What got you here won't get you there

Most professionals make good progress during the initial phase of their career but within 10-15 years they hit the plateau and struggle to make further progress. If you feel stuck in your career, read on.

It is not about your degrees or certifications, nor about your technical skills or functional expertise. All of this is important and that is the reason where you are today in your career. The initial phase of your career was a familiar path where you made good progress. But moving your career further up from the middle to the top is quite different and the path goes through unknown territory.

When you were starting your career, you knew well what certifications you must qualify and what skills you needed to learn. But now that you have a bigger career goal to reach the C-Suite, there is no structured career guidance available as to how you can achieve this goal.

It is all left upon the judgment and intuition of individual professionals to pick and choose the path as they see appropriate. Some God-gifted professionals make smooth progress to the top, however, most struggle.

The biggest mistake people make is to depend on the same tactics they played to bring their career from start to the middle. But to take it from the middle to the top, you need a very different strategy. Your hard work and long hours paid off well and your technical expertise got you high respect but to reach the CFO role you need to demonstrate a different set of skills.

Here is my recipe of 3 critical success factors to move your career from the middle to the top. I will also explain how we are transforming careers at MECA CFO Academy using the same approach.

1.????Your Mindset

First and foremost, you need to shift your focus from controlling to entrepreneurship, tactics to strategy, internal to external, bottom-up to top-down, what-is to what-if, micro-managing to big picture value creation and so on. An open mind with a huge capacity to learn and unlearn is a prerequisite.

A know-it-all attitude is the biggest hurdle for most mid-level professionals. It is not that they are dumb but a deep belief that by mid-career they have learned everything becomes their main limitation. Motivation to learn is the key.

The big corporations spend millions of dollars on their employees to build and nurture talent for the future. Unfortunately, the majority of this money goes down the drain because most employees sent to training by the corporates on corporate budgets do not consider such training anything more than some leisure time off the work. At best they gain some new knowledge which is hardly applied and soon gets rusted forever. What a pity. The corporates try to spoon-feed those who are not hungry.

It is easier to work with an open mind than with a clogged mind. We at MECA CFO Academy do not seek corporate nominations. We want professionals to make their own commitment and enroll with their own investments. The result? Most participants of the Strategic CFO Program join highly motivated with a commitment to learn and create a high ROI for them.

Every batch of the Strategic CFO Program is a cohort of highly charged professionals who are willing to learn with an open mind and commitment to change their careers and change their life. That makes our job easier. Rather than playing the role of a motivational speaker, I serve them as their career coach and personal trainer.

When we first introduced the ‘Strategic CFO Program’ in 2017 the duration was only 12 weeks. I soon realized that 3 months probably was ok to build some new knowledge but nowhere close enough to change the habits or build a new mindset. We decided to double the duration to 6 months and soon stretched to 12 months to ensure the results are achieved in terms of a new mindset and not just by knowledge building.

2.????Your Comfort-Level with People

Not many will admit but you can easily see common patterns; avoidance of going to meetings or not speaking or participating in meetings. Remaining within the four walls of their cubes or departments, hesitation to meet new people, and so on.

Our comfort zone is the main barrier to growing leadership skills. For example, speaking is an art and the easy way you can learn and develop this skill is to practice more. Unfortunately, the lack of comfort with people, makes it a challenge to speak in front of them, and thus one gets locked in a vicious circle. Leadership is all about working with people. If you are not comfortable with people, you are not comfortable with leadership.

To address this critical limitation, in the Strategic CFO Program, we form the participants into smaller peer groups. Peer groups work on their own and they meet every other week to work on their assignment involving the practice of leadership skills like presenting, debating an idea, negotiation, emotional intelligence etc.

Peer groups work on their own within the comfort zone of 5-7 people. It is the peer pressure, peer accountability, and peer support that keeps them working together thus enhancing their interactive skills. These peer group sessions are considered practice sessions for leadership skills. Any participant who does not have the opportunity or confidence at workplace to participate in interactive activities finds peer group sessions a robust platform to develop their leadership skills.

3.????Your Strategic Thinking

The strategy has become a cheap word. Almost every executive, whether they have had any formal training in strategy or not, considers a strategic thinker. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Otherwise, the top companies would not pay millions of dollars to top strategy consultants to help them with their strategy.

But you can always learn and develop this skill with dedication and commitment by spending some serious amount of time and money with a business school or a top executive coach or strategy consultant.

As a CFO, early on in my career, I understood that strategy skills are crucial for success in a CFO career. Besides, my MBA degree I ensured that I get fully skilled in top-notch strategy skills by attending multiple executive education strategy programs at Harvard Business School. This paid off very well in my career.

When we launched the first batch of the Strategic CFO Program, the business strategy was the core curriculum of the program. This helped a lot to finance professionals to learn and build their knowledge of strategy.

But they were still not fully equipped to execute the strategy. The strategy execution requires a strong grip on their leadership skills. So, we added an equal number of Leadership modules to make the program more balanced in helping participants develop their strategy knowledge and leadership skills at the same time.

Harvard Business School recognizes MECA CFO Academy as an institution of higher education. Through this arrangement, MECA has the privilege of accessing Harvard’s proprietary teaching resources and case studies and using them in our own programs. The curriculum of the Strategic CFO Program now includes several Harvard case studies and the Strategy Balanced Scorecard Simulation exercises from HBS.

Harvard’s teaching resources are world-class and well-tested and proven for higher education. It’s a tremendous advantage for MECA students to have access to the same quality of study material as the MBA students of Harvard Business School.

Technology is no more restricted within the domain of the IT department. It is now a common denominator and everybody’s business no matter which function you belong to. Today, no strategy discussion is complete without discussing the impact of digital technology. So finally, we added Technology modules to the Strategic CFO Program to provide digital orientation to prepare the Strategic CFOs for future.

Putting it All Together

Today, the MECA Strategic CFO Program is probably the best CFO program for mid-career professionals available anywhere to prepare and develop talent for C-Suite. The program now comprises 100+ hours of live online coaching sessions, spread over the topics of Strategy, Leadership, and Digital.

The 100% online format with live sessions on the weekends ensures that there is no interruption to your work schedules. The 12-month duration make the program highly practical with a total study load of not more than 4-5 hours per week.

We are now starting the 13th batch of this program on 28th May 2022. More than 300 executives and professionals have qualified so far from this program in the last 12 batches.

The MECA Strategic CFO Program has evolved over the past 5-6 years. When it was first launched in 2017, it was just a 12-week strategy program. Creating real results in Executive education is not easy. You deal with the experienced professionals helping them become more successful. Nothing is perfect. We learned from our mistakes. In every batch, we experimented with something new. If it worked, we polished it further and perfected it.

No wonder, the ‘Highly Satisfied’ score from the program completion survey is always above 90%. But this is not our goal. The main objective of the program is to develop and prepare the program participants for a successful role in C-Suite.

Out of the many success stories from the alumni of MECA Strategic CFO Program, I would like to share a recent case.

Yesterday I got a call from one of our senior alumni members who completed the MCA program in 2020. He told me he just got a job offer for the role of a Group CFO from one of the largest groups of companies in the UK. After 6 interviews, his final interview with the Group Chairman turned into a very insightful discussion on their business strategy and he got the offer. He pointed out the series of coaching sessions that mainly helped him to secure this offer. I am providing the links for the benefit of others:

Executive Job Search - Part 1

Executive Job Search - Part 2

Executive Job Search - Part 3

Are you ready for your next strategy conversation? That one conversation can provide you with more credentials than any executive MBA degree. Trust me. It works.

Join batch-13. Seats are filling fast.

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