321.5 Afterpod | Brad Dickerson, CFO, Blue Apron

The After Pod is brought to you by BlackLine and US Bank. Hello, Thought Leader listeners, and welcome to another After Pod episode where we offer you a little something extra by featuring a different finance leader responding to one of our favorite questions. This After Pod, we feature Brad Dickerson, currently CFO of Blue Apron and former CFO of Under Armour. And our question is, When you entered the CFO office for the first time, what's the one piece of advice you wish someone had given you? Here's Brad.

Yeah, it's a great question, Jack. And I think, you know, as far as leadership goes, I really— I keep going back to this term self-awareness. And I think it's just an extremely important part of any, probably any team. But I think in my career with the accounting and finance team specifically, it's been a very, very important trait of success. And what I mean by self-awareness is not just self-awareness in yourself and maybe one of those things that you're very, very good at and you like to do versus maybe some of those things that you don't as much enjoy doing or don't like to do. or is not as good at. So I think being very self-aware really tends for you to start to build the right competencies around yourself. Where are you going to add value in an organization? Where are you not because of your self-awareness? Build around those to balance out the competencies you need in your group to be successful. And then teaching this and obviously talking to your team about this, letting them understand that self-awareness is a critically important part of their professional career too because they're going to be looked upon to hire people, hire teams, develop teams. And, you know, really the thought of that sometimes things we're not good at and weaknesses aren't necessarily a bad thing. Probably the biggest strength is understanding what they are and building the right competencies and the right attributes around yourself so that there's a great balance in your teams to be successful overall. And that's probably one of the biggest things that I really talk to a lot of people about is that, ah, To me, self-awareness in myself, self— and teaching the self-awareness attribute to the people in my teams, and really focusing on that and talking to them about that and getting them to focus on that, I think has been a differentiator. I think that's why we've built very, very good teams. People are very focused on building the right balance around themselves. So self-awareness is one important thing. I also think patience is an important thing. Patience to learn and develop. So if it was, you know, a 20-something today that was an aspiring CFO down the road, you know, my advice for them to be, you know, beyond self-aware is be patient to put the time and energy to learn and develop your skill set so that when you do become a CFO, you're ready for it. Too often today, I think people want to jump that curve a little bit, the learning curve, and they're very focused on, you know, as much responsibility as early as possible. I've seen too many examples of people that have moved up that learning curve too quickly and didn't appreciate the time to get developed and learn. Unfortunately, that curve flattened out on them farther on in their career because they just didn't invest enough time and energy into learning and developing. I think it's really important that people understand what they're good at, what they need to develop on, what they're challenged at, and not push their responsibility and their success too quickly. Because that could be at the expense of their long-term success.