Talent Matters: The Softer Side of Finance

Last week’s post covered the need for finance employees to move beyond the idea that good “business partnership” means providing good customer service. Finance employees need to challenge line managers and create a healthy tension that prompts strong and effective decision making.

To ensure this happens, CFOs and their direct reports must provide training that develops the “soft skills” of their team, and helps them with two requirements in particular: understanding how the company that employs them makes a profit, and being able to educate and influence their business partners about a range of subjects. The tripartite phrase we often use is, “teaching, tailoring, and asserting control” over relevant finance issues.

These skills have become as important as the ability to create informative spreadsheets or to ensure that the firm’s overseas earnings are repatriated in the most cost-effective way. To borrow from the logician’s lexicon, technical skills are necessary for the finance role but now insufficient without the ability to explain how the numbers should shape managers’ decisions.

The CFOs that we speak with certainly echo these sentiments but 80% report that their staff lack soft skills. Our conversations and research also show a discrepancy between the most effective finance teams – with a CFO that is aware of the importance of soft skills – and those that are less effective, and focus almost entirely on the importance of technical skills. In our experience, not only do the best CFOs put effort into their employees’ development, they also provide a range of business development opportunities for their staff with the greatest potential to be the function’s future senior executives.

The most enlightened managers do this because not only do they realize that putting in a little effort now will make Finance a lot more effective in the future, but that employees respond well to development and promotion opportunities and consequently are more likely to increase their discretionary effort (effort over and above what their role minimally requires) and are less likely to leave.

Going Beyond Technical Skills

To help finance team members develop these soft skills,  CFOs must help their teams understand the corporation’s strategy, the opportunity costs of different decisions, and how to bring their finance expertise to bear in suggesting a course of action to managers who are often more senior than them. Leading firms assess training requirements for the entire finance team and build a skills model that supports the 3-5 year goals of the entire function.

CFO Executive Board (CFO) clients should use this case study to see how chemicals firm Borealis identified the most important skills required for decision support roles; Finance Leadership Exchange Elite (FLEx-E) clients should use this version, and Controllers’ Leadership Roundtable (CTLR) clients should use this version.

CFO clients should also use this case study to see how Amcor builds interpersonal and cognitive skills among its finance staff; FLEx-E clients should use this version, CTLR clients should use this version, and Finance Leadership Exchange (FLEx) clients should use this version.

Providing Business Development Opportunities

Beyond soft skills, finance team members need a comprehensive understanding of the challenges that line employees face before they can successfully support important business decisions. The best way to provide this understanding is through on-the-job learning; progressive finance managers make business unit rotations a core part of finance career planning and employee development.

CFO clients should use this case study to see how 3M created a range of development opportunities through rotations; FLEx-E clients should use this version, and CTLR clients should use this version. CFO clients should this case study to see how the CGI Group secures business unit buy-in for rotations by finance staff; FLEx-E clients should use this version, and CTLR clients should use this version.

Senior finance staff often advise their business partners to think about long-term as well as short-term goals, and to moderate their decisions accordingly, but increasingly that advice should apply to some of Finance’s in-house management as well. Use the fields below if you want to leave a comment, and CEB clients should contact me if they have any questions.