Third Rule Of Book Club...
Following on from here and believing we agree that what we focus on grows, then why not adapt the Seven Areas of Life in a professional context to help us manage upwards, sideways and down? I've used this approach and found it to be helpful.
Managing Upwards
One of the trickier aspects of effective communication is ensuring both sides know what they mean by what they say. Remembering to qualify what we (think we) heard can be a game changer. Adding Let me share what I think I heard. For example.
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Reconciling perceptions, like building trust, loyalty, brand, or a platform, takes time. Mistakes can be made if we move too far, too fast, without cross checking. But, when we get it right, telepathy begins to seem possible. Magic happens.
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Leadership teams, especially in SME's, wear multiple hats. A good CFO anticipates well and covers the blindside for their CEO. We want our CEO focused on growth. Brand. Market. Clients. Products. Services. Culture. All the things that had that founder or leader wanting to go into business in the first place.
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When I first land with a new CEO, a priority for me is to ingest as much business and market intelligence as I can from the CEO and their leadership team, and at the earliest opportunity I look to play back what (I think) I heard.
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I want the deepest assurance possible, and at the earliest, that my CEO and I are on the same page. I'm seeking confirmation that I understand the challenges well enough to describe them simply. That what I thought I heard aligns with what my CEO thought their words meant.
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One area where this perception reconciliation really applies is making sure we both explore what my role needs from me and what success in my role would look like – to the CEO.
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Spoiler alert. Many SME founder-owner CEO’s have never hired or managed a CFO before. If my primary goal is to anticipate and (risk) manage their blindside, then I might do well to anticipate how my role is part of their blindside. So, how best can I help them manage me?
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Adapting and adopting the Seven Areas of Life framework is one such method.
We can rework the Seven Areas model to agree seven professional areas that we see as critical to the role. We can agree what we understand these seven areas to mean in terms of scope and depth. We may not yet know how to score a performance against them, but we can agree what success would look like and we can then manage to that. The good news is we have a framework. It could include themes like these:
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Managing Downwards
This approach to reconciling perceptions can really serve the CEO and CFO to help them quickly build confidence and alignment around the expectations they have for the role. The CFO can then reference this same framework to manage downwards. We can use the model to set expectations with direct reports and coach and encourage them to use it with theirs.
I would typically research my own seven criteria in advance, with simple definitions and clear reasons for why they matter to me. I would introduce my direct reports to the concept of the Seven Areas and then invite them to brainstorm with me on what they see as most important for their roles, and why. This gives us both an opportunity to sense how engaged and aligned we are and reduces the risk of my role leading the witness, so to speak.
Once we have the framework we can open up a conversation around how we’d score ourselves against each of the seven and what we could do (by when) to improve our scores.
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Managing Sideways
Having demonstrated the impact of this approach, especially in organizations where Strategic HR is a hat we wear rather than a dedicated head we have hired. I've frequently been asked by the CEO to share the framework with my peers so that they can adapt and adopt their own version for their roles in their functions and with their direct reports.
To be continued...