For over two years now, the continuing spread of the COVID-19 pandemic is distorting industry growth across sectors. But the vaccine rollout has spurred hopes among corporates to reorient business plans, operational financial strategy, and work styles to adapt to the new normal. Stepping into the new normal, many companies are facing capability-building challenges to raise and sustain potential talent in the company. As a way of solving this critical function, many companies hire versatile CFOs to build, execute, manage and lead skill investments in companies to ensure longer organizational performance and growth.
Many years ago, CFOs’ role was merely confined to financial management, but with the rapid intrusion of new technologies and digital capabilities, almost every department employee(s) seeks advice or reports to the CFO. Having said that, let’s look into some key aspects where the CFO matters a lot in the company.
Bridging Capability Gap
Building capability in organizations has never been an easy task. But the new normal has reminded business leaders like CFOs – capabilities share a close tie with business resilience. Hence most companies are in a hot race to hire the most versatile CFO who strives to close capability gaps by incorporating new technical skill sets to enhance operational efficiency, value generation, enhance customer experience, revenue generation and increase business performance.
Track the Needed Skills
CFOs as financial strategists need to identify the skills deficiency in potential functional areas. To achieve this, CFOs collect data and interpret them to build sound financial strategies for enriching talent and expertise.
Training and Development
Once CFOs heading corporate finance and planning departments are aware of the lack of business acumen among business unit leaders and executives, they can invest in short-term certifications courses to help them get hands-on in different types of financial strategies to get a deeper understanding of their functional specializations and expertise. This will allow financial managers to efficiently decide on resource allocation and how to wire key performance indicators into the company’s operations and strategic plans.
Amplifying Communication
CFOs must not concentrate on the acquired skill sets like financial planning, budgeting, forecasting, or analytics, but should identify innovative ways to communicate financial concepts with others. CFOs can be vitally important to Finance managers to transform the data into actionable insights to boost production, factory usage, and pricing. This dialogue performance increases trust between CFOs and Finance managers to achieve scalable organizational success.
Beyond Finance Walls
CFOs need to have a world view of the shifting landscape of the business. They need to know where the individuals in a company can fit into a team and team into a company and company into an industry and industry into an economy. Macro-economic factors play a great deal in the micro decision-making process of the company. Hence CFOs must train the finance leaders below them to get updated on the evolving dynamics of political, social, and economic trends to make wise financial strategies to withstand national and global competition.
CFOs as cross-functional experts and value creators must identify the strengths and weaknesses of finance managers and inspire them through retooling approaches to help them gain a strong vision of organizational growth by building innovative and edging business models to face new entrants into the market, changing costs and competitive pricing. As means of improving on the strategic finance capabilities, CFOs can encourage finance managers to enroll in upskilling programs in finance and accounting centers to build capabilities, and Miles Education is one such center that fulfills this goal.
