Leading CFOs today are helping to shape strategies across entire organizations to drive long-term performance and growth. But some do it better than others. What do the high-performing finance leaders do differently? And how can you as a CFO evolve in your organization?
Finance leaders differ from the majority of roles in an organization by making a concrete impact on the company’s overall performance. They not only execute daily transaction-focused activities with a high degree of competence but also, and perhaps even more significantly, guide the strategic decision-making of other departments in the company.
Revealing research conducted with 1,500 finance executives globally from Oxford Economics and SAP shows that there are 6 key ways finance leaders stay ahead of the competition.
1. Competent CFOs have strong influence beyond the finance sector. This makes them highly impactful.
2. The ultimate goal for a CFO is to drive strategic growth initiatives while keeping the company’s resources in line. When finance breaks out of its silo, performance improves drastically.
3. CFOs focus on improving efficiency with automation. This not only helps to reduce the time it takes to complete tasks but also reduces costs.
4. Competent CFOs are very effective at core finance processes. This leads to robust profitability in which traditional finance activities still play a crucial role.
5. CFOs collaborate regularly with business units across the entire company. The collaboration includes not just finance, accounting, and sales departments but also human resources, operations, and technology departments.
6. Competent CFOs work closely with the GRC team and excel at handling regulatory change. Changing the dynamic business environment and making their processes more efficient is what they look for.
CFOs who want to ensure their hard work results in measurable results can boost organization performance to ensure all aspects of the business benefit from finance’s functioning, maximize efficiency through automating core processes, optimizing risk management by creating a strong alignment between GRC teams and finance, and use analytics and other tools to make data simple.
If you want to find out more about the 6 ways CFOs can stay ahead of the competition, click the link below for more information.
