A successful Chief Financial Officer (CFO) integrates your business's financial team with your services team. A strong financial background alone, however, isn't enough anymore.
In today's market, technology is more integrated with financial services than ever before. This has consolidated services that were performed by multiple departments into one role: the CFO. Successful CFO candidates now need experience with fintech, digitalization and online marketing.
While this shift in expectations for the CFO role predates the pandemic, the past two years have no doubt accelerated the change in expected CFO competencies.
A recent survey found that over half of CFOs reported increased demand from C-level executives after the first two years of the pandemic. Because of their access to comprehensive information, CFOs can obtain key insights from internal stakeholders even in a remote work environment.
Source: Toptal
Today, the CFO must wear multiple hats. The rapidly accelerating pace of remote work has further caused business leaders to rely on CFOs to perform multiple tasks. These include roles in human resources, operations, sales, marketing and technological infrastructure projects.
The three most sought-after CFO duties include:
CFOs can perform these duties and hit key performance measures by adopting the following strategies or skill sets.
The CFO has a unique vantage point from which to envision the company's future. At peak performance, the CFO supports employee acquisition and retention and enables the business to weather unexpected global or market events.
First, the CFO must serve as a champion of new technology. They must herald new technology implementation and process execution. Using new technologies as appropriate makes the business more adaptable--ready to handle the next crisis.
Similarly, your CFO can implement automation. By automating routine processes, your CFO frees the finance team to perform higher-value tasks. This includes achieving business growth objectives and reviewing comprehensive data.
With a forward-looking CFO at the helm of your finance department, expect tech spending to increase.
The CFO has access to comprehensive business analytics data and budget performance metrics. They can play a more visible role by reviewing key insights from all performance levels.
Rather than hoard this information, CFOs can encourage transparency and build employee buy-in by sharing that data. For instance, a CFO should prioritize weekly check-ins with both C-level executives and mid-level management. This creates space for a productive dialogue among leadership.
Your CFO should also provide an overview of critical key performance indicators in at least monthly intervals. This gives employees a broader understanding of business objectives and helps them envision their own achieving company goals.
Every team member has a sense of ownership.
Similarly, transparency also improves employee loyalty. Your CFO can use these meetings or other data sharing processes to reduce turnover, increase employee engagement and build higher customer satisfaction.
Finally, the entire finance team--beyond just the CFO--should spend time familiarizing themselves with other business departments and key stakeholders within them. This provides a wider understanding of company goals and assists the finance department in focusing on value creation for the organization as a whole.
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The pandemic facilitated the wide-scale adoption of remote work across industries. This created an opportunity for companies to adopt new technology platforms and services geared toward replicating in-office productivity at home.
CFOs should take advantage of this transformation by increasing digitalization.
For instance, successful businesses have already shifted to data-driven decision-making models. Further adoption of automation and machine-learning technologies by CFOs increases productivity by:
As a company leader, your CFO can demonstrate that technology is empowering. The CFO can also make the business case for technological upgrades, which provide a competitive advantage.
The most important skill of a successful CFO is the ability to continue learning.
Source: Andrew Rudchuk
An always-learning CFO keeps abreast of business and technological trends, provides insights that drive profits and growth and quickly generates high-quality conclusions.
Other top skills include:
The CFO position was already in flux, but the past two years have accelerated the change. The role of a successful CFO is no longer limited to budgeting and asset management--today's CFOs must wear multiple hats, including human resources, operations, finance and more.
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As Senior Director of Content and Communications, Jonathan Paul leads content strategy and execution at Vena, overseeing the development of owned media and content experiences that help finance professionals fuel business health, as well as their personal and professional growth. When he's not dreaming up new ways to offer audiences value through content creation, Jonathan loves to lose himself in an immersive video game with a solid narrative, lose golf balls pretending to be good at golf and lose time dreaming about time travel.
