The office of the Chief Financial Officer requires self-awareness. By the time you’ve arrived, you have plenty of experience to know what works and what doesn’t. However, some of your experience can actually work against you. In CFO executive coaching and leadership, here are 5 behaviors we often see trip up CFOs.
1. Withholding information
Find it annoying when you’re left out of a meeting that impacts you? Angered when you are left off an email that changes the direction of your project? Asked to work on something without proper context or clear targets? Consider how often in the midst of a busy week as Controller, VP of Finance or CFO you may be creating this same impact for others.
Your day is fully scheduled before it starts, and by mid-morning new issues have come up that require you to re-prioritize the rest of the day. Your calendar often becomes a mess even before lunchtime. This daily routine can easily cause you to withhold information. You may think you are simply being efficient with your time or saving others from unnecessary details: sharing on a “need-to-know” basis. But to others it may seem withholding: especially if you often choose to press “reply” instead of “reply all” to make a point.
CFO Executive Coaching Tips
Recognize the symptoms of the problem.
Consciously slow down and message your colleague with key bullet-points.
Be deliberate about thinking thru who else needs to know, and who should be included earlier on, and add them timely. As your colleagues are more “in the know”, your overall effectiveness increases.
2. Clinging to the past
Luke was the CFO of a successful software company. He joined at the startup phase, and in the early years he was responsible for all accounting and finance functions, including bookkeeping, credit and collections, and the annual audit.
By the time the company grew to $62M he had a staff with specialists responsible for all those areas. Luke had hired fairly well and built a solid team, yet one blind spot routinely tripped him up. He was anchored to his earlier experiences, which had required a lot of hard work with little assistance.
This tendency to compare to the past was so strong that he wasn’t even aware how he was using it against the team: “When I first started, I did everything in spreadsheets, working around the clock for weeks on end. Now, we have all these high-dollar systems, and this staff still can’t get the books closed by Day 10!”
Luke was clinging to his own accomplishments, thinking he was motivating others with his example, and ended in beating up his direct reports. While they recognized his accomplishments, those just weren’t relevant to today’s problems. He was rapidly becoming less relevant and less respected.
CFO Executive Coaching Tips
If you often start sentences with, “When I” while referring to past experiences, stop. While your own life lessons can be instructive, never weaponize them.
Re-cast your statements to be constructive and curious: “What if we …” and “What do you think about…,” or “How would it work if...”
3. Proving how smart you are
Lena is a hard-charger. Her knowledge is encyclopedic. After all, she worked for her Fortune 1000 company 10 years and was promoted from VP of Finance to CFO. She is frequently the most knowledgeable person at the table, and sometimes the smartest. Her weakness? It was that she still wanted everyone else to know that, too.
Colleagues brought her updates, direct reports created analyses, and the net effect was that they often left feeling underappreciated. When her new Controller produced an insightful analysis of the latest accounting pronouncement, Lena interrupted with, “This is good, Zoey. But the FEI seminar I went to last month made it clear this really does not apply in our case.” Zoey, who had been excited to make her presentation and was genuinely proud of the job well done, left Lena’s office deflated and wondering if she was even valuable to the company.
Once Lena was able to identify the ways in which she was self-sabotaging, and that her desire to be seen as a Hyper-Achiever was becoming a success limiter, she was able to find more effective ways to make her points while being a much more empathetic, creative listener and communicator.
CFO Executive Coaching Tips
If you tend to interrupt others, this signals you think you know more and are smarter. Even that’s true, re-train yourself to pause, breathe, and then ask a genuine question that can help the person have an “aha” moment on their own.
Trust that others are smart enough to see you and know that you know. You don’t have to try so hard. Trying to prove your smarts actually signals insecurity to others.
4. Passing judgment
As CFO, Kate was the financial “scorekeeper” and ultimately responsible for quantifying her peers’ performance. She was actively engaged with recommendations on new lines of business, revenue growth, or changes in people or cost profiles -- as a strategic CFO should be.
What routinely tripped Kate up was her incessant judgment of people’s capabilities: and she was not shy in letting others know exactly where they stood. Even on occasions when she didn’t voice her opinion, her disdain for certain colleagues or initiatives was visible on her face or palpable in her interactions. Kate’s expectations of herself and of others were so unreasonably high, she communicated a feeling that they could not be trusted to get things done right.
It was only when she became aware of how destructive this judge-y way of thinking was that she began to implement ways to intercept this self-sabotaging behavior. As she trained herself to lead from a mindset of genuine curiosity, she began to that others performance seemed to improve as well.
CFO Executive Coaching Tips
Intercept this self-sabotaging behavior by practicing empathy for yourself, and for others. With practice, this is actually a muscle you can grow: enabling you to release the stress that judging others brings to you.
Remember that others are creative, resourceful and don’t typically need you to fix their issues. The right questions, phrased with genuine curiosity, can awaken them to new perspectives.
When hearing updates, if any commentary is called for, start with gratitude for others’ contributions: “Thank you for these insights” or “That’s thought-provoking” goes a long way.
5. Making excuses
As a CFO, you will make mistakes. You will offend. And you will have failures, in both your professional life and personal life. When you make excuses, you are inappropriately blaming outside factors and refusing to take responsibility for them.
Joe was 2 years into his first CFO role at a private equity-backed company and when they began to miss earnings targets. The sales team was not meeting quotas. The product team was late with the release of the newest software, and the cost of tech support was rising exponentially. At the quarterly Board meeting, the pattern that emerged from Joe’s choice of wording conveyed to the sponsors that he felt these matters were beyond the control of management, and especially his own role as CFO.
By the 3rd Quarter, his attempts to pass the buck sounded increasingly hollow and the Operating Partner took the CEO aside, suggesting the CFO needed to broaden his vision: “It is part of his scope to initiate systems and processes that provide more effective, timely internal reporting that could enable the C-suite to course-correct more quickly and to drive accountability. We all have lots of excuses. Only some of them are good,” he quipped.
CFO Executive Coaching Tips
Pause. If someone blames you for something that went wrong, “seek first to understand, then to be understood” as Steven Covey has said. Find the 10% of common viewpoint that you can share, and ask open-ended questions. Meet them where they are, and help get to the root cause.
Consider: If the root cause is something you could have or should have done better, what can you do to acknowledge that, apologize, and put controls in place to prevent it from happening again?
By the time you’ve become the Chief Financial Officer, you’ve earned more accolades, recognition, and promotions than the vast majority of your early peers. Yet your playbook may need a few vital updates. Some pages need to be ripped out, some new ones may need to be added, while others may need to be reconfigured. Executive Coach Marshall Goldsmith reminds us, “what got you here won’t get you there.” What can? Training and equipping yourself for greater mental fitness as a CFOs.
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.
