Lessons learned from pitching 300 CFO's

Several months ago I had the opportunity to be apart of a conference specifically designed for women in financial leadership positions. The program had a balanced attendance of the public and private sectors.

My role in the conference was to get financial leadership in New Zealand to back the program and get their women in the room.

My prospects were Chief Financial Officers, Financial Controllers, and Finance Managers. Going into the program I had little understanding about finance roles or what the big challenges were, but I knew it was going to be a blast learning. I mapped out the biggest players first and then worked my way down. After an hour of prep, I was itching to go, I chucked on a headset and went to work.

Most core learnings came from my use of the engagement question, "What would you need to see in a program like this to think "hey I need to get my people in the room?"" I pitched this question over and over again, to council after council, energy company after energy company, every agricultural business, tech and telco, manufacturing, financial institutions, every university, port and any other business you could think of. To my surprise, the answers were the same or very similar and it was far more interesting than I anticipated.

Finance Manager Vs CFO

It became apparent that Chief Financial Officers understand clearly the difference between a Finance Manager and a CFO. I thought there would be a massive list (which there likely is) but each leader seemed to refer to one significant skill. They would say things like "this is what they need to become a CFO" and "its what sets finance professionals apart". The golden skill they referred to was communication. 9/10 CFO's would agree that the thing finance people lacked most was the ability to communicate well. Very few CFO's cared about training in the hard skills of finance, they unanimously agreed that the skill to crunch numbers wasn't a problem.

I began to say things in my conversations like "Every CFO in the country is having challenges with training their people in the soft skills like communication" the CFO would burst into laughter and say "my people could do with a bit of that, can I send the boys over too?". The most common one-liner I heard was "they struggle to communicate financial language to non-financial people" and they would typically end with "if they could gain that skill they would go a long way".

To have young finance professionals understand this idea and begin to develop this skillset would place them in such a great position.

Self Esteem - Resilience

There was one thing CFO's identified in female managers over male managers and that was a lack of self-esteem and not putting themselves out there enough. CFO after CFO. story after story they painted this image of women not seeing enough in themselves.

One CFO told a story about working alongside a female counterpart. Both were trained by the same CFO to potentially take over when he stepped down. He always thought she was miles ahead of him and best-suited for the role. He noted her skill and accuracy, her vision and ability to do the role so well. When the time came and the role was finally opened, she never applied for the position. He remembers her saying how she wasn't good enough and the role was just too big. He laughed and said, "if it was too big for her there was no chance for me ever landing it". He decided to apply for the role anyway and ended up getting it, that experience has stuck with him all these years.

This particular CFO decided to spend his career building his people's resilience. He said, "any program that taught resilience was worth exploring, anything about self-esteem anything about courage". He wasn't alone in this endeavor, both male and female CFO, Finance Manager and Financial Controller agree resilience was an important principle to emphasize.

There was a flip side to this principle because I happened to come across many female and male leaders that didn't agree. They didn't like the idea that women may have different needs than men, and the idea of separate needs by gender proved to become quite a fluff. These leaders typically had a no handouts, no women-only events, no gender discussion perspective. They believed that the best person always got the job and men needed to work on this as much as women. The idea of self-esteem and resilience was too fluffy for the male leaders in this group, and not a productive solution to the female leaders.

Both perspectives are interesting to understand

Lack of Women and Diversity

Though we have some great female finance leaders in New Zealand, there really aren't enough of them and it's very obvious. If I were to say most CFO's are older white men, that would be a huge understatement. Many organizations said they struggle to find female applicants for tier 2 and 3 and others said they were there but just get overlooked.

At the conference, the question of why this is was asked to a CFO of one of the banks, I loved his answer because it was very honest and humbly given. He said, "it's hard to say but for so long this has been a boys-only club, it's changing slowly but we have a long way to go". He suggested that change will come as more heads of organizations become women. He used the example of ASB and said: "a lot of progress has happened since the organization was under female leadership, its not perfect but its better". He mentioned that the front runner for ANZ's next CEO is female as well, and being the biggest bank in NZ he expected that it would cause some kind of ripple effect.

Last Words

I can't believe how great a conversation these people are, from Datacom to Silverfern Farms, Kiwibank to Transpower. I have stories of people coming to chair executive meetings in board shorts straight after a surf and others having trained 15 current CFO's in major companies. Finance has a lot of personality at the top, a lot of stress in the middle and a lot of grinding at the bottom. To those who aspire to one day being a CFO just know that they aspire to be the CEO, those that aspire to be the CEO usually become exactly that. Captain of the ship.

Conway Karaitiana