How To Speak Finance In A Non-Finance World
Anders Liu-Lindberg
Leading advisor to senior Finance and FP&A leaders on creating impact through business partnering | Interim | VP Finance | Business Finance
I think it’s fair to say that quite a few finance professionals struggle with effective communication. This is especially true when they are trying to communicate with people outside of the Finance realm. Sometimes our presentations include so many numbers that you get a headache just by looking at it. All of course with good intentions however if this is true for your presentations then you can forget about ever forming a meaningful connection with non-finance professionals. So what can you do to remove this barrier between your exciting world of finance and the rest of the people you work with? Here are some tips and examples of how to do it:
- Speak with presentations instead of word documents or long e-mails
- Use story line headings instead of generic titles. This will help guide the audience through your presentation and act as an executive summary
- Speak with graphs instead of tables and take a moment to consider if you prefer (a) or (b)?
- Turn your “big data” Excel sheets into easy to understand dashboards like from (c) to (d)
- Last but not least speak in business terms instead of just talking about variances, increases, decreases, percentages etc.
(a)
b)
(c)
(d)
If you follow some of these simple tips your presentations will come to life and you will start to see that even non-finance professionals stop falling asleep during your presentations. You might actually forge a connection with them and they will stop calling you a bean counter and refer to you as their business partner. One HR professional once told me after one of my presentations that this was the first time she actually got it when someone from Finance presented. The same thing could happen to you!
I would like to hear some of YOUR stories on how YOU managed to catch the attention of people in the non-finance world!
I also encourage you to take a tour of my old posts on finance transformation and not least “Introducing The Finance Transformation Nine Box” which is really the starting point for the transformation. Last but not least, you should join my Finance Business Partner Forum where we will continue to discuss this topic.
Financial Analyst vs. Finance Business Partner
You’re A Finance Business Partner, Now What?
Case Study: Becoming A Finance Business Partner
The New Career Path For Finance Professionals
Why We Need Business Partnering Transformation
How Finance Can Help When Business Is Bad
How Finance Can Become An Analytics Powerhouse
How Finance Business Partners Improve Company Performance
There Is A New Kind Of CFO Needed In Town
Anders Liu-Lindberg is the Head of Global Finance PMO for Maersk Transport & Logistics and is working with the transformation of Finance and business on a daily basis. I have participated in several transformation processes such as a (business) finance transformation at Maersk Line, going Beyond Budgeting at Maersk Drilling and transformed a finance team from Bean-counters to Business Partners. I would love the chance to collaborate with you on your own transformation processes to help you stay out of disruption. Don’t be shy! Let’s get in touch and start helping each other.
Financial Controller at Tibah Airports Operation Co. LTD
4 年Anders Liu-Lindberg Excellent Article very helpful Thanks for sharing I will also try to implement with details mentioned
Executive Security Consultant | Creator Bold Behaviour Be Sci Newsletter & Podcast | Keynote Speaker, EMCEE Tech Event Presenter, Moderator & Facilitator Extraordinaire | Bold Behaviour Podcast Host
4 年Love this Anders Liu-Lindberg - a question I always ask is “show me the hero, the villain and the mentor in this data” the story is there, we just need to say why it impacts.
Collaborator, Cost Reduction Strategist, Automation Specialist, Simplifier ? Financial Planning & Analysis ? Project Mgt ? Budgeting ? Forecasting ? Process Improvement ? Expense Mgt ? Accounting ? Auditing ? Fixed Asset
4 年Anders, nicely done. c and d charts better for presentation. I see where you are heading with it.????
Head of Finance - Europe (DAF) @ Triple-A
6 年I used to be the accountant who tried to present information in the (a) format and get frustrated when people wouldn't look at it. Then I sat down with our CFO who would have a quick look and say : 'so what?'. And this is the answer I am trying to give every time I am presenting numbers.?
Business controller
6 年Sometimes it might be best to not even show graphs but just tell (in language that the business will understand and appeals to them) and show you're emotion. By the way, I mostly use graphs, only sometimes supported bij tables with as little amount of numbers as possible.