How Can We Attract Business People To Finance?
Anders Liu-Lindberg
Leading advisor to senior Finance and FP&A leaders on creating impact through business partnering | Interim | VP Finance | Business Finance
We need more finance professionals with a profound understanding of the business. We need more finance professionals that can communicate well and keep the customer at the center of everything they do. We need more finance professionals that understand that numbers are not everything but it’s when combined with business insights that they become powerful. Where can we get more of these finance professionals? Well, how about from the business side?
“I tried that but they just couldn’t see the point of coming to work in Finance”
I think many of us have heard that answer before. The truth is while finance leaders would be proud to send their best and brightest finance professionals to work in the business no one is proud of sending their people to work in Finance. Clearly our value proposition is not good enough so we need to explore further how we can succeed in attracting more business professionals to work in Finance. We aim to explore over two articles because it’s paramount that we widen the talent pool of people that would be great in business partnering roles.
Let’s start with Finance’s value proposition
To attract anyone to buy your product you must have an excellent value proposition. It can be price, quality, unique features, etc. To attract more business professionals to Finance we need to make our value proposition clear. Here are some elements of what Finance can offer.
- Full profitability scope: No other function except general management has a full P&L scope like Finance. If you work in Sales you focus on the top-line. If you work in Operations or Procurement you focus on costs, etc. Hence being able to put it all together and drive value creation where the potential is highest should be interesting.
- Holistic view on the business: In Finance you get the overview of the company and can see how all the parts come together.
- Objective view: You can look at business performance more objectively as you can take an outside-in view. Still that doesn’t mean you shouldn't feel responsible for helping business stakeholders meet their targets as that’s what counts at the end of the day
- Data-driven decision: Finance is rooted in the numbers and the data that the business activities result in. That’s an excellent starting for making data-driven decisions rather than those based on gut feeling.
- Strategic impact: Finance sits close to management be it at company, division or front office level hence ideally situated to make a strategic impact. This is done either by defining the strategy or helping to translate strategy into execution.
This seem like a very solid value proposition to me so why are we not attracting more people? Probably because we have not been good enough at explaining what it’s like to work in Finance.
So, how is it like to work in Finance?
To many outside Finance they still consider us the beancounters of the world being completely detached from business activities and the ones always saying “NO”. However, in many companies this is no longer a reality. There’s a lot more focus on analytics and being a business partner. We’re impacting decisions every day and while you can always claim we should become better at it there’s no discussing the direction. The fact is that if we can’t influence decisions for the better we probably shouldn’t be there! That’s because most transactional activities are either outsourced, offshored or automated. Hence, working in Finance today is all about creating insights to influence decisions and making an impact on business performance. To some that still means being buried in Excel sheets all day long and not doing a lot of business partnering. However, we must say that this is an interim state only. We’re working seriously with changing that so that the report is something you have in hand Monday morning needing only 15-30 min to skim the conclusions. Then you go into the meeting to discuss business performance with your stakeholders and align on where the issues are. On Tuesday you brainstorm with some of your stakeholders on ideas that can improve performance. On Wednesday you make the recommendation and get the go ahead. Thursday, it gets executed and on Friday you get the results. Isn’t that quite an interesting value proposition?
If you have any experiences of changing from Finance to the business or the other way around then please tell us about it and we’ll be happy to feature your story in an article! It’s critical that we succeed with attracting more business people into Finance and we can only do that by making a clear and compelling value proposition and then tell the story. Are you ready to join?
I encourage you to take a tour of my past articles on finance transformation, finance business partnering and not least “Introducing The Finance Transformation Nine Box” which is really the starting point for the transformation. You should join our Finance Business Partner Forum which is part of the Business Partnering Institute's online community where we will continue to discuss this topic and you can click here to follow him on Twitter.
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Anders Liu-Lindberg is the Head of Global Finance Program Management Office at Maersk and I have more than 10 years of experience working with Finance at Maersk both in Denmark and abroad. I am also the co-founder of the Business Partnering Institute and owner of the largest group dedicated to Finance Business Partnering on LinkedIn with more than 6,000 members. My main goal at Maersk is to create a world-class finance function not least when it comes to Business Partnering. I am the co-author of the book “Skab V?rdi Som Finansiel Forretningspartner” and a long-time Finance Blogger with 22.000+ followers.
Team building Expert | LinkedIn Top Voice | Forbes featured | I help executives manage change, foster innovation, & boost their bottom line ???? ???? Actress ?? Writer ?? ???
6 年@Kerri Golden? Since your background is in Finance, any suggestions for businesses on how to attract more business people to Finance?
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6 年Good morning Anders ??
VP - International controller - DTC Streaming
6 年I agree with you Anders that for finance, as for any other department, being exposed to other areas of the business represents a positive experience for the company which will normally add value to both the company and the professional. Especially in the period we live in right now, where all functions are more interconnected than ever before, companies should look towards embarking in programs that encourage transversals moves, but I don’t think this applies to not only finance. I have seen many examples where a ops director has become a better leader by being exposed to HR, Marketing or Finance, and the other way round, CFOs who had more transversal roles and understood business insight had ended up being better CFOs and better leaders too. However, in relation to your article, I am not sure if this is the right answer or at least the only one for the Finance function to remain relevant as a good business partner, first of all, because it is very unlikely that those individuals would remain in finance but normally take those temporal assignments outside their core skill set to then later on apply those across the company - which in itself would have very positive impact across the business but not necessarily on the finance department. And secondly, but I believe more important, as you well pointed out, the trend in the industry is to move the more transactional tasks out of the business, whether outsource, automated and/or centralized in offshore shared serves centers, and for finance to remain good business partners and add value, it is not only important to be able to communicate a clear message and have good business insights, but I find at least as relevant (if not more) to have basic accounting knowledge and understand financial risks and how to better manage/mitigate those.. Furthermore, good governance, clear business processes and data workflows are also normally better supported by the finance function too and those skills shouldn’t be undermine for finance to remain a key function. The finance function is a support service function and should not lose its focus and roots either. Therefore, I do agree with you that being exposed to other areas of the business is positive overall, but not sure about if it is how finance should find the right talent, at least I have some doubts, may be when combine with other initiatives of course! This is just a thought….
Enseignant école sup. en finances
6 年=> Agree with you Anders :” they just couldn’t see the point of coming to work in Finance” Ready to move from Business professional to finance. This is the path even if the path is a jungle for many "non-finance" back-background.
Head of Controlling Services, Process Excellence Book-To-Report, Global Business Services @ Bosch
6 年Many years ago I moved from project work as external consultant for financial management solutions into a finance function. Why? Simply to help develop and lead an organization from insight and not ?only“ providing advice how to do it and then move on. It would be very similar for people to move from business to Finance within one company just to help Finance providing services that the (internal) business really wants to have. What I learned from my move is that most (certainly not all) colleagues appreciated to have someone in the team who put the customer (here: the business line but also the external clients) in the middle of all that I was doing, also a quite frequently challenging our business what exactly they do with requested analysis to drive external business and challenge them by providing data that I felt would be needed to take decisions about future engagements etc. I do think it’s almost a no-brainer today that teams with mixed skills and experience will have higher success rates serving their internal and external customers. Having said that we shouldn’t stop to attract people from outside Finance to help us work with business, but also help them develop their own skills. We have a lot to offer to learn in Finance!