The 1 thing that stops Accountants being great Finance Business Partners

Sitting in front of you are two accountants at very different stages of their careers and with different ideas about what success looks like.

Peter is a senior finance executive in his 30s. Peter has had a varied career that started out of university working at a large multinational investment bank. He worked his way through 3 organisations in various analytical and business development roles and is now the Head of Commercial Finance for a large multinational with a team of 6 reporting into him. Peter is not a qualified accountant and does not have an accounting degree. His technical knowledge is considered limited as he does not know a lot about debits and credits, accounting standards or tax laws. What Peter does excel at is translating financial and numerical information into tangible business insight. He has partnered many different functions over his career including sales, marketing, supply chain and operations and also worked on several IT and system related projects. He is currently being succession planned into the CFO role within the multinational organisation he works in.

Jessica is an ambitious young accountant. She has spent the last 5-6 years of her life dedicated to the accounting profession. After breezing through university with high marks, she started working in one of the Big 4 accounting firms as an auditor. It is here she started her CA qualification and over the next 2 years managed to get through the rigours of one of the world’s best post graduate study programs and achieved a merit mark in 2 of the 5 modules.

Following 4 years as an auditor and working on some of the biggest clients in the country, she took the leap out of professional services and moved into a senior management accounting role in a large ASX company.

She is considered to be as technically strong as her peers in the field of accounting but is struggling to create influence in her organisation and is wondering what skills she is lacking that will help take her career to the next level. She has recently started her MBA as she sees this as a way of developing her skillset further in the finance and accounting field. She looks at the career of Peter and aspires to have a similar position in a few years time.

What is Jessica doing that is not allowing her to progress to the level Peter is at. How has Peter managed to get so far in an accounting and finance career and does not have any technical accounting skills.

This is the Accountants Paradigm.

And understanding the Accountants Paradigm is the first step to becoming a great finance business partner.

Being a great finance business partner requires very different skills and behaviours to being a great accountant. And it is counterintuitive to everything we are taught as accountants when we are doing our professional training.

For Jessica the good news is that right now she is the smartest she will ever be. Right now at this moment in her career, she is as technically smart as she will ever be in the accounting field. Jessica has just spent around 2 years studying everything, and right now she will never know more about technical accounting than she does now.

For Peter, unfortunately he is a long way past the smartest he will ever be. The last piece of formal technical training he did was in his commerce degree at university, plus some varied leadership training in the organisations he has been in.

But that is ok, because Peter has several other skills which put him comfortably in the position he is in as a Head of Commercial Finance of a large multinational. Peter has spent the last 10-15 years applying his financial and commercial acumen, his leadership skills and behaviours. He has spent the last 10-15 years helping people and solving problems in his organisations. And he has spent a significant portion of his career doing this with non finance professionals.

This is The Accountants Paradigm.

Finance staff at early stages in their career believe their technical expertise is what will make them successful. And it most likely does; in an expert area such as tax or professional services (working in a Big 4 firm or consulting). However in a commercial organisation surrounded by non finance people and complex variables, it is not what defines success.

This is The Accountants Paradigm – how do I change everything I have been taught and been conditioned to think like, in order to be successful in a role that requires a subtle change in skills, behaviours and approach.

Technical Knowledge 

To understand how your technical accounting knowledge works consider it to be a line on a graph. This line goes on an upward north east directional curve as we study our professional qualification and peaks at the conclusion of that. Then we qualify and slowly but surely this level of competence and knowledge decreases and flattens out. To a point where you now do not know as much from a technical stand point as you used to. You haven’t forgotten it, it’s just become a little vague.

This is normal and nothing to be afraid of. The reason this happens is because a significant portion of the technical material you study in your qualification is often not used once you are in an organisation. This is especially true in a large organisation which is where a lot of staff out of Big 4 firms first go, as there are several people focused on these specific areas. Put another way there are a number of subject matter experts in the organisation and you will be one of them for only a small portion of what you had previously studied.

I experienced this when I worked within a large ASX listed multinational property company. My role was heavily focused on Financial Instruments, hedging and Shareplans. These are the accounting standards I spent all my time reading and reviewing and I was an expert on them. I could even quote paragraphs of these standards. But if you asked me now I would have no idea, because I don’t work with them any longer and truth be told, I couldn’t care about them as they don’t help me solve the problems I am confronted with on a daily basis,

There must be something else going on otherwise we would all finish our professional qualification and be at the top of our games. If having strong technical knowledge was what career success looks like for a finance business partner, Jessica would be in the best position in her career right now, and we all know that isn’t what happens. If it was Jessica would be the Head of Commercial Finance and Peter would be a junior staff member.

Remember Peter is considered to be one of the best finance business partners in the country and he isn’t even a qualified accountant.

This is the Accountants Paradigm.

So how do we break this paradigm. Our industry is heavily focused on training and conditioning us to be technical experts in our field. However this knowledge and expertise is simply a hygiene factor when working in a commercial organisation. It is a ticket to the game. And sometimes it isn’t even a ticket to the game as other business functions like sales, marketing, operations have little to no idea what you are talking about when you quote S6 of the Tax Act or IFRS16.

So what is going on here and how do we break this paradigm so we can move from technical experts to strong finance business partners.

There are two additional dynamics that define your success

Credibility

The first is your ability to apply those technical skills. Or your practical experience in applying them. How do you solve problems and help people in your organisation in other functions. Your business acumen, your analysis skills. I like to call this your “Organisational Acumen” and this is what helps you build your credibility in an organisation.

Done well people will want to work with you. And once you have that (credibility) only then can you start to influence them.

This starts slow as you learn to do tasks and things that you need to do to do your job in an organisation. You effectively just learn the normal things of what to do and they are usually learnt via scripts, processes, etc; anything you can document and instruct.

This then builds as you encounter adhoc pieces of work (projects), oneoff issues, unusual problems and things that have not yet been encountered before by yourself and more often than not the rest of the finance team in the organisation.

This is where you take your technical skills and start to apply them to solve business problems, resolve issues and add value. And this can take some time as you will need to learn how the organisations business model works, where are the problems, what ideas do you have to tackle these issues and resolve.

It's a bit like when you first learn to cook. You most likely picked up a cook book or followed a recipe showing you all the ingredients and all of the steps to make the worlds most fantastic hard boiled egg. But it didn't work for some reason. Great chefs don't use cookbooks, they lean on the years of mastery or solving problems and helping others to be able to turn that ruined dish into something extraordinary (or edible at least). Without the ability to do that they have no credibility of their craft.

Don’t under estimate how easy it is to improve your credibility by just getting involved, observing and offering help in things that you may take for granted and assume others already know. Most of the time they don’t know what you know.

Influence

The second dynamic that will define your success is your behaviours.

The things you say, and the things you do, how you turn up, the words you use, the shoe you wear, your haircut, what you have for lunch, who you have lunch with, everything. All of these things other people are observing either consciously or subconsciously and they are discussing them with other people in your organisation. And you have no idea about it because you aren't even in the room for the conversation. This is where you build your influence within an organisation. By being conscious of it and making a few tweaks.

This builds slowly as most of us are meritocratic by nature (right/wrong, black/white) and then we start to understand that we need to be able to work with the other humans in an organisation who are not meritocratic. Once we realise this it takes off quickly.

Now as stupid as this sounds this behavioural line is a critical factor that can propel you quickly through an organisation and is often under estimated by finance people due to our meritocratic nature. It doesn’t require much technical knowledge but does require a strong element of emotional intelligence or EQ.

Don’t believe me. Surely we get to the top of the organisation by being good at what we do most accountants believe. And in part it is true, but not 100% true.

Try to think of an individual in your organisation that always seems to get promoted or gets opportunities but you look at them and think they do not seem to do a lot and don’t seem to know anything. This is them.

The leaders of the organisation love them and they behave in a way that’s consistent with the people who have influence in the organisation. And they are technically inept.

It doesn’t seem fair to us meritocratic technically strong finance individuals. And it’s not fair, but neither are organisations and politics.

This behavioural aspect of strong finance business partnering has four components:

1.      Your team; leading them and working with the people who speak the language of finance and know what you are on about. How do you make sure the people you are leading are aligned and will do things for you as their leader. What behaviours are required to be successful at this?

2.      Your peers; Cross functional people who are at your level or lower in the organisation but work in a completely different department that is not finance. Those who don’t speak your language and speak their own language. How do you get to a place where you understand each other and can help each other. What behaviours are required to be successful at this?

3.      Your stakeholders; your boss, your boss’ boss, and your boss’ peers. For your career aspirations to be fulfilled what are they looking for out of you and how do you influence them. What is your brand and reputation with them because they will have a large say in your success. What are they saying about you in their meetings? What behaviours are required to be successful at this?

4.      The organisation; how do the above three elements all come together and work in relation to the organisation you are in. Are you behaving in a way that is consistent with the leaders of the organisation and what do they want from you. If you want good work/life balance but the organisation you are in expects you to burn the midnight oil for them how does this play out. What behaviours are required to be successful at this?

If you are able to influence your team, your peers and your stakeholders and build trust with them, then you are well on your way to becoming a successful finance business partner.

This is the Accountants Paradigm.

Ensuring you focus on "applying" your technical skills, helping people and solving problems. And then being hyper conscious of your behaviours and "how" you do your job will help you break this paradox. Only then can you move from being a great accountant to being a great Finance Business Partner.

Author - Andrew Jepson

I was a Head of Finance who, overnight, became a Head of the whole company

It was then I realised everything I thought I knew about Finance Business Partnering, was wrong.

I was a finance person, telling non finance people about finance stuff. And I had it all wrong.

My non finance colleagues were looking for an orange, and I was trying to sell them a lemon.

I believe that the accounting and finance industry is at a fork in a road. Non finance teams are questioning our effectiveness in organisations. Few of us seem capable of connecting the dots. And with the threat of automation and robotics here now, if we don't do something different we will be under threat of irrelevance in a digital age.

I would like to change that.

I train, coach and develop finance teams and individuals the real art of finance business partnering SO THAT they can become more influential in their organisations

As accountants we have a lot to offer organisations, we just need to offer it in a slightly different way.

I am one of Australia's leading authorities on Finance Business Partnering, and head up the APAC region for The Finance Business Partner, a global consultancy firm founded by my good friend Andy Shambrook.

I have produced the Development Program "Compliance to Commercial" and recently published the frameworks and findings from 2 years of research of this, in a book titled "Compliance to Commercial: The QUIET approach to Finance Business Partnering".

I am an accredited Insights Discovery Practitioner, a tool that helps individuals with their self awareness and ability to connect with others. This allows me to profile individuals and teams and help build programs that can assist them with their specific situation.

If, like me, you have a passion for seeing the Finance and Accounting industry improve then lets connect....

www.thefinancebusinesspartner.com.au

www.vinceroconsulting.com.au

M:+61404 758 194