Six ways CFOs find the time to unlock their full potential

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Six ways CFOs find the time to unlock their full potential

By Ankur Agrawal et al., | McKinsey & Company | April 15, 2024

Extractive Summary of the Article | Listen 

Call it the CFO conundrum. As your company’s most senior finance executive, you understand that your most important mission is to enable significant value creation. That means finding a way to shift from “just” keeping a complex finance function on the rails to establishing yourself as the CEO’s principal thought partner—rather than, as some CFOs confide, being considered “a glorified accountant.” For some CFOs, the challenge can be even more intense. Instead of being carefully prepped for succession over the course of years, they find themselves thrust into the top role unexpectedly, perhaps when the business is in distress, emerging from an ownership change, or dealing with a tail-event crisis. They simply must carry the mantle forward. Urgent requirements, including cash management, internal and external reporting, talent development, risks and controls, and scenario planning, can’t be wished away.

But even following the most favorable transitions, many CFOs ask how they can conjure up the massive amount of time required to run a company’s finance function and also be a thoughtful, strategy-first leader. And how, in the face of the enormous complexity of pressing and even competing demands, can they establish the credibility to have other senior leaders view them as the de facto “deputy CEO”? If only they had more time, they could be that kind of CFO. But because they’re not that kind of CFO, they need to scramble to invest even more time.

Yet some CFOs do rise to the challenge. How they raise their games above functional expertise to achieve real strategic impact?  By improving in six critical dimensions, they solve the time-crunch challenge to become enterprise-wide leaders, superior decision-makers, and value-creating confidants of CEOs—all while running a more efficient, dynamic, and farsighted finance function.  These six critical dimensions are:

1. Crystalize your strategy—and identify where technology can be an enabler:  
2. Focus on big moves
3. Radically simplify
4. Keep up the tempo
5. Overcome cultural inertia
6. Mind your microhabits

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Call it the CFO conundrum. As your company’s most senior finance executive, you understand that your most important mission is to enable significant value creation. That means finding a way to shift from “just” keeping a complex finance function on the rails to establishing yourself as the CEO’s principal thought partner.
2. But even following the most favorable transitions, many CFOs ask how they can conjure up the massive amount of time required to run a company’s finance function and also be a thoughtful, strategy-first leader.  Yet some CFOs do rise to the challenge. How they raise their games above functional expertise to achieve real strategic impact?  
3. By improving in six critical dimensions i.e., crystalize your strategy—and identify where technology can be an enabler, focus on big moves, radically simplify, keep up the tempo, overcome cultural inertia, and mind your microhabits. – they solve the time-crunch challenge to become enterprise-wide leaders, superior decision-makers, and value-creating confidants of CEOs—all while running a more efficient, dynamic, and farsighted finance function.

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Topics:  Strategy, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Executive Officer