What They Don’t Tell You About Becoming a CFO - Part 3 of 3

TRANSCRIPT

The path to the C suite is rarely linear, and the challenges don't stop once you get there. I'm Wassia Kamon, and I'm taking you with me on my journey as a newly appointed CFO, sharing the hidden challenges, unspoken rules, and lessons I wish I had known. So whether you're in finance, working finance, or just trying to get your budget approved faster, there's something here for you.

The purpose of this podcast is to make better leaders and help leaders be better at life. Welcome to the Diary of a CFO.

Hello, and welcome back to part three. Of what they don't tell you about becoming a CFO. Part three is simple. And that is that you cannot be a yes person and thrive, especially as a CFO.

When you think about leadership in general, you saying yes to a lot of things, too many things, or not able to say no, when you need to shows four main things to others around you. One, it shows that you lack. Focus. Many people are not considered for leadership because others see them as being all over the place.

That alone shows you how being able to say no can help you stay on track and deliver the best possible results. The second thing is when you say yes to too many things, you're not able to always deliver on your priorities. See, effective leadership is a mindset. It requires constant prioritization of what matters most to deliver effective results.

So by saying no, you are able to show that you can think strategically. To make things happen. So let's say there is a project and somebody says, Hey, there is this other project I need to be on. And for some reason you're like, yeah, sure. You could be shifting your energy and in result, what you were actually working on may not go as planned, may not go as well.

Because you divided your energy to something you probably didn't need to go in. So you have to be comfortable saying no when you need to. That's important for leadership in general. And it's also important for your personal brand. So your personal brand will erode when you are not able to say no when you need to.

Because you'll find yourself, and I am guilty of that too, saying yes to a lot of things. But then you realize, oh, I cannot do it. And so you will let people down and your brand will suffer your mental health as well, because you won't see yourself as a dependable person, but that's really you saying yes to too many things.

As a leader, it's important to say no to protect your team. Because if you say yes to everything, chances are you'll probably overload your team with non value tasks. Because every time a department or so and so says something, BAM, you do it. BAM, you go to your team and you're doing it and it's not good.

And it reminds me of a great quote by Ray Kroc that says, The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves. Again, the quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves. You have to be comfortable saying no. There is no shortcut to it.

So, so far we talked about four things, four consequences of you not being able to comfortably say no, saying yes too often.

The first one is because you will seem to be all over the place. You won't have the focus, which secondly. Will not allow you to deliver on your priorities because you'll be too distracted. The third thing is when you're too distracted, your personal brain can suffer because again, you're not delivering on what you said you were going to do.

And then the fourth thing is your team as a leader. If you say yes to too much, you will be overwhelming your team with all these times that you saying yes from another department, just push back. Just to safeguard your team, make sure that you deliver on your priorities. Now, why is it important, especially as we in this conversation about CFOs?

Because the CFO sets a cultural tone for risk. Your attitude toward risk will shape the company's overall approach. Your decisions as a finance leader and guidance will influence everything from investment to operational strategies, from how we think about how we're going to spend money to the boundaries of what is acceptable risk taking in every department, sales, marketing, HR, it, and all that.

So you have to be able to know that you saying yes to everything. Could be reckless when you think about risk management. Are you considering all the risks associated with a particular decision? And so if one decision is risky, you will have to say no, because you are responsible for protecting the business from itself.

Yes. As a CFO, you are often the last line of defense against bad decisions. Whether it's an overly aggressive expansion or risky acquisition, you have to be the voice of reason. And that's even when everyone else is caught up in the excitement. Yes, it's a great idea. Let's do it. Let's do it. And you come in and you, you probably the CF know, right?

And oh, no, they may see you like that, but you have to remember why you're doing this because you again, setting the. Don't for risk. Same thing. When you think about balancing short term and long term goals as a CFO, you, you constantly have to juggle between meeting the short term financial targets. And long term sustainability, and that's particularly hard for CFOs of public companies, because you have investors sometimes wring down your neck, you have activists, you have people want to see the result now, now, now, they want dividends now, now, now, and it may not be helpful for the company 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 years ahead.

But as a CFO, as a finance leader, you will have that big picture. You'll be able to see from above what's going on and you'll be able to know that, um, yes, this may be exciting in the short term, but it will not be in the long term. So as you thinking about risk, as you thinking about how you have to protect the business from itself, you have to be comfortable saying no.

Another thing to consider is.

CFO, CEO relationship as a CFO, you report to the CEO and your success is tied to the CEO. That means sometimes the CEO will be excited about certain things, some risky things, the things that may be good in the short term, but not in the long term. So you will need to provide constructive dissent when necessary.

You will have to find that balance of how do I say no to the CEO? How do I counter something they may want to do? How do I negotiate? How do I get alignment with the CEO? Knowing that I have the financial responsibility in my role to set the tone for risk. To protect the business from itself, to help people see the blind spots, things that may not be considering when it comes to strategic finance.

And that's hard. And it's also places CFOs in a very, very vulnerable place. I've seen a lot of CFOs who had to quit, who were terminated because they said, no, they stood up for themselves. That's when controllers, I will say, have an advantage over CFOs in that, because I realized that a lot of companies will let go of the CFO easier than they will do of their controllers.

That's why you can see a lot of controllers being at their role for 5, 10 years, and yet they've been through like CFOs. It's a tough place to be, and that's something that We all need to be aware of that's why you have to master the art of saying no without alienating people because you often be the gatekeeper of the company's resources.

You have to know how to decline funding requests. Without shutting down innovation, without damaging your relationships. That's a tough balancing act that you will face in the role. It's a tough spot. I actually published a post on LinkedIn, I think a couple of months ago now, where I was talking about the decrease in tenor of.

So CFOs were staying a few years at the organizations and that number keeps going down. So a lot of people were like, Oh, they're just looking for new opportunities. But a lot of it in the comments and DMs I received were disagreements with other people in the C suite and the CEO, especially. So how are you able to negotiate and strike win win deals will be key in this role.

You have to get comfortable negotiating and saying no, sometimes you don't need to say the word no. Okay. There are other ways that you can say no without saying no. If that's something that you're not comfortable with, I'll share a few tips. For example, you can offer a compromise. So let's say the situation is with limited time and bandwidth.

We cannot make everything happen. Okay, so let's say you stretched. You can say, Hey, I can do X but it will mean that this priority I'm working on will be delayed. Okay, so that could work with even your boss, with everyday things. So you're not saying no, you're just saying that if I do this, I won't be able to do that.

Or you can author an alternative. And you can say, hey, I know you asked for XYZ but if the main goal is X There is this ABC document that can work, like what is something else that could be an alternative? Again, you're not saying no, using the word no, but you're just saying, I know you want this, but here's another thing that could work.

Or you can just recalculate the run and say, Oh, you asked me this, but I think Susie in this department may be better able to help. So I'm not telling you no, I'm just helping you out, or you can just act like a coach. Somebody comes and you're like, okay, you should have the answer. And you'll be like, Hey, I can help you do this.

So you don't need me in the future. And so you're not saying no, but you're saying no, using other ways.

And to me, this part three about the fact that you cannot be a yes person and thrive is very personal. It's very personal because. In my career, I've seen so many people being so intense at work, working crazy hours, and going through a divorce because they were spending too much time at work.

I've seen people, unfortunately, pass away. For not taking care of their physical health and saying yes to a increasing workload, taking on, taking on, taking on. At the end of last year, I lost a member of my community to brain aneurysm. He passed away. He was working crazy hours and he passed away. He left a wife and two kids under five.

So to me, knowing how to say no is not just to be successful at work, it's a matter of life and death. Whenever you're in a situation where you feel like, oh, I have to say yes, I have to say yes, otherwise I'm losing my job, you have to be mindful. You have to at least give yourself a deadline. For example, if you work in accounting, it would be yes during month end.

Month end is crazy. It's maybe a week or two during the month, but then after you should have normal hours, it could be. Yes. I'm going to be staying very late during the budget. It happens once a year, maybe around the forecast, but then afterwards. I'm going to work normal hours. What are you saying yes to?

How are you saying yes to it? And how are you comfortable saying no? Now, I get a lot of people saying, Oh, I see. But that's you. You're so great. You have all these areas behind your name. You can say no and you'll be fine. Uh, baby. No, boo. No, I struggle, too, with saying no sometimes. Right. Depending on the circumstance, you don't want to disappoint.

But I have to remind myself, I have to remember those extreme example, yes, granted extreme example of how not saying no can be very damaging to your life, to your personal life. So what do you do? What should you do?

Work on career insurance. You should be thinking and be intentional about building your career insurance.

That's a term that April Little, if you don't follow her on LinkedIn, you should absolutely. She's an executive coach, amazing, amazing, brilliant person, career insurance. That's what you need when you know that you will say no, need to say no. And that may put you in a bad spot, like literally losing your job.

Okay, because like I said, a lot of companies are more comfortable letting go of the CFOs and their controller and other positions. So you are in this spot. You are in a tough spot and you're like, Ooh, I may have to say no. How do you develop what I call career insurance? Because you need career insurance.

Okay. I saw an article about PwC and how they were going to let go of about, I think over 1700 people. Last year, Accenture globally let go of 19, 000 consultants, 19, 000 KPMG, Deloitte, Ernst Young, they all laid off people. When you're in accounting and finance, you realize these companies are like your dream companies when you are in college.

They're like, Ooh, you have this, your career is insured, you'll be fine. And now we're seeing them lay off. While you were working so hard, crazy hours, saying yes to everything, well, I hope you built career insurance. What is career insurance? Sure you wonder, and I'm glad you asked. One thing, for example, of career insurance is personal development.

What are you doing to improve your skills? Thank you for tuning in and listening, and I'm sure you're learning some things. What else are you doing to increase your knowledge and be better at your craft? Because you realize that the better you are, the more options you create for you. And so when you're in a situation where you need to say no, and it may cost you your job, you will feel more comfortable because you've been keeping yourself updated.

Likewise, the second tip I have for you is networking. Yes, networking. You should try to meet a different person every week that's in your field or outside of your field, because you want to build your network before you need it. You can create your own community, right? So I have my own finance sisterhood.

I'm also connecting with other female CFOs. You need to be able to say, okay, if I'm confronted with a very difficult situation, like fraud, you don't want to be in trouble. If something goes wrong and you have to walk out, what is your career insurance? What are you going to do? Of course, we all have bills to pay a lifestyle that we want to keep.

So what are you doing? Because as I said earlier, layoffs are happening everywhere at every company. It's not like. Back in the, what, 80s, 70s, people were thinking twice before firing people, um, just to meet a quarter result, they'll let go. You may say, Oh, I see. That's very pessimistic. How do you know that?

Well, the news, but also because I, in my career, was involved twice in. Let's say expense optimization exercise that ended up with having to let go of people. That was so hard. That was so hard for me on a personal level. I remember crying. I remember staying up at night because it was very tough. There was a number to me.

I was helping. The business make those tough decisions and trying to manage for a certain number. Not that I'm proud of that moment, but it's just a reality when you're finance leader, sometimes you have to make those tough decisions. And sometimes somebody else is making those tough decisions about you.

So as a person, as a professional, What's your career insurance? So yes, I talked about how you have to keep improving yourself, how to have a strong network, but also to me, third, we always come back to having a good personal brand, having people knowing you and wanting to work with you. It's also important.

Now, beyond personal branding is what I call strategic influence. Strategic influence is that intersection between strategic ability and influence. I have a leadership assessment on it. If you go on my website, awasiakamon. com, it's a free assessment. Please take it so I can register into the research I'm doing regarding it.

But what I'm finding out is that the people and teams who succeed have strategic influence because they're able to see the bigger picture. And people trust them and are able to influence the decision positively. Back to the idea of you have to say no, if you have strategic influence, if people know your strategic ability, and if your personal brand is strong, you have great relationship with them and you have influence over the decisions, influence to move them toward what you are advocating for, then you say no.

Will not impact your work in a negative way. It will just be another day. You won't have to be thinking, Oh, I will probably lose my job. But after I say this, so having strategic influence beyond just working in your personal brand is something that will really place you into a safer place and into a place of really power, let's think about.

A finance team in general, right? So you have finance teams that are strong. Okay. They have the right people. They have the right systems. They have the right processes. I mean, the team is on fire. They have strength, but what if they don't have influence? It means that they will come up with great insight.

You, the CFO, the finance law will come up with great insight and say, Hey, my team or my analysis shows that here is what we need to do. If you have no influence, that great inside of information will fall on deaf ears. Nobody will listen to it. They'll move on with their life because you don't have strategic influence.

Because you're not aligning yourself with the power players because you haven't built a brand and a reputation of being strategic, of being someone that can be trusted, of being someone that people want to work with. You haven't built your strategic influence. And so even though you're strong, you know how to do your work.

Your team is strong. If you're not conscious. About your need for strategic influence. All that you will say will not matter. I have a very long article on my website about strategic influence. So I invite you to check it out, but that's really what you need as career insurance when we think about saying no, because sometimes saying no is uncomfortable.

I'm not going to say that. Oh, it's so easy for me to say no. Sometimes I struggle even with my friends that struggle. I'm like, yeah, I want to come to this party. And then I'm like, Ooh, I have this engagement. I can't go to. When you want to be comfortable saying no, yes, I shared a lot of things about how you can say no without saying no, how you need to improve your negotiation skills, right?

And creating win win agreement, win win situation. To me, you also need career insurance. We all need right now with AI and layoffs left and right, we all need to be thinking about career insurance. Whether it's you learning more, developing yourself, attending conference, you networking, getting out of your zone of working, I don't know how many hours a week that you'd never have time to network.

Stop that. Okay. Sunday night, you can just go on LinkedIn and connect with five people and somebody will be willing to have a virtual coffee chat with you. Bam. You connect with somebody else. Okay. And you don't have to do it based on their title now, whatever, but I do encourage you be out there, build your personal brand.

Yes. But also think about strategic influence, build work on your strategic influence, both inside and outside of your company. So that when you're in this situation where you need to say, no, you have options. You have career insurance because saying no, it's really part of the job. It's really part of the job.

It's hard to say that you're going to be the person setting the tone for risk. And every time somebody comes to you, you just say, yes, if you do your analysis, you have an understanding and you realize that he's not in line. You will have to say no. If you have a budget that you need to stick to, because otherwise you may have cashflow problems.

You will have to say no, otherwise you wouldn't be doing your job. Now how you say it, how you're able to negotiate is what will really make a difference for you. So definitely strengthen your negotiation skills. Again, we're in finance and accounting background, and as we went through college, it was all about technical, technical, technical skills.

That's what we learned in school. That's what we did a lot of. And that we realized that the higher we go in our hierarchy, the more we need those soft skills. To some extent is like, Oh, it's not fair. Right? Because we're like, Oh, I like to say, can I get my money back? Cause I didn't feel prepared for some of that.

Well, we just have to be mindful and find leadership programs that are specifically addressing the finance specific leadership challenges, because. Unlike our peers in HR, sales, and marketing, we in finance and accounting are usually promoted for our technical expertise. So when we are transitioning from an individual contributor to being a leader, we have to know how to manage people.

Yes, but there is a lot of other shift that we have to do in our ways. We have to shift focusing on being in compliance to having influence. We have to shift from being in the details to be talking strategy. We have to shift from being in the numbers to how we craft. Narratives and storytelling, how we avoid finance jargon and all that while we're doing a lot of decision making with incomplete information and under pressure.

And that's a lot. That's a lot of us finance leader, and we're not always prepared for it. And that's why I hope this podcast will shed the light on a lot of other things that. We need to be aware of to thrive as finance and accounting leaders, as business leaders, and also as individual, because behind the titles are people, we human beings.

And so we need to be able to say no to protect our mental health, our professional lives, but also do great at work in the responsibilities that we have to carry.

That's it for today. Thank you so much for tuning in again. This was part three. Of what they don't tell you about becoming a CFO. If there's any other topics you would like me to cover in the future, as I like to say, don't hesitate to DM me on LinkedIn or email me at ask at a diary of a CFO.

com. Coming up next are episodes that I did with special guests. We'll cover things like how you work better with marketing and other functions, how you plan your 90 days, what are some of the things that you should be thinking about as you step into a new CFO role? I cannot wait for you to listen to those episodes.

So keep spreading the word. Don't forget to subscribe and review as we are trying to make better leaders and help leaders be better at life with this podcast. Thank you.