A Deep Dive into Leadership and Excellence for Finance and Accounting Professionals

We kick off by shedding light on how cultivating leadership qualities can propel your career ahead while catalyzing remarkable transformations in your team and the broader organization. We delve deep into the strategy of excellence, putting a spotlight on the power of clear communication, high expectations, and accountability. We also underscore the significance of trust, character, integrity, and equality in creating an environment that breeds excellence.

Episode outline:

1. What does achieving excellence mean,
2. Why developing your leadership will propel your career, and
3. How you can make a positive difference around you.

Please connect with me on:

1. Instagram: stephen.mclain
2. Twitter: smclainiii
3. Facebook: stephenmclainconsultant
4. LinkedIn: stephenjmclainiii

For more resources, please visit Finance Leader Academy:  financeleaderacademy.com. 

1. On the website, you can download the Become a Finance Leader Guide. You can use this guide to build your Finance Leadership skills so you can help senior leaders develop and execute the strategy.
2. I also offer a course, Advance Your Finance and Accounting Career: Developing a Promotion Strategy that Sets You Apart.

Chapters

• 0:04 Leadership and Excellence
• 13:29 Finance Leader Podcast and Resources

Transcript

Stephen McLain: 0:04

How does leadership and excellence go together? It's important for finance and accounting professionals to invest and develop their leadership skills so they can influence and build teams who achieve excellence, which then helps their organizations to achieve excellence. What is required is a strategy of excellence, along with a change in mindset. Grow your leadership skills so you are better prepared to help your teams to improve and strive for stronger performance. Excellence rarely happens without great leadership. Please enjoy the episode.

Stephen McLain: 0:41

Welcome to the Finance Leader Podcast, where leadership is bigger than the numbers. I am your host, Stephen McLain. This is the podcast for developing leaders in finance and accounting. Please consider following me on Twitter, facebook, instagram and LinkedIn. My user names and the links are in this episode's show notes.

Stephen McLain: 1:02

This is episode number 110, and I will be talking about using leadership to lift your team and your organization to excellence, and I will highlight the following topics Number 1, what does achieving excellence mean? Number 2, why developing your leadership will propel your career. And 3, how you can make a positive difference around you. General Colin Powell said if you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception. It is a prevailing attitude Today, wherever you are from a skills perspective, and no matter what you have on your plate today, it is another great day to learn and to grow. Learning has no impact if you don't grow, meaning if we don't become better today than we were yesterday. Then what did you learn? This is what I expect from myself and my teammates to be better today and better tomorrow. I believe I need to set the example for learning, growing and becoming better. Since I am a leader In finance and accounting, our roles are at the forefront of strategy execution and performance.

Stephen McLain: 2:18

We know it because we see the numbers. We have a critical leadership role in bridging gaps between our KPIs and the strategy. Business department leaders may not see what we see because they only see one side of the numbers, probably only their numbers and a few other metrics they may be interested in, but sometimes not the entire picture. This is where we can link what is missing. We can bridge the gap of understanding and move our organization a little closer to excellence. Do you believe that you can develop yourself to be an effective leader? I believe you can if you are committed to making others better. Also, can you bring out the best in your team? Can you inspire others to become better.

Stephen McLain: 3:04

Of course, it begins with hiring team members who are coachable and who want to learn. When we inherit a team, we do not get the luxury of hiring them, so we have to work with what we have. So it becomes a journey of discovering who we do have. Learn about each person and what motivates them, what are their goals, what challenges them and what type of work or project brings out their best. Considering the various types of leadership that we can adopt, I tend to practice a more participative approach, but it depends on the situation. To achieve excellence, you can definitely be more directive by saying something like do as I say and this is how you do it. Or you can set a vision and invite people to join you in achieving that vision. This, of course, depends on how you recruit and hire your team. If you want to be a visionary, you need to onboard team members who will most likely share your vision. I want to deep dive the various leadership styles in a future episode.

Stephen McLain: 4:05

Now, excellence can sometimes be subjective, but when we see it, we know it, and when an organization is poor in execution, we also know it and feel it. An organization who consistently is high performance often has the following characteristics they trust each other, they treat each other with respect and fairness and dignity, and their communication is clear and consistent. They believe in each other and where they are going. How do you begin on the journey to better team performance? Seek input from key leaders, try to discover where the roadblocks are Open and improve communication. Establish clear expectations, set high standards, hold others accountable and you set the best example possible with your own character, integrity and values. Now, to help you in your finance leadership development journey, I have a written guide for you called Become a Finance Leader. You can download it for free at the link in the show notes or go to financeleaderacademycom and download it there. This guide will help you with your mindset and other finance leadership related topics so you can help leaders throughout the organization. Also this is very important Ensure you are striving to accomplish your 2023 goals.

Stephen McLain: 5:25

What is your next big career move? Please make sure your resume or CV is updated and also your LinkedIn profile is updated. Always keep them updated. And also please clean up your social media so you are sending out the right messages. Are you ready for your next big career move?

Stephen McLain: 5:45

I believe we want to achieve excellence, but we sometimes don't know what it means or how to achieve it, or we deal with complacency and our comfort zone. It becomes a subjective goal to achieve. Because does excellence mean a number we are working towards or is it a particular culture that we want the team to live by? When we see it, we know it, and when we see a poor performing organization, we see that too. But what about performing average? And then we are also on the brink of poor performance. What do we do then? How do we fight going past average and making sure we do not slip into poor performance. So how do we do better? We can start getting movement in the right direction by setting clear expectations, by holding everyone accountable, communicating more clearly and by removing barriers or obstacles that are holding everyone back.

Stephen McLain: 6:39

Now let's talk about using your leadership to lift others and your organization to excellence. Number one what does achieving excellence mean? I talk about achieving excellence a lot, so I want to briefly discuss what an organization looks like that achieves excellence. There is a different vibe for an excellent achieving organization, because you can feel it and see it. One thing that is present is more trust, and trust is built on character, honesty, integrity and transparency. Trust is further built on unselfishness and looking out for others, fairness, equality and an unbiased approach to leading your team. There is no room for narcissism in a trust-built organization who wants to achieve excellence.

Stephen McLain: 7:23

Additionally, organizations who want to be excellent do the little things great. Every task matters, every detail matters and every action matters. Little actions done well build to greater things being done well. And what is your purpose? What does your company deliver to the market? Why does it exist? Who is your customer and what needs do you fulfill and can your customer get anywhere else? On how you deliver it, does the market believe in your organization and its values? Organizations that practice excellence do so often due to clearer and more consistent communication. Share relevant information quickly so the people who need to know can take appropriate action.

Stephen McLain: 8:10

Bridge gaps in understanding. I believe that as finance and accounting leaders, we get to bridge gaps between teams and other leaders where there's a failure to understand or a failure to move in the same direction. Senior leaders must be working to assure everyone is working in the same direction once a decision has been made. This is key to success and excellence. Now also be open-minded to new ideas and develop a culture of speaking up when you need to, so you can eliminate obstacles and improve communication. Excellence means you all must master your roles, become the best at what you do, and to do that, you must have a culture of learning and personal development.

Stephen McLain: 8:55

2. Why developing your leadership will propel your career. I believe that being a leader will set you apart from your finance and accounting peers, who can often be only focused on becoming the expert on the usual technical skills. Now, technical skills are important, but I want you to go steps further, to learn how to bring people and ideas together to develop and execute the strategy. Greater possibilities begin where learning leadership begins. Now let's get out of our comfort zone so we see new things, learn new things and we have new experiences that lead us to a better outcome. If your goal is to become CFO and even CEO, this will require you to learn leadership and to shift your skills from hard technical skills to soft skills. Leaders play umpire in our daily business. Leaders expect results and leaders lay down a foundation of purpose mission, creating a winning culture and establishing values to live up to daily.

Stephen McLain: 9:54

3. How you can make a positive difference around you. I want you to constantly be building out your leader's toolbox for key skills and action. The first you should be able to lead your team over obstacles that get in your way and set up priorities and ensure your team is trained properly and is focused on what is important. The next one is that effective leaders know how to achieve a consensus decision between opposing positions and then to refocus everyone once a decision is made. And the third is that all your team members should have a professional individual development plan and you should have regular one-on-one sessions to discuss issues and professional growth. And the fourth is that understand your bias so you are not blinded by it. Know and control what you are using to judge others so you overcome it. Your bias may be preventing you from hiring and developing incredible people. Develop a strategy and mindset of excellence with the people around you, engage with your team always, open better ways for clear and consistent communication and build trust in everything you do. And you also have to move on from people who undermine what you are trying to achieve. You know who they are. They do not buy in to what you are doing and will probably be happier somewhere else. Now, please build out your leader toolbox, develop a working strategy of excellence and mindset and quickly move on from people who are not fitting in or do not contribute to what you are trying to achieve.

Stephen McLain: 11:26

Achieving excellence is a game of mindset. It requires resilience, strength, focus and purpose. It's an everyday exercise to motivate your team to be the best and to defeat complacency and to overcome obstacles and barriers. It is a leader's responsibility to realign the team from mediocrity to excellence, do the right things extremely well and share everyone understands the priorities and work together to accomplish common goals. Now for action. Today, here are a few areas that can help you start building excellence in your daily work routine Grow your leadership skills, communicate purpose, build trust in all your actions and share you. Make everyone around you better every day and set a great example of character, integrity and values. This can get you started with building a culture and mindset of excellence.

Stephen McLain: 12:22

Today, I talked about using leadership to lift your team and your organization to excellence, and I highlighted the following points. Number one what does achieving excellence mean? Number two while developing your leadership will propel your career. And three how you can make a positive difference around you. What does it really mean to become excellent in our organizational performance? It can be a subjective measure based on our experience and what we expect from ourselves and our team.

Stephen McLain: 12:51

As a leader, do you feel satisfied with how you and your team performed? Can you do better? Are you happy with the results? Do the numbers suggest excellence or is something lacking? When I started in the Army, I always performed better when I was given leadership of a more poor performing organization. Improving performance always begins with understanding the obstacles and the breakdown in communication and standards. How can we do better? What can we do differently to raise the standards in our overall performance? It can often begin with how we treat our people.

Stephen McLain: 13:29

I hope you enjoyed the Finance Leader podcast. I am 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 will find the podcast Until next time. You can check out more resources at financeleaderacademycom 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.