder than it has to be. in fact, the organizations that do this really well, or the teams, sometimes it’s localized to a team that does this really well. they have real clarity around expectations. so, they have clarity around what the role is. they have clarity around what job specifics are. they have clarity around what our flexibility practices are. they just have great and direct clear communication within the team. that’s one of the first things. brené brown says, “clear is kind.” and that is really kind of where they start from. they shoot straight, but they do it from a place of, i want you to know everything you need to do to be successful. and i’m going to tell you everything i can tell you to help you be successful. so it’s this kind of clarity that’s part of it. 

i think another thing that i see, again, simple. they’re making sure that the employees have the resources they need to do their job. so i call it a no hassle policy. whether that’s a second screen, or that’s a vpn that doesn’t crash, or whatever it might be, the little things make a really big difference. and so, that’s kind of baseline, but we don’t do those things very well. i think the second thing that we see in organizations that are attracting and retaining talent, is they are intentional to know the employee, what their strengths are. what are their career and growth goals? and they’re trying to create opportunity for them to have exposure to that. so, it’s a very individualized approach to the employee experience. and that can be a challenge in large organizations, where we feel like there’s so many of it, but it’s really at the team level. you know, this is something that happens at the local manager, supervisor, staff kind of level. it’s, know your people, know what’s going on in their life. ask the question, how can we support you? because that builds a sense of belonging, which is really the third piece. 

belonging is about seeing how my individual strengths fit into that bigger piece of the puzzle. it’s understanding that i do make a difference here. it’s believing we make a difference here. and then i think the last thing that i see is coming back to that desire for growth. it is giving intentional effort and opportunity for people to grow and develop in their careers. and it’s interesting to me because we’ve got growth and learning as the number one thing we’re seeing in this deloitte study, you know, that they’re asking for in their careers. and yet we’re still saying that 6% have no desire to reach the highest level of leadership. so, you know, i think if we kind of tease that out, what we see is, this isn’t about motivation. this isn’t a motivation problem. this is about young professionals not seeing the way it’s been done before as attractive. and so we’re not modeling lives that they aspire to. and yet they still want to grow and develop. so there’s a gap there that we’re all trying to figure out. but i would tell you, i have great hope and i have a lot of optimism in this area. 

i started working in the profession almost 20 years ago, and it has changed significantly since then. i don’t see that… i’m not saying it doesn’t exist anywhere. but i don’t see that badge of honor around, you know, i worked the most hours of anyone in the firm last year. now, people are very much more inclined to boast about getting billable hours down and getting revenue up. which is where we all need to go, right? 

jean: right, exactly. 

kassi: so i think that, you know, if we’re going to try and sum that up, what got the leaders that are in the senior leadership roles, what got them there isn’t going to get the next generation there. and today, leaders and future leaders really need to focus on, i call them power skill, but the human skills, the human elements of work that make work a place that people want to come, and stay, and contribute their best efforts. we can’t separate the fact that we’re human from the jobs, or the tasks, or the projects that we complete. so, that’s kind of a really long answer to go with all of that. but it’s a complex topic. and to try and simplify it into a two or three checklist is hard. but again, i think clarity of expectation, individual contribution and alignment, making sure that belonging is really a component of how it all plays together, and given growth opportunities. if we can just do those four basic things, i mean, you would be an employer of choice. 

jean: right. that’s so… that was a great summary. i have two more questions. and i’m switching this around just because of that answer you just gave. do you feel that smaller firms have an advantage in this area about creating this employee engagement as opposed to larger firms? or is it that this is so people, and i’ll say personality focused that the size of the firm is not relevant, that everybody has the same challenge? 

kassi: so, i think from designing a culture, yes, midsize and smaller firms have the nimbleness that they can articulate, and probably set expectations and make movement more quickly at a global level. but again, culture is always localized. and so, you know, when you work in a really large organization, you’ve probably said things or observed things like, well, this office is really different than this office. and that’s because of the human interaction component that takes place. so, i think it’s both and. i think there’s an opportunity from a large organization to set the expectation. but it always comes down to the individual. i used to work for a managing partner who said, you know, we change the culture one conversation at a time. and he was… 

jean: i bet i could guess who that is. 

kassi: i will give a shout out to joey havens there. he’s been a great friend and mentor. but it was so correct. but there also is a way to operationalize that and to bring it into the larger components of strategy. i mean, i think employee experience needs to be a key part of a firm strategic plan. it’s not just what happens by accident. and so to think that we separate, you know… when you think about capital for an organization, the human capital is the most nimble. it’s the most innovative. it has the ability to tell a story that, you know, your technology capital or the other parts don’t have. and i think if we could shift from seeing people as a call center to seeing people as an asset, it would really change how we go about serving the client, growing. this is a strategic part of growing our firms, owning our futures, doing whatever it is, on our long term vision. like, people aren’t separate from that. and it’s not a byproduct. i think it has to be thoughtfully considered just as anything else is. 

jean: yeah, that’s a really important message that you’re sharing. so our last question is a bonus question. so you share a lot of information about leadership. who is a leader in your life that has inspired you? 

kassi: okay, i have so many. i actually… oh, man, narrowing it down to one would be really challenging. okay, so i’m gonna kind of go off the beaten path of this one, and i want to call out someone that goes all the way back to college. and so his name was dr. jimmy abraham. and he was actually the director of student affairs at mississippi state university. and he’s the one that really got me into this leadership game. he got me into studying leadership, not directly, but just by how he modeled leadership. i was in a student organization of his that required us sometimes to be somewhere at 4:00 in the morning. and he would us pumped and excited. and it just got me asking bigger questions like, what does it take to motivate people? and why do some people want to go all in while others don’t? and so, to this day, dr. abraham stays in my life. but he taught me a lesson, jean, that’s one of my core values in my practice, which is, nothing is routine when dealing with the lives of people. 

and i have carried that through every interaction i’ve ever had because of what he said, but also what he showed. and so i got a shout out to him because my career was really molded by what he modeled for me a very long time ago. i won’t say how many years, but a very long time ago. 

jean: that is fantastic. and i just think it’s valuable for us to take a step back every once in a while and think through our lives, and our education, and people that we’ve met along the way, and what they’ve meant to you and contributed to you. i think that’s a lot of… and i think that also helps us, you know, pay it forward, and to be that inspiration or leader for other people. what a fantastic answer. 

well, i’ve been speaking today with kassi rushing, ceo and owner at kassi rushing consulting. kassi, thank you for your time today. this was inspirational for me. i mean, you’ve got a lot of valuable information to share that i know our listeners and viewers are going to benefit from.