Everybody has strengths and weaknesses.
And I argue that your greatest strength is also [often] your greatest weakness.
Here’s what I mean with a personal example…
One of my greatest strengths as an FP&A leader is my ability to see the vision of where my team needs to go, assess our current state, develop a plan to close the gap, and execute that plan.
It’s a great skill to have in the business of FP&A transformation.
But early in my finance leadership career I got feedback from a high-performer on my team:
Every time we start making progress towards your vision, you change your vision. We need you give us time to actually execute it.
He was right, my strength of constantly living in the future meant I lost sight of where we were in that moment. I learned to hold onto some of my thoughts for myself, slow-play new changes, and engage the team to understand their capacity for change.
But I wouldn’t change my ability to cast vision for anything. It’s what makes me, me (and sometimes makes me annoying).
And it’s often the missing skillset that’s keeping your FP&A team stuck: lack of vision.
Let’s talk about why vision is the skillset you’re missing and how to fix it…
They haven’t experienced greatness
It’s normal human behavior to default to what you know - and if all you know is manual processes in excel, then that’s all you’ll aspire to.
Knowing what’s possible in theory is often not enough. Your team has to believe it’s possible because they’ve been close enough to greatness to have an ah-ha moment.
Believing that you can produce an early results summary that drives the business, or knowing that you can build a driver-based model that gets forecast accuracy misses under 1%, or building a forecast review process with the business that get’s them to champion your perspective… these are all difficult for someone to desire unless they believe they can achieve it.
There’s a few different ways finance leaders can instill belief in their FP&A team:
Hire people who come from industry best-practices
Expose your team to industry best-practices
The first is obvious - hiring a seasoned veteran who walks in the door with the playbook is simple (but expensive). Your team doesn’t need belief if you hire a Director or VP with the playbook, they just have to show up to work 5 days a week and it’ll magically happen.
The second is harder - intentionally investing your team’s time with consultants or experts can unlock what’s possible for them. This exposure is often enough to create ah-ha moments you need to generate belief.
Regardless of which you choose, you won’t have the FP&A team you want unless you start here.
Moving on to step 2…
They don’t know what to do
Prioritization of what matters most at this stage.
Your team has a bottleneck.
Solving anything other than that bottleneck is a waste of time.
What was the obvious next step for another CFO or FP&A team is not necessarily your next best step.
Not intending to start a fight, but FP&A software can be a huge distraction.
Unless your team is pushing the limits of your current tech, has a clear idea of what’s holding them back, and can perfectly articulate why a new software tool will instantly unlock the next level of excellence, you don’t need anything new.
For some finance leaders, prioritization is easy.
For others who are easily distracted, it’s helpful to have a forcing function.
The best forcing function I’m aware of is optimizing for a single metric.
If you haven’t done this before, I advocate your forcing function to be forecast accuracy. Here’s what you get when you optimize for it:
Moving from trend picks to driver-based models
Creating accountability within finance for forecast outputs
Generating analysis that improves understanding of the business
Guarding against false precision in constantly making small adjustments
Other potential forcing functions you can pick are:
Reporting automation
Business partner satisfaction
Analytical output
They all get you to roughly the same place (FP&A excellence), but might force you to get there a different way.
Which leads us to our final step…
They can’t see the path
Just like there are hundreds of destinations, there are even more paths to get there.
Frankly, this is where we see FP&A teams get stuck.
Too many options can paralyze analytical people (that’s us).
You know what you want.
You know what you need to do.
But the gap between where you are and where you want to be is unclear and will require sacrifice.
The demands of the day-to-day are too big and you know you’ll have to run hot for a while before everything pays off.
If you’re willing to suffer for a bit, you’ll see the rewards
It’s why we created the FP&A Flywheel.
It’s a simple process that any FP&A team can implement to drive excellence without much thought. We essentially took this whole post and turned it into a step-by-step course.
Pair this with your forcing function and help your FP&A see what’s possible - you won’t recognize your team in 6 months.
How we can help:
Build your own FP&A Operating System so you can drive more impact through a best-in-class FP&A process.
Looking to elevate your FP&A leadership skills? Steal our Finance Manager Playbook to help you drive a healthy, high-performing finance team culture.
Get step-by-step video instruction on designing your perfect FP&A Flywheel. It’s the exact process we use when transforming FP&A teams.
Brett Hampson, Founder of Forecasting Performance
