CFO’s Insider Guide to Staying Sharp

As CFO, you are an expert in growing a business, navigating volatile economic environments, and acting as a leader inside and outside your organization.

Being in such a leadership position often requires you to move away from the day-to-day operations, making it a challenge to stay sharp on basic skills and new trends and technologies. 

The best CFOs learn to strike a balance between keeping their tactical skills and process know-how sharp, while also remaining locked into the bigger picture of organizational health and progress.

Why you should never lose complete touch 

With a distinct set of responsibilities including driving the business forward, innovating and achieving team and organizational goals, it can be difficult to find the time to jump in and learn about Microsoft Excel’s newest feature. 

While you shouldn’t become a master of all things (it’s impossible), you should keep in touch with the major changes and trends affecting your team, processes and functionality. 

When you lose touch with day-to-day operations, you lose the ability to make decisions that are necessary for enabling your team to push forward. It’s critical that you look both inside your team and organization and outside the business to stay in tune with the changes coming your way.

Tactical tips to get you there

Learning every aspect of day-to-day functions and keeping every tactical skill simply isn’t sustainable — and for CFOs it’s not time well spent. Follow these tips to ensure you gain everything you need to know without wasting valuable time:

Stay in tune with processes. Invest time in understanding how your team functions, which tools they use and how they use them. You don’t need to understand every aspect of each tool or process, but knowing processes — especially those used in cross-team collaboration — will allow you to know how to best serve your business and drive your team forward. 

Selectively dabble in the day-to-day. Tap into your team to identify which tactical skills are most essential for you to hone to stay on top of team functionality. Consider process mapping and use tools yourself to identify inefficiencies and solidify understanding. 

Embrace learning down. You hired talented experts for a reason. As a finance leader, those on your team are your most valuable resource for learning. Ask questions and invite them to teach you critical components of the day-to-day functions. You’ll learn something — we promise.

Make time for events. A well-designed conference is one of the best time investments you can make. Be sure to make time to attend events (and invite key team members) to quickly get up to speed on industry developments. Get really good at distilling information and passing it along to your SMEs. 

Are you staying sharp as a finance leader? Melissa Howatson takes the stage on the latest episode of The CFO Show to share lessons learned and tips that will take your career to the next. 

In case you missed it…

What makes an exceptional, growth-driving CFO? Vinny Prajka might know better than anyone. Vinny has worked with dozens of CFOs in his role at JMI Equity, where he helps portfolio companies accelerate growth and navigate operational challenges. Tune in to learn how you can help drive organization growth, demonstrate exceptional leadership, effectively communicate with investors and become the driving force behind business performance.

What’s next…

FP&A professionals spend so much of their time gathering data, and only a small portion analyzing it. Integrating digital transformation in finance has the potential to shift this dynamic by automating data collection and allowing more time for in-depth analysis and interpretation. We will be joined by Stacy Brown, VP at Marcum Technology to break down how finance can benefit from investing in digitization, and the role CFOs need to play in leading digital transformation within their organizations.