Personally, my favorite finance jobs look like:

I’m 99% sure you would agree with that list for yourself.

Which is why I’m surprised when I see a finance leader design their team completely different from this.

They stick people in a role with no clear accountabilities while micro managing them every step of the way - or letting them figure everything out themselves.

You want to know how to keep your C-players and scare off any A-players?
Design bad roles.

It’s what you’ll find in level 1 or 2 FP&A teams.

And designing better roles is one of the most impactful things you can do to find capacity and elevate your FP&A team. Oh, and it’s free.

Let’s talk about how to design better finance roles…

If you find yourself without a clear talent strategy today, you probably have a few generalists who are acting like firefighters.

Work comes in, it goes to whoever has capacity, it gets done (but not without your direct involvement).

Or worse, you are doing all the “important work” while your team doing the “boring work”. That’s what we pay people for, right?!

Either way, your team is sub-optimized. People are never able to be proactive because they don’t know what they should be doing.

And rather than asking HR to write a fancy job description (that nobody reads), I suggest you design roles in terms of outcomes.

My goal is always to delegate outcomes, not work.

Here’s a simple example that I deep-dive in the Finance Manager Playbook:

You’ll notice each role has a mix of the following:

One aspect I recently implemented myself in a new team was clarity on business partnerships. Here’s what we did…

Previous leadership didn’t tell our business partners specifically who they should work with on our team, so they defaulted to working with our finance manager on everything. And the manager didn’t have a framework for how to delegate that work on our team - which meant our manager was the front-line of defense for every little thing happening in the organization.

No bueno…

We sent an email to our business partners and told them exactly who to work with for “anything finance related”. And my team will figure out how to triage it behind the scenes if needed.

My calendar freed up.
My manager’s calendar freed up.
Business partners have their dedicated finance person.

That’s a win-win-win…

“What’s next for me?”

It’s the question every high-performer is asking themselves when s**t is hitting the fan and they aren’t getting clear feedback about their performance. People are willing to tolerate difficulty, but only for a purpose.

I’ll go to the gym if it means I’ll look and feel better.
And I’ll gladly work through a 15th budget revision if I know it’s helping me grow my career.

Your team needs this clarity - in fact, they are starving for it.

In my FP&A Manager Playbook we give you one of our favorite tools: The Expectations Grid.

It’s a tool I implement as fast as possible for FP&A teams. It gives perfect clarity to what my expectations are by role.

This helps my team sleep better at night knowing how they are performing against an objective standard.

Secondary to the expectations grid but also in Level 2, we also advise you begin recruiting business savvy talent.
This is people who have been-there-done-that before.
They know what excellence looks like.
But they cost more money.

These are the people that walk in, see how messed up everything is, then start to fix it.

And these people thrive on clear ownership and accountability, so don’t skip step 1.

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