Important Soft Skills for Business-Focused Finance Professionals

By Andy Burrows

It’s really great that you’re reading this article!

You’re a Finance professional, probably trained as an accountant, immersed in figures...

... and yet you’re interested in ‘soft skills’. That’s not normal... but it’s impressive!

You have made an extremely significant first step, my friend!

In another article, I talk about the importance of behavioural skills in Finance leadership: “In my 25-year career in accountancy and finance, I can honestly say that what I’ve learnt in this area has been more helpful, more revolutionary, more career- and life-propelling, than any technical area. These are skills that not only help you at work, but will help you in every area of life, in marriage and relationships and friendships.”

In that article I also discuss what I think may be some of the reasons why behavioural skills are so neglected among Finance professionals.

I’m not going to repeat that discussion here. The point is that you’re right to be interested, so keep reading!

Why even talk about soft skills?

Just so you know where you are, this is the third in a four-part series of articles looking at the ingredients of what I call “business-focused Finance”.

The first article gave an overview of the what and the why of “business-focused Finance”. And I presented three areas we need to develop in if we want to advance our careers in Finance, as business-focused Finance professionals – business acumen, behavioural skills and tools / techniques.

The second one spoke about business acumen, what it is and how to get it.

So, here we are with the “behavioural” (soft skills) side of things. Let’s dive in!

For my purposes today I’m going to talk under two headings:

1.    Personal effectiveness habits

2.    Situational techniques

Being effective is far from ‘soft’!

Personal effectiveness is the thing that multiplies all your other skills and strengths. Whatever skills and techniques you develop in the behavioural category (and other categories), the way to level them up over and over again is to continually develop and reinforce your personal effectiveness habits.

Personal effectiveness is your ability to achieve what you want. It’s how well you function in relationships with other people. And it culminates with your ability to lead and get the best out of others.

Knowing you can do it

Personal effectiveness starts with a revolutionary insight – you have choices. Within what Stephen Covey calls your “circle of influence”, your actions and reactions are not determined by anything else but your choice.

You are not bound by other people’s attitudes, their possible responses. You’re not locked into a course of action by feelings, even feelings of fear or anxiety.

You are not bound to respond the same way tomorrow as you have in the past. You can break habits, break vicious circles, climb out of ruts – if you choose to.

Sometimes it may feel like we respond to things automatically, like we can’t help it. But however small it is, there is a gap between stimulus and response.

And you can learn to make that gap bigger and use it to reflect, to learn new responses and build new habits.

Seeing the future

The next level of personal effectiveness is being able to set your destination and direction.

This is all about reflecting on what you want out of life and what you want to put in. It’s all about how you want to be remembered and what you want to achieve.

How many of us wander through life doing what seems to come next? How many of us are frustrated because we can’t figure out what our priorities should be?

There are ways of developing your ability to make your mission in life more explicit, more capable of planning against.

Focusing on moving in the right direction

With the ability to make conscious choices and control your actions (within your “circle of influence”), and the ability to clarify your mission in life, the third thing you need is the ability to make progress in that mission without unnecessary distractions.

This is the ability to focus your time on doing important mission-progressing activities, minimise unimportant activities and avoid being overwhelmed by urgent things that press on us.

Again, this is an area you can get better at and it really helps.

Just pause for a second and think what the definition of ‘effectiveness’ actually is.

Effectiveness is the extent to which objectives are being achieved.

Knowing your mission, your objectives and goals, means you have a chance of knowing how effective you are. Now if you want to be effective against that definition of effectiveness, plan and organise your activities to do things that progress definitely and purposefully towards your explicit, intentional goals! Otherwise, it’s ‘pot luck’, as they say.

Building trust

Next you move from your internal thoughts and personal actions to the way you interact with people. And you realise that in order to be effective in dealing with people you fundamentally need to build trust.

And building trust, building relationships with people, is something you can do by acting in particular ways, principled ways – with integrity, with kindness, with maturity, and so on.

Listening without prejudice

Then you have to think about communication, which has several facets.

Fundamental to the effectiveness of your communication, however, is the way you listen first of all.

We tend to think about communication in terms of what we say to other people, or getting our point across. And there are some techniques to learn for that side of thing.

But in order to be really effective in our communication it’s important to understand the people we’re communicating with. And that means we should be really listening to them – listening to understand rather than simply to respond.

Making everyone a winner

Then we come to the higher levels.

Thinking in terms of win/win outcomes is where you really set yourself apart. And it’s not as simple as it sounds.

Win/win isn’t just a “nice outcome if you can get it”. It’s a mindset and an outlook on personal relationships.

This is where you challenge your view of the world. Do we believe that competitive forces mean there will always be winners and losers for the world to stay in equilibrium? Or do we believe that there is more than enough in the world for everyone to be a winner?

Do we approach relationships wanting everyone to be a winner? Or are we only thinking about our own goals and our own wins?

Delivering more than the sum of the parts

The culmination of these habits is the ability to generate synergy.

That isn’t just getting economies from sharing support services!

This is the ability to bring people together to achieve more than they could have done as separate teams or individuals. In simple terms, “1 + 1 > 2”.

And by the time we’re at this level, I believe we’re starting to demonstrate that mysterious quality spoken about in CFO job adverts – “gravitas”!

Balancing and growing

The other part of personal effectiveness is the ability to expand and grow our capabilities and remain effective.

We do this through balancing work and rest, stretch and recovery, across the four human dimensions – physical, social/emotional, mental and spiritual.

Personal effectiveness involves deep concepts. You were expecting tips and techniques? A ‘how to’ guide? Right?

It’s lifelong work and it’s about maturing into the wise, inspirational leaders we were born to be. And, by the way, you don’t have to be the head of a group or an organisation to be a leader. It’s about being able to inspire and make a difference to others.

You may be sceptical, but my personal experience has been that when I’ve been through leadership development programmes its’ these concepts that have made the most powerful impact on my growth and development.

And then the ‘how to’s

But, whilst “personal effectiveness” habits and behaviours are like the fertiliser for growth, there are ‘how to’ techniques to learn that will help you as you progress in your business career.

I labelled them above as “situational techniques”. I’ll run through a few of them and you’ll see what I mean.

Coaching skills are essential

The first skill I want to mention is coaching.

Believe it or not, a coaching approach is something that will help you in a number of different business situations (that’s why it’s a situational technique – clear?).

Coaching is different to teaching in that it is not simply me imparting knowledge to you. It’s helping you to do something better. This is oversimplifying massively, but in essence a teacher wants you to know something, whereas a coach wants you to really get it and be able to do it.

This is essential to situations where you’re managing people, and that tends to go with career progression whether you’re in Finance or not.

However, it’s also essential, if you think about it, for business partnering roles and other roles where you’re expected to help and advise others.

And since being a “business-focused Finance professional” is all about helping your business colleagues, coaching is going to be helpful at many stages, whether you’re managing people straight away or not.

There’s always something to learn

Other situational techniques (to summarise since I’m at risk of going on too long!) are things like:

-      How to run meetings well;

-      How to give feedback;

-      How to speak in public;

-      How to deliver presentations;

-      How to write good reports;

-      How to choose the right communication methods.

You may feel like you’re already okay at some of these things, but my advice is to never pass up an opportunity to learn from experienced trainers, coaches and mentors. You are always guaranteed to take away something new and useful if you always remain teachable.

What about influencing?

Well, we’re nearly at the end of the article and I haven’t mentioned the one thing you were probably hoping to see covered – influencing!

There’s a lot of talk about how Finance business partners, CFOs, even Finance in general, can gain influence in the business.

Suffice it to say, for now, that whilst there are definitely techniques that can be learnt to increase your influence and your ability to persuade people, I have some principles-based concerns about them.

A lot of those techniques seem like psychological manipulation to me. And I am coming to believe that the principles-centred approach to personal effectiveness outlined above actually builds the maturity that brings the right kind of influence.

With that principles-centred influence and leadership your desire is to win with people, not win over people. And that brings better, and more satisfying, results in the long run.

That’s why, at the moment, I don’t tend to talk about influencing skills as a separate item for CFOs and Finance professionals.

In conclusion

That was a very quick run through the ‘soft skills’, behaviours and habits, that I think about as part of “business-focused Finance”.

I’ve published a book called An Introduction to Personal Effectiveness for CFOs and Finance Professionals. It’s available to buy on Amazon, but you can get a pdf download copy free by clicking this link.

And even though it goes into the ‘personal effectiveness’ concepts more than I have here, it’s still only a brief introduction!

You may have thought it odd to major on those habits, rather than talking at length about communication and influencing and things like that. But as I say in my book, “without these ‘personal effectiveness’ habits gluing everything together, the other skills we talk about in Finance and business leadership become merely a random ragbag of techniques.”

Next time

One more article to go in this series on the subject of business-focused Finance. And that will talk about some of the tools and techniques that are useful as you build on your accounting training.

Learn More

Don’t miss my future articles and posts – click the Follow button at the top and bottom of this article!

I have a couple of free downloads that you may find helpful if you want to explore the topics in this article further:

As I mentioned above, there’s the pdf version of my book, An Introduction to Personal Effectiveness for CFOs and Finance Professionals.

But also, don’t forget the short guide, How Finance Can Drive Business Performance, that I mentioned in the previous article.

And here are links to a couple of other articles on similar topics:

Why Finance Business Partner is the new best route to a CFO role

If you want to be a CFO, develop these three skills

For online learning products to help Finance professionals help their business, visit the Supercharged Finance website and get on our mailing list!

About the Author

Andy Burrows is a popular Finance writer and experienced senior Finance professional.

Having founded Supercharged Finance in 2016 to encourage Finance professionals to pay more attention to the way that Finance can boost business performance, he continues to write articles and develop learning material, books and online courses, to that end.

In terms of history, he qualified as a chartered accountant in public practice in England in the 90s. And he’s worked in a variety of businesses of different sizes and types in senior Finance roles since he made the move into industry and commerce in 1996.