Paul K. Rudoy recognizes that a structured, deadline-oriented
profession like his in the accounting industry doesn’t need extra stress.
So the managing partner of Horovitz, Rudoy & Roteman LLC
fosters a culture of openness and personal development with his staff of 45.
The lunches with partners and mentoring of personal and professional goals has
led to minimal firm turnover.
“The biggest challenge for people to get ahead is when they
don’t feel that there are people there to reach out to them knowing that the
goal is to make them better,” Rudoy says.
Smart Business spoke with
Rudoy about developing a mentoring program.
How do you decide each employee’s mentoring components?
We provide a survey so hopefully we can identify their needs.
A lot of the professional needs we, as partners, are aware of in terms of their
development but sometimes making that work-life balance we’re not as aware of.
We try to get them to prioritize what their goals are. For
certain people, work-life balance is very important, especially people who are
starting families and have outside issues that they are responsible for. Other
people, it’s purely technical; they want to be able to move ahead in a way that
is just related to their professional development.
What we try to do with that survey is ask questions
specifically on what they’re looking for for some guidance.
How do you match each employee with a mentee?
We have a mentor committee that will match them up with a
mentor. Some mentors are designed more to help them professionally and some
help them more on their work-life-balance issues. It gives them an opportunity
to have somebody on a regular basis (help them with their) goals and work on
them together.
It’s a little different than you would have with your straight
career goal where you’re getting personnel evaluation on your achievements, but
so somebody can be your champion and your cheerleader to help you move ahead.
We try to have the mentor not be somebody that they’re going
to be working with at a very significant level. In other words, the person you
work with the most throughout the year, I try not to have them be the mentor
mentee because they’re already getting that mentoring from that person in some
way or form. Try not to have that overlap so you have a different point of
view.
Just be sensitive. Certain people are going to say this is
going to be very important to me. If somebody is at the stage of trying to pass
the CPA exam or somebody that is trying to get a master’s in taxation or some
other designation that would help the firm, we would want to place them with somebody
who is knowledgeable about that process.
You try to match them up with somebody who has strength in
that area or knowledge in that area to get them to their goal.
