The 20 habits so vividly described in Marshall Goldsmith’s best-seller, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, cuts to the heart of common leadership issues I see as an executive coach for finance leaders. These 20 behaviors may have helped you achieve promotions and accolades from management and peers alike. But, with expanded executive roles and broader responsibilities, those same behaviors often become liabilities and hold you back from continued professional advancement and achievements.
How does this apply to Controllers, VPs of Finance, CFOs? The role of the Chief Financial Officer is continuously becoming more complicated. For you as the CFO or Head of Finance, the skillsets that served you well in your earlier career might not be so helpful now. For instance, your single-minded strong will has likely pushed many otherwise doomed projects across the finish line. Yet that same forcefulness can now make you seem unreasonable or even unlikeable.
Perhaps your deep knowledge of esoteric details about the company’s financial systems kept the monthly closing working smoothly and on time. But now, your knowledge can make you seem pedantic and unable to focus on the big picture. Maybe your command of spreadsheets enabled you to solve complex problems like no one else. But now, your propensity for being “hands-on” keeps you from empowering others.
In the expanded role of CFO, you may need to back away from what got you here to help the larger organization be most effective. It’s no longer just about reaching for your next promotion. Instead, your success is measured by the company’s overall success, which requires a completely new set of skills – and maybe even a different version of you.
We’ve grouped the 20 behaviors into these 3 categories of behaviors that will prevent you from realizing your full potential, whether you’re currently a CFO, or a CFO on the rise.
Self-delusion
Dealing with people, and
Managing your boss
CFO Bad Habit 1: Self-Delusion
As a successful and strategic CFO, there are many ways you can lull yourself into thinking you’re even better than you are. After all, someone thought enough of you to promote you to one of the top spots in the organization and trust you with an immense amount of responsibility. You must be pretty darn good – right?
And you probably are. But you may not be quite as effective as you think. The next article in this series, “4 Lies You Excuse Yourself With: Ineffective Habits of CFOs” explores the many lies you might be believing about your likelihood for even more success. Your failure to recognize reality may come from listening to others only superficially, an over-confident belief that your innate goodness is infallible, or that your uncanny understanding of history perfectly predicts future outcomes.
The good news is that once you recognize the difference between reality and the truth about yourself, you can work to close that gap and experience both personal and professional growth.
CFO Bad Habit 2: Excusing Poor Self-Management Skills
As a CFO, you have achieved a span of control such that your ability to be an individual contributor is now highly limited. That is, you’re too busy to complete most of the tasks that helped you achieve your station in life. Instead, you must manage through your finance & accounting teams, and your colleagues. Unfortunately for you, dealing with people is likely to be the most challenging, unpredictable, and difficult part of many CEO and CFOs’ job.
Further, the way you dealt with people earlier in your career is different in today’s world than it used to be, even just 5 or 10 years ago. Instead of being an expert accountant, financial analyst, investment manager, or banker, you’ll now need to be an expert leader and motivator of human beings who report to you, look to you for guidance and sometimes assurance, and expect insightful and candid business-savvy direction.
Predictably, there are several ways that past behaviors can get in the way of your future success. Teammates all around you respond best to receiving recognition, feeling valued, and hearing candid feedback. Those may be foreign skills to the earlier version of you from your formative years. For executive coaching tips for CFOs on how to grow in this area, see “5 Ways You Trip Yourself Up as CFO”.
CFO Bad Habit 3: Managing the CEO and Other Leaders Ineffectively
Just as you need to manage yourself well and manage those who report to you with a balance of accountability and vision, you need to manage UP as well. Your CEO and board of directors expect executive presence, actionable intelligence, confident reliability. Without a doubt, those traits are both highly prized, and often hard to come by. Not many CFOs have experienced the benefits of executive coaching but those who have will attest to the transformative impact of enhancing one’s CFO leadership skills, as well as the ability to partner with the CEO, lenders, investors and board members at a much more strategic as well as tactical level.
To continue to grow in your role as CFO, you’re expected to always be in control of the situation, speak with authority, and recognize where actions have fallen short of expectations. Failing in any of these areas can not only hold you back from your full potential, but can also be downright destructive and even limit your tenure.
Some of the most common behaviors that generate conflict between CFOs and the CEO or the Board includes being overly prescriptive, unreasonably rigid, or refusing to take responsibility. Dive deeper with “6 Reasons Your CEO Wonders if They Have the Right CFO”.
By the time you’ve arrived as a Chief Financial Officer, you’ve seen a lot. You have earned more accolades, recognition, and promotions than the vast majority of your early peers. Still, it’s useful to consider where your playbook could use some updates in order to finish strong. What pages need to be ripped out? Where do you need to add new plays? Because “what got you here won’t get you there.” What WILL get you there? Increasing your level of self-awareness and equipping your mind with the tools that lead to greater mind fitness as a CFO.
Jeff Martini, MBA is a 5-time Chief Financial Officer and has been promoted to the role of Chief Executive Officer and Chief Operating Officer multiple times. He has served businesses ranging from Fortune 500 to pre-revenue startups. His experience includes leadership in both private equity and NYSE-listed publicly held companies and has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and equity funding through strategic partnering.
Edith Hamilton, MBA, CPCC is a certified executive coach for CFOs and VPs in Finance and Operations, particularly recently promoted women in the C-suite. She is a former executive of Fortune 500s, and has a background in private equity. With over 25 years’ experience in finance, operations, and growth strategies in corporations of all sizes including middle-market and entrepreneurial, Edith is a catalyst who accelerates leadership growth using tailored coaching frameworks that typically have an ROI of 4x-6x.
