The Olympics have medals and schools often grade on a bell shapped curve but when it comes to executive education, CFO's and other senior managers are content to attend seminars or training and receive a "Certificate of Completion". How can you engage your competitive spirit and benefit the organization you serve at the same time for better results?
As a CFO with responsibility over HR, IT, Legal, Accounting and Finance as well as risk management it is hard to have the level of depth in a topic necessary to avoid conversations around initiatives that are "dumbed down" to the expertise of myself or other senior managers. This presents issues around capital approvals as well. Certainly there is a skill to being a general manager but to engage your experts that are also your direct reports, I have a a new approach.
For the month of August I am engaging in a book swap with my IT Director. He has identified my technical reading "Mastering VMware vSphere 5" by Scott Lowe and I have identified my technical reading for him as "The new CFO Financial Leadership Manual" by Steven Bragg. The criteria is that I have read my book (with mastery of the content) and he has done the same. By the deadline of August 31st we are ready to orally quiz each other on retention and mastery of the content- loser buys lunch.
Will I be able to configure virtual servers in our network by reading one book? Would I ask the IT director to structure a reverse triangular merger anytime soon? The answer to both is no, however I expect the financial concepts of ROI on IT investments to be part of his thinking and vocabulary while I already can identify the hardware savings associated with running multiple operating system instances on the same server.
This blog is called "5 miles wide, 1 inch deep" because the role of a CFO or any senior executive prevents us from being 5 miles deep in any one area if we manage several diverse departments, but perhaps it is possible to be more than one inch deep if we challenge ourselves to continuous learning with an incentive to "Win".
I would love to hear other approaches that may work. I will update this blog with the results of this challenge... even if I lose.
In terms of enhancing understanding between different functions, a series of "brown bag" lunches is often helpful. These are events held during the lunch period where each month one function takes its turn explaining what they do. Attendees then leave with a better understanding of what is important in different settings, faciliting higher awareness and cooperation.
ReplyDelete