Q&A: Moore Global CEO on culture and commoditisation

In an industry so fundamentally defined by its duty to help monitor and drive profitability, there arguably exists a glaring lack of ethical integrity.

This maxim is the guiding principle for Anton Collela, CEO of accountancy network Moore Global. The overarching question of “what it means to be a professional” sits at the heart of everything the organisation does, he says.

As such, Collela intends to position Moore Global as a “socially-ambitious” network, reinstating the compassion, accountability, and leadership culture that he says the professional services industry is so desperately crying out for.

During an extensive chat with Accountancy Age, Colella tells all, including the importance of his near twenty year stint as a teacher, the need for accounting firms to “love” their clients, and how to undo the “commoditisation” of professional services.

What has your career looked like prior to your current role with Moore Global?

I was a high school teacher for 18 years, so I’m very unique within leadership in the accounting profession. I’m not an accountant, I’ve never been an accountant. I’ve never worked in a professional services firm. So I really do come fairly fresh to leading a global network.

However, I was the CEO of the Institute for Chartered Accountants in Scotland (ICAS) for 12 years, which really exposed me to the whole area of profession. And I don’t just mean profession in terms of accounting, but the concept of profession in general, which has really given me quite a profound understanding of what professionalism should be. I think that has really been brought to bear in my current role as the CEO of an over 30,000-strong accountancy network in 113 countries.

The teaching aspect is pivotal for what I want to achieve in the Moore Global network, because the biggest challenge you’re dealing with when it comes to young people is the phrase “I can’t do it”. So when you deal with that day to day and you translate it into a global organisational structure, you understand the power of influence and persuasion and challenging people to do things they didn’t think they were capable of doing or even necessarily wanted to do. That’s a very powerful dynamic, and particularly when it comes to the whole agenda of people development.

We’re obsessed with developing people and helping them realise their potential, so I’ve translated that directly from life as a teacher to life as a global CEO. I think that’s enabled me to get to the destination of change a lot faster.

How does your experience with ICAS translate into your current role?

Obviously you do become familiar with the challenges facing the profession – firms’ development, standards regulation, all of that. They’ve all been very helpful, but to be honest, the most profound thing has been the understanding of what it means to be a professional.

I really do believe there’s an opportunity today for a rediscovering of what it means to be a professional. I mean, the word itself comes from the Latin, profiteri, which means “publicly declare” – I think that in some ways, the profession has an opportunity to rediscover what that public declaration has been.

Public confidence in professions generally isn’t always high, so I think there’s an opportunity for the accounting and professional services profession to start to publicly declare a bit more about what it stands for. And it isn’t all about making money – there’s nothing wrong with making money, but today’s public are looking for a group of people across the world who they can trust and depend on, who are reliable, who do the right thing, who act in the public interest, who tell the truth. I think that is a key driver for the work that we’re doing at Moore Global – rediscovering that professional identity as a global network.

How are you promoting and fostering this identity at Moore Global?

Well from the word go I’ve said that our ambition is to be the most respected professional services network in the world. Now people say to me, “that’s a bit arrogant”, why would you aspire to that? But to be honest, my understanding of the word respect is about being deeply admired, and I believe that’s a good ambition, and one we should be embracing. In doing this, we can begin to redefine the modern professional services network to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace.

I think there’s a huge opportunity to make culture a major part of that differentiation, and outstanding leadership is a key part of that for us. The single the biggest driver for differentiating yourselves and adding respect is by having outstanding leaders – I learned that early on at the Institute [ICAS]. The firms that were really desiring to rediscover what it means to be a profession were doing so with courageous leadership. Sometimes it’s easy to just be the same as everybody else, so we’re putting huge investment into our leadership culture.

And more broadly, we want to create a culture that is our way of life. That’s why we’re striving to develop a profoundly human culture that will stand out in today’s commodification of professional services.

What impact does a “human” culture have on an organisation?

When I said profoundly human, I mean that it’s a highly relational network – it’s about relationships with clients, and its highly personal rather than transactional. We develop a companionship relationship with our clients, not just a service relationship. I really believe that the world is crying out for more profoundly human organisations. When COVID happened, the tide went out a lot – people discovered the true nature of the organisation they worked for. We’ve been trying to act on that principle.

I mentioned companionship with our clients, and I’m unapologetic about saying that we love our clients. But do you know what it’s all rooted in? We’ve got to love our people first. If you want to create a profoundly human culture, it must be rooted in that human care for one other. So it comes back to leadership again – our leaders set the tone for that culture in every firm at every level of the organisation, building a community of givers and not takers.

Meanwhile, I think one of the biggest things that we can provide for our clients is peace of mind. But there’s no way you can do that if you’ve not built that relationship with them. If you don’t really understand who they are, it’s going to be difficult for us to make that impact in their lives.

But perhaps even more fundamentally than that, I really believe that we have an obligation to leave something behind as a profession, and to play a part in changing the world. We’re unapologetic about saying that we want to be a socially ambitious network. I don’t think there’s any organisation today that’s going to get away with being a purpose-free organisation – people won’t come and work for them and clients won’t want to be served by them.

We talk a lot about greenwashing among businesses today, but I think one of the dangers is falling into the trap of purpose washing. One of the things I learned about young people as a teacher is they know when you’re real and you’re not – they can smell a fraud a mile away. So we’ve got to create a purpose that they recognise straight away and are willing to give the rest of their career to.

What’s the key service area for Moore Global right now?

Well, we want to position ourselves as a leader in the delivery of ESG services. But here’s the key – I don’t want us delivering ESG services if we’re not doing acting on those principles ourselves. That’s the biggest challenge. We’re doing our own internal examination of how we’re living these principles, and we’ve appointed almost 200 Moore ambassadors within our firms who are going to drive the delivery of ESG within our firms. Sure, the leaders in the firms will be doing it, but the catalysts will be coming from below.

We want to empower young leaders right across our firms to be the catalyst for ensuring that we do what we say. And I want us to be able to go to market with ESG services from a position of authenticity. We’ve got a long way to go to be perfect, but we’ve set out our stall and we’re doing everything in our power to live it, not just sell it.

Put it this way, you can’t give something that you don’t have. You can’t talk about wanting to help your clients succeed if you’re not helping your people succeed. We can’t say that we really care for the needs of our clients if we’re not caring for our people. It’s two sides of the same coin. That’s where you start to understand the word authenticity – we’re working hard to try and be an authentic business.

What will be the key challenges for Moore global going forward?

We’re positioning ourselves as being a very socially ambitious organisation. We’re going to be led from the young and harness the talent across the network to provide local resourcing solutions. One of the big challenges for our firms is recruitment and so we’re using the size of our network to capture the resource flow across the world – what is needed in one country can be provided seamlessly in another. It’s what I would describe as “insourcing” rather than outsourcing.

For example, we have a number of firms around the world that are serviced directly from Johannesburg. This has become a key initiative for us in the years to come, and what we’re doing is effectively utilising to the maximum the resources that are available across the network.

But it’s not necessarily just about serving our firms’ resources – we also don’t want to lose any of our people. We want to create an environment where people come and stay. There are firms today that are haemorrhaging their people. We want to have the highest retention rates anywhere, and part of the way we do that, as I say, is delivering a purpose.

And the final key challenge is dealing with what I already described as the commoditisation of professional services. What we must be careful of is trying too hard to sell a product – in professional services, the product is the people. It’s about identifying the needs of clients over a long period of time and developing a relationship with them. They’re looking for a personal relationship, not a transactional ocule. That’s a big challenge, not just for us, but right across the profession.