Did you know that as a finance and accounting leader you can have a great, positive impact across your organization? Finance and Accounting professionals do more than just analysis and record financial transactions. We help lead change. We bring reality with the numbers. We advise with critical insights and help to shape and execute strategy. Leadership is the ability to communicate a vision that is easily understood by everyone and then…creating a pathway for your team and others to follow. Finance and accounting leadership is critical for an organization, so they apply numbers to strategy and to execution. How are you embracing the role of leader, and…do you yet realize the amazing impact you can have?
Episode outline:
Please connect with me on:
1. Instagram: stephen.mclain
2. Twitter: smclainiii
3. Facebook: stephenmclainconsultant
4. LinkedIn: stephenjmclainiii
Consider joining The Finance Leader Podcast Community Facebook Group, where we can talk leadership and the other topics I present here on the podcast. https://www.facebook.com/groups/financeleaderpodcast This is a good time to jump in and start sharing ideas and thoughts about leadership so we can help each other.
For more resources, please visit stephenmclain.com. On the website, you can download the Leadership Growth Blueprint for Finance and Accounting Managers. You can use this guide to develop your leadership by focusing on communication, and growing and empowering your team.
You can now purchase a course to help you advance your career from financeleaderacademy.com. It's called Advance Your Finance and Accounting Career: Developing a Promotion Strategy that Sets You Apart.
Did you know that as a finance and accounting leader you can have a great, positive impact across your organization? Finance and Accounting professionals do more than just analysis and record financial transactions. We help lead change. We bring reality with the numbers. We advise with critical insights and help to shape and execute strategy. Leadership is the ability to communicate a vision that is easily understood by everyone and then…creating a pathway for your team and others to follow. Finance and accounting leadership is critical for an organization, so they apply numbers to strategy and to execution. How are you embracing the role of leader, and…do you yet realize the amazing impact you can have?
Episode outline:
Please connect with me on:
1. Instagram: stephen.mclain
2. Twitter: smclainiii
3. Facebook: stephenmclainconsultant
4. LinkedIn: stephenjmclainiii
Consider joining The Finance Leader Podcast Community Facebook Group, where we can talk leadership and the other topics I present here on the podcast. https://www.facebook.com/groups/financeleaderpodcast This is a good time to jump in and start sharing ideas and thoughts about leadership so we can help each other.
For more resources, please visit stephenmclain.com. On the website, you can download the Leadership Growth Blueprint for Finance and Accounting Managers. You can use this guide to develop your leadership by focusing on communication, and growing and empowering your team.
You can now purchase a course to help you advance your career from financeleaderacademy.com. It's called Advance Your Finance and Accounting Career: Developing a Promotion Strategy that Sets You Apart.
Did you know that as a finance and accounting leader, you can have a great positive impact across your organization? finance and accounting professionals do more than just analysis and record financial transactions. We help lead change, we bring reality with the numbers, we advise with critical insights, and help to shape and execute strategy. Leadership is the ability to communicate a vision that is easily understood by everyone and then creating a pathway for your team and others to follow. Finance and Accounting leadership is critical for an organization. So they apply numbers to strategy and then to execution. How are you embracing the role of leader and do you yet realize the amazing impact you can have? Please enjoy the episode. Welcome to the finance leader podcast where leadership is bigger than the numbers. I am your host, Stephen McLean. This is the podcast for developing leaders in finance and accounting. Please consider following me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. My usernames and the links are in this episode's show notes. And also, please join the Facebook group I have for this podcast community. Thank you. This is episode number 100. And I'll be talking about how finance and accounting leaders can have a great impact across their organizations. And I will highlight the following topics. Number one, find relevant insights to help build the business. Number two, become a business advisor by translating key metrics and financial data into leadership actions. Number three, close the communication gap between teams. Number four, transform and update your processes always. And five, exercise your leadership ability to bring positive change. Author Simon Sinek said genius is in the idea. Impact however, comes from action. Now this is episode 100 have published 100 full length episodes, plus many bonus episodes. Since I started this podcast back in January of 2020. My goal was to highlight the role of leadership in the finance and accounting fields. We are not just doing analysis or recording transactions, but we are also helping to shape and grow the business. We are leaders who can help form and execute strategy. We also bring in reality with the numbers by communicating their impact and magnitude through a partnership with leaders at all levels in all departments and functional areas. Now what does it mean to be a finance leader? I want you to go beyond your spreadsheets in your analysis to create positive change and to help grow the business. Never allowing mediocrity to overcome anything you are responsible for. leaders provide a vision. They prioritize their actions. They are deliberate in everything they take on. They protect their team from distractions, and they grow other leaders. Finance leaders do this also within their finance and accounting responsibilities by improving their processes, and improving communication, understanding gaps when talking about the numbers, and proving monthly, close and going above and beyond to know everything about key metrics and KPIs that affect and drive the business. I challenged you as finance and accounting professionals to embrace becoming leaders and not just the technical experts. I want you to lead and influence positive action throughout the organization. I believe that leadership will set you apart from your peers, your peers are performing the required analysis. They're recording journal entries and sending off routine emails. With a few numbers. I am challenging you to do more, to become leaders to become advisors, and to bridge gaps in communication. I want you to continually transform finance and accounting so you can deliver faster, more accurate and more relevant information for decision makers. I have always believed that we often get stuck on technical solutions and usually only work on our technical skills. But leadership is key to advancement and through leadership, we get to have a positive impact on the business. A few weeks ago I asked in Episode 98 about why you chose a career in finance and accounting. It's leadership and impact for me, how can we make a positive difference, so we helped grow the business. reporting the numbers is not good enough, we must do more to help build the business. I believe we must partner with leaders around the organization. The finance and accounting fields are meant to have an impact across all the teams. We can literally lead and bring positive change as an essential business advisor to the organization. I love the role as advisor and partner with other leaders assisting them and accomplish Seeing their goals. This is where we can exert great influence on how the business can grow, and how to develop and execute the strategy. Fight the status quo by constantly reviewing and improving your processes. Challenge why we can't do something better and more efficient. Challenge why we can't invest in better technology and challenge why we can't show our data in a different way. I want you to break the fear of speaking out. Learn to find courage to engage with senior leaders, and bring the great insights that I know that you know, bring something unique that is usable, relevant and accurate. Share information that can change how people view the company, the competition, the market, are a key metric. Be bold and unafraid to take risks to share critical information so senior leaders know who you are, and what you can accomplish. Over the next few weeks. Review your goals that you set in 2022 and start to shape what you want to accomplish in 2023. What did you do? Great. Where did you fall short? What did you wish you had done differently, continue to track your progress, and your individual development plan and update it as you finish training or accomplishing a key objective or goal. Embrace your role as leader in the finance and accounting fields. Don't hold back, take what you are responsible for and make a difference, it will be welcomed way more than shunned. Be bold and find ways to help in your analysis. Close the Gap on guessing and knowing. We have senior leaders who may be guessing because they lacked the financial key metric insights to help them make better decisions, you can close that gap or at least make it smaller by what you can provide by the leadership that you can provide. Now let's talk about how finance and accounting leaders can have an impact across the organization. Number one, find relevant insights to build the business. We should not only be booking transactions or publishing the financial statements, or just performing our required analysis for monthly close, but we should be finding key insights to help improve and drive the business. learn and discover everything about the metrics and KPIs that is in your portfolio. So you can properly advise the departmental and functional leaders learn everything how each metric and KPI reacts to other business and economic stimuli to competitive moves to the economy in general everything. We are trying to find every way possible to help leaders to make more informed and better decisions. Number two, become a business advisor by translating key metrics and financial data into leadership actions. I want you to do more than just your routine set of reports and tasks. But embrace your role as business advisor, help leaders from around the organization to improve their areas. And to help drive their key metrics. You have the data so exercise your leadership ability to advise, team leaders don't really know what they are missing until you show them the relevant data, and how they can use it to deliver their desired results and accomplish their goals. I know you can help them do it. Number three, close the communication gap between teams. You will be surprised by how stove piped and separate teams and departments are in a company. They don't talk with each other due to fear or unhealthy competition, or just being too busy doing the wrong tasks. So they don't also share key information. But once you begin talking to leadership, you will see gaps in communication. And this is where you can help bridge those gaps. So find the gaps to help your company become better. They are there and can be easily found. And you can be the solution by applying leadership and bridging teams and bridging leaders across the organization. Number four, transform and update our processes always. How many times have you considered your team's processes as antiquated or outdated? I do always no matter what I know we can do better, that we can show our data better and that we can build our models better. A leader fights the status quo so they can bring about positive change. Are the finance and accounting teams still doing manual processes? can we automate more processes? Can we find better ways to do our jobs to get to the numbers or the desired output faster and more accurate so we can spend more time leading instead of developing elaborate labor intensive spreadsheets. Continue to review and update the finance and accounting processes. You may even have to work to transform your processes to ensure they stay up to date with industry and global standards. And don't forget to review your systems are they meeting the needs of the business and syst and work to have the business invest in modern systems. And finally, number five, exercise your leadership ability to bring positive change, finance and accounting professionals must be leaders We must exercise our leadership. So set the example for unnecessary change. People can get stuck in their processes, and then their daily tasks work, including senior leaders. So we must use leadership to fight the status quo. So we continue to grow and to become better. Learn how to tell stories with the data, make it interesting and link why it's important to the customer. I know that learning and exercising leadership is key to your own advancement. Once you move beyond only completing your everyday tasks, so you can have an impact with your leadership. I believe this will open additional opportunities for you, leadership can advance your career. Now for action today, realize an embrace that you as a finance and accounting leader can have an incredible positive impact in your organization. So here are a few items to consider. The first is Be not afraid to take action. I talked about taking risk in your career last week in episode number 99. Please go back and listen to that episode. If you missed it. The next is to work to bridge communication gaps between teams, you will realize that teams are not talking and that you can make an incredible impact. By putting two leaders together that are from different teams, you build a bridge that communication and it'll make the organization even better. Now learn everything you can about the business and what drives it, which includes key metrics and KPIs and show how they are affected. I also want you to find relevant and useful insights to help senior leaders make better decisions. And finally, review, update and transform your processes to find efficiencies, and to stay current with technology and the industry practices. If you have not already, I want to invite you to download a leadership guide for finance and accounting leaders, you can go to Finance leader academy.com and select Free leadership guide on the main menu. It's free, and it may give you a few ideas for your own leadership development. Or you can click the link in the show notes. Today I talked about how finance and accounting leaders can have a great impact across their organizations. And I highlighted the following points. Number one, find relevant insights to help build the business. Number two, become a business advisor by translating key metrics and financial data into leadership actions. Number three, close the communication gap between teams. Number four, transform and update our processes always. And five, exercise your leadership ability to bring positive change. Be bold in your leadership so you can bring positive change to your organization. I know there are team leaders who need more help and understanding their numbers, their metrics and their KPIs. You can bridge that gap believe that you can bring a positive impact in what you do. Showcase your leadership by bringing a positive light to everything the company is doing. Be ready for 2023 as we continue to work to improve ourselves so you can also advance your career. Over the next few weeks. I'll be sharing a few bonus episodes as we close out the year and get ready for 2023. The first full episode for 2023 will be released on January 10. This will begin season 13 And I can't wait to share. I want us to grow and develop as leaders even more than we did in 2022. I will be challenging you even more. So get ready. I hope you enjoyed the finance leader podcast dedicated to helping you grow your leadership skills to change your mindset and to clarify your goals so you advance your career. You can find this episode wherever you listen to podcasts. If this episode helped you today, please share and leave a quick review so that others may find the podcast. Until next time, you can check out more resources at finance leader academy.com and sign up for my weekly updates so you don't miss an episode of the podcast. And now go lead your team and I'll see you next time. Thank you