What IKEA Teaches Us About How to Become More Influential

When my wife and I first moved in together we didn’t have much in the way of furniture and fittings, nor much in the way of money (I’d imagine the relative salaries of trainee finance professional still haven’t improved much) so this was the first time we became acquainted with IKEA.  Chances are also good that you might also have a piece of IKEA furniture in your home. Perhaps you’re even sitting on an IKEA sofa as you read this blog, at an IKEA desk, or lying in an IKEA bed right now. So, why am I talking about the world’s largest furniture retailer and what can this Swedish giant teach finance professionals about how to become more influential with their stakeholders?

Finance as a profession has had many thousands of years of training in compliance and installing better controllership processes to reduce risks and better safeguard assets within the organisations they support. But this alone is not reason enough to get our stakeholders and customers to want to engage with their finance teams, because ultimately they’re not really interested in knowing what or how we do what we do.

Torture or Pleasure: The IKEA Process?

You only have to know or talk with someone who is familiar with the IKEA experience. In my formative years as a finance professional (as well as partner, fiancé, husband, and father) it’s like getting dragged to a super large car park, which most of the time was really busy, finding a parking space was an ordeal, a long walk over to the building, only to be confined to its labyrinth of maze-like showrooms designed to us to what seemed like every department, from the kitchen to the textiles, where we ended up buying things we never knew we needed. Note on a novice sub-lesson here: There were the inevitable arguments about this with Katie my long suffering partner, as my inner accountant would always question do we really need this, or even be here, inevitably I lost all of these and I’ve since learned to pick my battles.

And despite going through all of this, and leaving the store with our purchases, we more than likely have to face into the tortuous process of assembling that piece of furniture. So why did we do it? And why do so many others continue to do it making IKEA the worldwide success that it is?

Simple:

Customers and stakeholders don’t want to know what you do. They want to know how you’re going to enable them to do what they want to do.

At IKEA no one buys the ordeal or buying and torture of assembling that piece of furniture (some do but each to their own), they just want some shelves for our books or a table for our dinner. That’s why IKEA leaves the instructions and the confusing assortment of screws inside the packaging so we can get to the end outcome.

Stakeholders almost never buy the process. They buy the result.

What Interests Your Stakeholders

So we really should be influencing with what they want to be influenced on that’s going to help them meet their objectives (whilst making sure shareholders are also safeguarded). So in our context this means:

• Rather than asking leaders to have their teams make their purchases via a new central agency process, you can say it gives them more money invest back into their teams since we can negotiate bulk purchase discounts on the most common items and ensure they are continually stocked.
• Rather than implementing a new Finance review stage on larger deals and say we need to check the numbers, instead we position what we’re doing as helping teams drive more profitable sustainable business that allows them to meet their profit targets more predictably.
• In a lot of instance finance professionals have the right intent when introducing or changing processes, we could perhaps be better at identifying the results our stakeholders are looking to achieve and aligning what we do with how this serves their interests as well as those of our shareholders.

And that’s why we bring guest mentors onto our Strength in the Numbers Show, to help you peer over the fence to see what’s worked and not worked for them when positioning the end result instead of the process they are changing or introducing. We deconstruct their stories word-for-word and share with you their hard-won lessons so that you can digest their knowledge to practically figure out how to become more influential, solve more meaningful problems for your organisation and remain relevant in these times of digital disruption.

Stakeholders almost never buy the process. They buy the result. Do you agree?

The author Andrew Codd is the producer of the Strength in the Numbers Podcast which interviews real finance practitioners to break down their hard won lessons and deconstruct their practical methods that work on the job and which you won't typically find in textbooks or exams so that we create more influential finance professionals worldwide who solve meaningful problems for their organisations and in return have fun, rewarding and successful careers in finance.

Andrew also leads AVF Worldwide, which helps finance leaders and teams establish the necessary infrastructure around people, processes & systems to create more influential finance professionals who drive greater impacts for their organisations.