Why Your Finance Team Needs an Influence Strategy

Growing up in Ireland, I played Gaelic football.

If you don’t know it, it’s similar to the Australian rules.

At the underage level, I had some great coaches.

Or I should say, they were great people.

Some were parents. Some were former players. But they were really more like managers. None of them had ever learned to coach, so they made do with whatever knowledge they had.?

But hey, the main thing was getting a team on the pitch. And they did that very well.

Being competitive was a bonus.

Strategy in Action

When I was 24 and playing on the adult team, we got a new manager from outside the club.?

It was a complete game changer.

He organised a full practice game between ourselves - 15 versus 15.

He took my team to the side and gave us a set play to follow when the goalie kicked the ball out.?

Players on the right of the pitch would run to the left-hand side and call for the kick out.?

This created acres of space on the right. Without calling for the ball, one of the players would come from their position and move into that space.

From there, winning the ball was easy.

It took teamwork and coordination to make it happen. The whole team had to be on the same page to create that space.

But it worked, and it was exciting to see.

It was poetry in motion.?

In time, we developed eight of those kick-out set pieces. We weren’t just showing up to the pitch anymore. We had real strategies.?

And because of that, we’d win possession on 80 or 90% of the kickouts.

Why Did We Never Have This Growing Up?

It takes time for a football club to mature. Great coaching skills don’t develop overnight.

It’s probably a bit faster now that we have the Internet.

Want to be a better coach? Simple. Just order a book from Amazon or watch the right YouTube videos.

But it doesn’t really matter how you get those skills. What matters is that you do it.

My parents still live beside the football club. So when I visited them in Ireland last year, I took my son down to see a game.

The under-16 boys were playing.

But they weren’t playing the way I was at their age.

They had set plays. They had strategy. They played as a team and they were highly skilled because of it. They won both of their competitions last year.

The club has definitely matured.

And I think it all started 15 years ago, with that one set play.

The club never had coaches like that before.

Getting one opened our eyes. It showed us how much room there was to improve and, more importantly, how to take our team to the next level.

Does Your Team Have a Strategy for Influence?

How strategic is your team Finance team?

Is everyone on your team moving together in the right direction? Or does each person have their own idea of how to influence?

Would they benefit from having an influencing strategy and knowing what behaviours truly drive success?

Perhaps you’d love to arm them with a few set plays that could help them win.

If you’d like to have a more influential Finance team, you can watch a recording of an online event I ran recently. We discussed how to create an effective one-page finance strategy for influence and more.

Click here to get the details.

-Alan “Strategy” Cameron-Sweeney