Global Finance Leadership Development

Transforming the Finance Function in Large Organizations: Two Approaches

Traditionally the Finance functions played the role of the Comptroller in organizations - skillfully tracking, reporting and explaining the numbers. This is no longer enough.

Business leaders now need a stronger value proposition from their finance business partners including the ability to:
Lead growth initiatives
Bring financial analytics to conversations across functions, translating financial priorities to functions such as supply chain and sales
Fully understand specific needs of business functions, partnering as a problem solver
Create an atmosphere of fact-based decision making, generally improving the quality of business decisions
Keep business leaders focused on the implications of their decisions on cash management
Bring creative financial solutions to forward-looking scenario planning
Instill strategic thinking among leadership, bridging business strategies to economic value to shareholders
Proactively enforce ethical business practices through internal audits and policies
Manage risks

"A finance business partner should be more about business analysis, trends, opportunity assessment and prioritizing initiatives and less about reporting and accumulating data about the past." ITAP client; Fortune 50 consumer goods company.

According to the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (2007), there are no established best practice models or processes for positioning finance leaders as business partners. However, ITAP knows how to transform financial and accounting functions into Valued Financial Business partners in a way that is customized to the organization.

Case #1

A global financial institution approached ITAP for support in a Global Financial Transformation Project. ITAP was tasked with identifying the behavioral competencies required to be an effective financial business partner while retaining the best practice of financial risk management, for which this organization is well-known.

APPROACH:

ITAP focused on the strategic intent of the organization and, using proven research techniques, uncovered/defined the behaviors necessary to the financial work of today and of the future. Using the defined competency model, the client:
Performed a gap analysis to identify organizational needs
Assessed/identified which employees had the capabilities and how much they had
Used that to data to develop or select those who would succeed and stay

In this case, the competency model included multiple levels of the finance function starting at the CFO level and down to offshore financial call center and internal support positions.

Case #2

A global consumer products company tasked ITAP with defining how to develop to financial talent following an organizational restructuring that reduced silos and installed a matrixed management structure. The scope was to build a finance curriculum around existing development processes focusing on both talent and the rest of the global finance function (5,000 people worldwide). The goal, as in Case #1, was to position finance to lead change. The approach was different, however.

APPROACH:

ITAP designed a 5-day offsite that included deeply challenging sessions on topics such as pricing, product costing, margin management, inventory control, tax/treasury and other topics specific to this business. ITAP partnered with finance and other business functions (marketing, supply chain, operations) to build company-specific cases which required demonstration of business partnering skills. As business partnering was a central theme of the program, ITAP leveraged its Culture in the Workplace Questionnaire™ to bring a truly global perspective to the meaning of partnership in this organization.

ITAP also wrote Instructor Guides, Participant Guides and collected support materials so that the talent development program would be repeatable.

In addition, ITAP created a virtual training portal for webinar-style training. This capability allows the organization to trickle-down important functional learning lessons in a cost effective way throughout finance and beyond.

In conclusion, ITAP sees an important trend toward repositioning the finance function to play an active leadership role in modern, global organizations. There are no quick fixes or cookbook strategies to accomplish this. However, adapting proven tools and methods to fit each unique organization, ITAP can be a strong partner in the process.

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