The Role
As an Audit Director, you will provide strategic leadership, overseeing major client engagements and ensure high-quality audit delivery and compliance. You will manage key client relationships, drive business development, and mentor senior team members. Your role focuses on strengthening the firm's reputation, profitability, and long-term growth.
Core Skills
Client Focus
- Take the lead on managing and building client relationships with Azets clients with responsibility for developing relationships on key clients
- Identifies and delivers service improvements
- Demonstrates a deep understanding of client underlying future needs
- Understands current & future forces that will shape and influence clients' needs
- Uses a variety of influence approaches for strategic impact
- Makes decisions based on maintaining long term relationships
- Delivers excellent client satisfaction as measured by relevant KPIs
- Manages client complaints in accordance with Azets processes
- Takes the lead on cross service line delivery on own client base.
Technical Excellence
- Recognised as a technical expert
- Provides oversight and takes responsibility for ensuring that team members possess the necessary skills, knowledge and behaviours required to deliver accurate, high quality work for our clients and assesses the team’s ability to deal with future technical or regulatory developments and takes steps to address any skill gaps including managing talent / resource and software planning
- Have a broad knowledge of the more technical aspects of other services lines – be able to spot and talk at a high level about matters outside of own service line
- Thinks beyond own area to develop capability
- Ensures that quality is beyond a minimum level, with adherence to key processes and ensuring appropriate training is undertaken
Commitment
- Proactive leadership of tasks to achieve business plan
- Creates and maintains positive environment
- Able to look holistically at department to promote wellbeing, and a collaborative environment
- Is able to pick up on the ‘mood’ of the business and take steps to raise team morale as appropriate
- Leading by example and consistently setting high standards for professionalism and ethical behaviour
- Champions the Azets brand, building on our portfolio of services, values, reputation, and market profile
- Supports the continued development of a consistent and unified Azets brand, strategy and values and is able to challenge colleagues and clients who are not demonstrating these behaviours.
Attention to Detail
- Encourages team to raise standards and eliminate errors
- Tracks and acts on quality issues
- Is transparent and shares information with colleagues which could benefit the business, working with the partners in the team
- Is aware of the skills and abilities of those around them, communicating tasks clearly with deadlines and supporting through to completion
- Communicates to the team the bigger picture and objectives of an assignment and is able to strike a balance between seeking further detail and an efficient and commercial output
- Actively takes part in and contributes to the development of Azets quality monitoring processes in own part of the business.
Efficiency
- Deals effectively with conflicting objectives, priorities and agendas
- Draws upon organisational data, understanding of market trends, and latest thinking to identify and take forward ideas for improvements and efficiencies
- Leads the way with digital transformation initiatives through clear understanding of the program and embedding throughout their team
- Is able to critically assess effective use of time, for example ensuring all meetings have a defined purpose and agreed output.
Key accountabilities
Decision Making
- Takes a dynamic and flexible approach to decision making, using live data to recognise when different approaches are required
- Holds genuinely open discussions, listens to others views, and show a willingness to compromise
- Is able to present a range of possible decision making options to stakeholders, highlighting the positive and negative implications of each to reach a decision
- Is able to identify and extract relevant data to support a decision from a large volume and wide range of sources
- Consistently demonstrates awareness and sound judgement on decisions which are able to be made autonomously and escalates those that cannot to more senior stakeholders
- Actively reviews and adapts past decisions where data suggests original expectations are not being met.
Leading People
- Communicates direction clearly and brings colleagues along on the journey balancing business priorities and people priorities with respect
- Trusts and appropriately empowers team members
- Promotes a culture of openness and trust
- Actively looks for opportunities to develop others, gives responsibility to others and willingly delegates as appropriate
- Comfortable in voicing opinions that may conflict with the status quo
- Builds empathy and support to ensure buy-in and ownership of ideas
- Always upholds and demonstrates integrity
- Has oversight of wider team’s development and their future career progression and leads the support strategies.
Leading Yourself
- Is able to lead a team to achieve resolution of complex challenges
- Stays true to leadership style even when under pressure
- Can step outside comfort zone and actively pursues new challenges and opportunities that support the business
- Lead by example by openly pursuing continuous personal and professional development and demonstrates self-awareness
- Demonstrates resilience but is able to recognise own limitations and draws on and is accepting of support from own network when required.
Driving Business Growth
- Strategically develops and refines own external network and shows evidence of winning work from this network for own team and for Azets more widely
- Able to critically assess the value of business development efforts and takes steps to refine own and team strategies that are under performing
- Leads and builds own client portfolio, demonstrating fee growth from existing services and evidence of successfully introducing new services
- Can identify the commercial realities of a client engagement and is able to seek agreement across service lines on approach to fee setting and fee growth
- Is able to articulate the value proposition for the services the team delivers to support fee growth
- Uses chain of indirect influence. This may include the use of technical experts to help sell a concept by adding credibility
- Takes the lead on ensuring minimum pricing initiatives are followed and is proactive in RRR reviews.
Living Our Values
- New to Azets: Shows good understanding of our company values, and making good progress towards consistently demonstrating required behaviours
- Existing Colleague: Consistently ‘lives our values’ - demonstrates expected behaviours in line with our company values
Technical Skills
- Acts as an engagement lead on assignments supporting the RI on more complex or larger assignments – acting as a quasi RI where necessary or appropriate
- Takes responsibility for audit approach, direction of audit assignments and assessment of risk and response
- Actively involved in supporting peers and Partners with department strategy and future planning
- Works with Managers to identify high performers in team and support applications for Azets development programmes to help retain key team members
- Supports Managers with identifying and addressing any underperformance or inefficiency within the team, obtaining additional training and development resources as necessary. If required, lead on performance improvement consultations
- Responsible for identifying and pursuing growth opportunities to support departmental growth targets
- Responsible for audit quality (communicating, implementing and monitoring) within department and regionally
- Leading the way for change, innovation and technological advances for the wider team. You understand developments in technology and use appropriate technologies on audit assignments where they can demonstratively improve quality
- Has responsibility for leading a specific area of strategy/operations within the department, for example finance or people
- Demonstrate appropriate oversight and responsibility when utilising the expertise of others during audit assignments
- Anticipates issues and risks within audit engagements and takes timely action to address audit risks – maximising audit effectiveness
- You set the tone for audit engagements, communicating and consulting appropriately and effectively to deliver high quality audits
- Responsible for monitoring and managing economics on each job across portfolio, including:
Being aware of the firm KPIs on all audit jobs ensuring individual job performance is within these KPIs
Communicating process for managing budget and overruns within the team
Ensuring that all time is booked to audit codes
Identifying appropriate fee increases, scope changes, overruns and securing (alongside the partner as appropriate) with the client on a timely and professional basis
Debriefing with client and team to identify efficiencies and improvements going forward.
Qualifications
Holds an accountancy qualification or qualified by experience (e.g. ACA/ACCA/CA).
Essential Experience
It is expected that the above core and technical skills will have been developed through study alongside work experience in an accountancy practice.
Job Reference: AZ04648
