The Mentoring Round What Do You Wish Someone Had Told You at the Start of Your CFO Career?

Transcription

1 The Mentoring Round What Do You Wish Someone Had Told You at the Start of Your CFO Career? 10 CFO Thought Leaders Answer Direct from the Mentoring Round Summer 2014

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Patience Is a Virtue 3 Brad Dickerson, CFO, Under Armour It s All About Attitude 4 Debbie Ricci, CFO, A-T Solutions Don t Try To Make People Happy...5 Kray Kibler, CFO, Scrip Companies Find a Mentor 6 Bill Knese, CFO, Angus Industries Grasp the Power of the CFO Voice.7 James Tholen, CFO, Broadsoft Place Trust in Others.8 Dan Crumb, CFO, Kansas City Chiefs Make Time to Listen..9 Caterri Woodrum, CFO, North Carolina Museum of Art Focus on What s Material.10 David Morris, CFO, Guardian Pharmacy Have a Quarterly Plan...11 Carlos Salazar, CFO, IntelliDyne You Are an Unequal Peer..12 Mike Dinsdale, CFO, DocuSign

3 Brad Dickerson Episode #43 CFO Under Armour As far as leadership goes, I keep coming back to self-awareness. Where are you going to add value in the organization and where are you not? Build around those to balance out the competencies you need in your group to be successful. The thought here is that weaknesses are not necessarily a bad thing, and the biggest strength is understanding what they are and building the right competencies and the right attributes around yourself so that you have the right balance around your team to be successful overall. I also think that patience is very important. Patience to learn and develop. Put the time and energy into developing your skillset so that when you do become a CFO, you re ready for it. Too often today, I think, people want to jump that learning curve a little bit, and they are very focused on taking on as much responsibility as possible. I ve seen too many examples of people who have moved up the learning curve too quickly, and they didn t appreciate the time required to develop and learn. // Page 3

4 Debbie Ricci Episode #20 CFO A-T Solutions I think that attitude can be so important. I learned a lesson early in my career when I was doing a summer internship with a local water authority and I did a bunch of projects: Reconciling 401(k) plans and working on special projects that no one wanted to touch they were sort of like unknotting a ball of yarn. At the end of the summer, the comptroller of the water authority said, You ve done a great job here. I said, Well, I don t feel like I ve done a great job. I just don t feel like I accomplished all of what I wanted to accomplish. At that point, he said, No, you ve got a great attitude. You dig in. You re very positive about what you re doing, and that will carry you a long way. While that was a number of years ago, I always remember it, and I found it to be true: If you have a positive attitude, it can really help you with whatever you re doing and with your teammates. // Page 4

5 Kray Kibler Episode #17 CFO Scrip Companies The advice I wish someone had given me is don t try to make friends and don t try to make people happy. The business is bigger than us. I m a corporate CFO. My job is to make this business better because if I make the business better, the shareholders will get a return. If I make the business better, (a) I ll be happy, and (b) our employees will be happy because they are going to be benefiting if we have the right incentives in place. The advice I would give to others is to pick up corporate orphans. I have picked up neglected departments, neglected functions, neglected customers, and no one assigned them to me. I took them or I volunteered and it was noticed. Find something that is undermanaged, fix it, and then report the results. You will be amazed at what happens. You have to work hard. There is simply no excuse for otherwise. Walk around, ask questions, find out what people do. Learn every number in the business. Treat everyone with courtesy even when they may not deserve it, and just lead. // Page 5

6 Bill Knese Episode #30 CFO Angus Industries I wish I had had a mentor. I didn t have one. I did have examples, but a mentoring relationship is a little different. As someone who oversaw an accounting department, my role was to be a mentor for as many of those people as possible. What I wish someone had said to me is what I said to many of those people through the years: I don t want you to reach the point where 10 years from now you look back and say, You know, if someone had paid a little more attention to me, my career would be further along than it is now. So I would sit down with those people and say, Well, here s what I see you doing: Go look for a certification, take on some additional course work, and can we get you into a little bit different role within the organization? I would tell them to extend their role. They would need to collaborate with other departments and get a better look at the business as a whole, while continuing to keep their accounting skills strong. // Page 6

7 James Tholen Episode #8 CFO Broadsoft When you take on a leadership role in finance, whether you re controller or CFO, finding and utilizing your voice is very important. There is an authority built into the position and there s an authority that you create out of your own competence and insights, and you have to recognize the power of that voice and use it accordingly. To really understand the power of your role as CFO, you have to understand the power of your voice. And you have to be careful with that power, and truly understand that you have insight and an ability to change things. You must stay true to that voice. In preparation, you should be thoughtful before you engage. Just being right doesn t make you more effective. You need to communicate and empower others. You can be 100 percent correct, but you will fail if you don t communicate things in a way that others can then take and be actionable with. // Page 7

8 Dan Crumb Episode #47 CFO Kansas City Chiefs For me, there has never been a time when I wished that someone had told me this or that because I ve always looked at every opportunity as sort of a blank canvas. As soon as I get started in a new position, I m instantly collaborating and finding out what I need to find out. So, it s about getting a lot of valuable information on the front end. The habit I have that I ve used throughout my life and career is trust. I place trust in the people with whom I work, and it is really a two-way street. They have to trust that I m taking them down the right path and that I m going to give them the resources they need. I m a trusting person, and to me, trust is a principle that I have embraced. I have found that it has suited me well as a foundational habit. // Page 8

9 Caterri Woodrum Episode #14 CFO North Carolina Museum of Art Listening skills are extremely important. You can t believe that you already know it all, because you don t and oftentimes your staff knows more than you, and they are closer oftentimes to what may really be a problem. So listening skills are something that I have learned to value, and it helps me to hear what my people are saying and understand it. But this requires time, so the other skill that is so important is time management making the time to listen to anybody who needs an ear and can add value, while still not finding yourself at the office until midnight every night. I personally spend a good deal of time out with the staff trying to learn what the problems are and how they are impacting the business, so I have to really take care of time management. This means prioritizing the things that I have to physically roll up my sleeves to do. I ve learned to be very good at time management because I ve had to be. // Page 9

10 David Morris Episode #15 CFO Guardian Pharmacy I don t know if this is advice or knowledge, but you can have an A-level business plan with C-level execution, and you will probably fail. But you can have a B-level or C-level business plan with A-level execution and you re much more likely to achieve the results. Another thing on which I have always sought to focus is that whether they re in an entrepreneurial environment or a Fortune 500 company, executives have hundreds of things coming at them every day typically, more than anyone can handle. I think that it s really important to identify and focus your energy on things that add value to the business. Now, this sounds simple, but I see things every day where people are not doing it, and this is at all levels in the organization. I call it focusing on what s material when it comes to moving the organization forward. You need to come back and always ask yourself: Is the activity that I m focused on working to create value? // Page 10

11 Carlos Salazar Episode #5 CFO IntelliDyne Know how to pick the battles that are worth fighting and that are critical to your agenda. Sometimes, allowing others to win arguments or discussions can be a win in itself, because it gives you the possibility of more negotiation space the next time around. Personally and professionally, one of the things that I do for myself is to put together a quarterly plan that really focuses on key accomplishments that I d like to realize over the next 3 months. The accomplishments are on not only the professional side but also the personal side. At the end of the quarter, I look back and compare my performance against those objectives. I have lessons learned for myself, and I implement those into my next quarterly plan. // Page 11

12 Mike Dinsdale Episode #2 CFO DocuSign At my first job, I met David J. Barram, who is former CFO of Silicon Graphics and Apple, and I had the opportunity to go out to lunch with him once a month over a period of 4 years. He gave me a couple of things. One is an actual piece of paper where he wrote for me the things that I was good at and the things that I needed to work on. He would often say something that I repeat often now, which is that the CFO role is very interesting because you are a unequal peer. You support everyone on the team, you have the CEO s ear unlike anyone else does, and you know what s happening more than any other executive. The other comment that he would make is that you have to fly high and dive deep meaning that you have to transition from very high-level strategic stuff and be able to get into the minutiae, the details, too. People expect for you to know it all. These two things have always stuck with me. // Page 12

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