Hidden Profit Leaks in CPA Firms: How to Fix Broken Time Cultures
It’s Not the Clock—It’s the Culture
If it feels like there’s never enough time in your firm, the real culprit may not be your workload but how your culture shapes your leaders' relationship with time. For many CPA firms, this is not the exception; it is the norm. These visible challenges are often misdiagnosed as time management problems. They reflect a deeper issue: an organizational culture that unconsciously rewards urgency, overload, and reactive leadership.
Time management is not a personal productivity tool. It is a mirror of your firm’s leadership, values, and expectations. The greatest opportunity is to reshape your firm’s relationship with time, beginning with how leadership models and reinforces its use.
What the Research Tells Us
Scientific research provides clear insights into why professionals struggle with time. Studies show that deadline-driven work activates hyperbolic discounting, which causes people to delay tasks until urgency spikes (König & Kleinmann, 2005). Behavioral scientists also highlight urgency bias, where professionals gravitate toward quick wins rather than strategic priorities (Koch & Kleinmann, 2002). Perhaps most importantly, research shows that many professionals feel they have little control over their time. This external control leads to disengagement and frustration (Uzun, 2023).
Workplace culture influences time management through three key mechanisms: shared values, stress levels, and task orientation. Firms that promote deep work, strategic planning, and psychological safety create healthier time behaviors. In contrast, cultures that reward constant urgency, reactive multitasking, or visible busyness lead to fragmented focus and burnout. These findings confirm what many partners already feel. Time pressure is not just about doing more. It is about systemic habits, beliefs, and structures that promote reactivity over strategy.
The 7 Levels of Time: A Leadership Lens on Time Behavior
As a leadership and transitions coach, I work with professionals to explore how their mindset shapes their relationship with time. Based on the Energy Leadership© framework, here are the seven levels of time and how they show up in CPA firms:
Level 1: Time as the Enemy "There is never enough time. I am drowning." This often shows up as burnout, disengagement, and passive compliance. Leaders operating here experience "victim energy," feeling trapped by time and powerless to change their circumstances.
Level 2: Time as a Threat "Stop wasting my time!" Time is blamed on others. Leaders express resentment and micromanage, leading to conflict and defensiveness across teams.
Level 3: Time as a Tolerated Burden "If I can just push through, it will be fine." Leaders cope by pushing through inefficiencies and tolerating suboptimal processes to meet deadlines. If they truly believed they had more control over their time, it would open up new clarity and possibilities.
Level 4: Time as a Support Tool "You seem strapped for time. How can I help?" Leaders act with empathy, aiming to support others in managing time. The risk here is overextending themselves and losing sight of strategic priorities.
Level 5: Time as a Resource to Create Value "How do I want to use my time?" Leaders here view time as an opportunity. They think strategically about prioritization, delegation, and long-term value creation.
Level 6: Time as Flow "We always have enough time." Leaders at this level experience a sense of flow. If you truly, wholeheartedly, believed there was enough time for everything important, how would your actions change? Systems, innovation, and synergy emerge naturally here.
Level 7: Time as Conscious Creation "Time is a construct that is both infinite and fleeting." Leaders are fully present, experiencing time as a medium for creation. They operate from a place of simply "being," fully aligned with purpose.
What level best describes how your firm approaches time?
Quick Assessment: Is Your Firm Running on Level 1 and 2 Time?
Do your leaders feel constantly behind?
Are staff burning out after each busy season?
Are meetings mostly reactive and deadline-driven?
Is time tracked, but not valued as a strategic asset?
Are high billable hours praised without regard to long-term value?
If you answered yes to three or more, your firm’s time culture could be silently draining profits and damaging retention.
Case Studies and Cultural Implications
In a landmark study, Anderson-Gough and colleagues examined how accounting trainees internalize time management. They found that billing culture trains professionals to perform time rather than lead through it. Time becomes a game of perception, not value (Anderson-Gough et al., 2001).
In another study, Loscher and Kaiser (2020) observed how accounting firms structure time to meet both professional and commercial demands. They found that leaders often manipulate time reporting to balance client expectations and internal politics. Rather than enabling performance, time tracking becomes a survival strategy.
Finally, Maalouf and Maalouf (2024) found that firms with clear time values and supportive cultures experience less stress, better performance, and stronger retention. Time culture is not abstract. It is measurable, visible, and impactful.
Five High-Impact Shifts for Leaders
Creating psychological safety is essential. Leaders must foster an environment where team members can speak candidly about their workloads, deadlines, and competing priorities without fear of judgment. Transparent conversations about time challenges are crucial for sustainable performance and realistic workload management.
Audit the language of time: Are your leaders speaking in terms of scarcity or strategy?
Create clear time norms: Block deep work time. Protect post-deadline recovery time.
Reward outcomes, not hours: Redefine what high performance looks like.
Develop time-capable managers: Train mid-level leaders to set boundaries and prioritize.
Use time retrospectives: After each busy season, ask teams what worked and what did not.
These changes do not require major investments. They begin with how leaders think and act.
What Firms Gain by Shifting Time Culture
Firms that invest in time leadership report higher realization rates, improved engagement, and stronger retention. Teams become more strategic, clients are served more proactively, and burnout decreases.
This work is not about time management workshops. It is about building leadership capacity and cultural alignment. It is about helping firms create environments where people can thrive and succeed sustainably.
Closing Thought
How your firm treats time reflects how it leads. When leaders model intentionality, communicate expectations clearly, and create safe spaces for honest conversations about capacity and workload, teams respond with clarity, trust, and higher performance. Shifting how your firm talks about and manages time is not just good leadership; it is a profitability and retention strategy.
This article contains my interpretation of the copyrighted work of Bruce D. Schneider and the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching.