I’ve written before about how good leaders give effective feedback when the stakes are high. That article articulates a method for structuring feedback to ensure you effectively deliver the content of your message so that it can be heard and so that it can actually help change behavior going forward.
Important decisions benefit from genuinely different perspectives. The job is not to eliminate bias, which is impossible, nor is it necessarily to reach consensus. Too much consensus can produce what I sometimes call ‘consenseless’: a conclusion sufficiently diluted for everyone to accept and no one particularly to believe.
One useful approach to seeing how significantly the chief financial officer’s role must change over the next decade is to weigh the questions finance leaders should be asking today—but often are not. A traditional CFO might ask, “How can we reduce costs?” By contrast, a strong CFO today is more likely to ask, “Which costs should we remove to fund growth and innovation?”
There is a significant risk in continuing to develop leaders for yesterday’s role. Leaders who are given more interpersonal responsibilities without the tools, time, or space to carry it will burn out. Organisations will lose talented people, and others will look at the role and decide they do not want it.
More than two-thirds (67%) of job seekers said they’ve modified parts of their personalities to better align with their company’s culture, and 63% said that who they were at work was different than who they were outside of work.
