The CFO Role- How to manage Diverse Responsibilities and Win

Welcome Finance/Accounting/HR/IT/Legal/Insurance/Risk Management Professionals!

This blog is my response to the difficulties CFO's or other Financial Executives at middle market ($50MM-$1B) and even smaller organizations face with diverse responsibilities and a myriad of intiatives that cross all parts of the organizations.  This frustration led one of my fellow CFO's at a CFO forum to say "I feel like I have to be 5 miles wide in the scope of my work but I can only be 1 inch deep in my expertise".  So that is the genesis of this blog, how to be an effective CFO over multiple responsibilities and choose strategic initiatives to spend your time on while not requiring the investment of your personal time to be an expert (after all, some of us have been known to have families that occassionally enjoy our company, or at least our presence).

What will you get by reading this weekly blog?  Each of you are undoubtedly inundated with sales calls from banks, consultants, insurance brokers and vendors of all sorts.  I will share my experience of cutting through the clutter of emails and voicemails to spend time on partnerships that work and how to monitor and use those relationships to be your experts and drive results.  Also, when to cut ties and upgrade.  I look forward to sharing some insights on the initiatives I am working on including global expansion, M&A, treasury management, supply chain enhancements, ERP upgrades, outsourcing and automation and using HR to build a culture of high engagement. Some posts will be status updates on initiatives, some will be learnings with links to learn more.  This blog is commercial free but feel free to send links if you had particular success and great learnings.

Please use this forum to multiply the learnings, disagree with me and show that there is more than one way to achieve the goal of building profitable business models.  Give me any feedback to make this blog better and this will grow with your help. 

Where to start?  How about effective leadership?  If there is one thing I want for you to be an expert in (5 miles deep), it is how to get the most from your team(s).  I picked up some great learnings from University of Chicago/IE Business School's Global Senior Management Program this past May/June and here is the action plan/excercises I think are critical to getting to be the type of Leader that your staff will remember as worth of following with their hearts and minds.

1. Leaders need to be authentic and care about their staff like family.  A great first exercise is write your name in the middle of a blank piece of paper and draw lines out (like spokes of a bicycle) with the names of the 8 people most critical to your performance at work (not including your spouse).  To care about your staff in an authentic way, you must know a lot about them.  For each of the people you listed- Do you know if they are married, have kids (what are their names and ages), where they are going on holiday this year?  We often choose to invest time getting to know our peers and our CEO/President and perhaps your staff knows all these things about you, but if you haven't spent time listening to who they are beyond work, how can lead them as individuals with strengths and weakness?  For those people you feel a little less aware of but are critical to your performance, commit on your calendar for at least 15 minutes to learn something new about them or patterns in their behavior.  Learn something about them by listening and observing first, sharing yourself personally before you ask them to.

2. Know your strengths and your team(s)- diversity is good.  While many analysis of personalities and working styles exist (FIRO-B, Myers Briggs, etc).  I like the strength finders http://www.strengthsfinder.com/home.aspx which gives you a top 5 that you can focus on what will make you a great leader (your top 2 probably) and if you have your staff take the same survey, you will find the complementary strengths to effective teams like Ideation/Maximizer with Activator and Relator.  This goes beyond the roles we have on our teams as job descriptions and allows you to think about which staff is good at building concensus, which will write the plan to get it done on time on budget, who will generate ideas, who will refine them and who will find the downside of doing something new (risk management).  If those traits aren't on your team- get them from the outside vendors like lawyers, consultants, interns, etc.  The one thing you need internally is the someone to generate ideas and build excitement.  This doesn't always have to be you- but rarely can that be done from outside the organization.

3. Motivation drives behavior, learn what drives you and your team.
How:
a. listen and observe using (closed question, open ended question then probe)
b. what is their job history?
c. family background
d. free time pursuits
e. observe what excites them and what bores them

Types of Motivation:
1. Lifestyle
2. Structure and predictability
3. Satisfying relationships
4. Recognition
5. Power
6. Autonomy and growth

People move in and out of these 6 at different levels but the highest performers are heavier on 4-6 and your leadership should not only respond to types of motivation, but can influence it - low feedback on the meeting the needs of someone high on 4-6 results in them quitting or falling back into low effort and more emphasis on 1-3.

That's enough background on knowing more about your team before you embark on truly challenging initiatives- next week I will tackle some of the initiatives on my plate.  Thanks for reading!