People First Finance: Building World-Class Teams & Culture

Welcome FP and a guy here. Super excited to have you and look forward to learning where each of you are coming from and talking about people first finance. This session is sponsored by Maxio. Really excited to have them as the the sponsor and I'm going to go ahead and share my screen and get started with the deck here. But I would love to know where you're coming from. So if you could let me know where you are out there, I'd really appreciate it. So go ahead and just let me know in the comments where you're coming from today your name is and where you're coming from. Where. This is a three part series we're going to be doing this week, next week and the following week and the focus is on frictionless finance and it's going to be people, process and technology and we're going to talk in that order. So today we're going to focus on people and then in the future weeks we will focus on process and technology. Welcome Shani from New York City. Excited to have you. I'm going to go ahead and present my screen here. Craig, welcome from Minneapolis. Keep letting me know where you're coming from. Always love to see where we have different people coming from that join us. So let me know if you could see my screen. Everybody should be seeing the deck now. Alrighty. Hopefully everybody's seeing it. We'll jump into things. Welcome Lorena from United Arab Emirates. So as I mentioned, people first finance building world class teams and culture. So this series is brought to you by Maxio. Maxio is basically a billing and SaaS platform. So what Maxio does is it removes friction from financial operations and billing by automating workflows like Revrec and SaaS metrics. Great SaaS companies pair their talented team with Maxi Help me to do. Got it. So really it started as how do I get what I have in my head on paper and got turned into a book at the end of the day and so is there. You talk a lot about helping teams teams be proactive. Is there a key framework in there or methodology you like to do to help make ensure your finance team, the people that are under you, that you manage are proactive.

Yeah, that's a good question. I feel like a lot of FP and A teams the main issue that you'll find is they will fall victim to, I'll call it the squeaky wheel impact. So if you've got a business partner who wants something a certain way or they need something something or the business is putting on pressure on you to get something specific. Oftentimes that thing is not perfectly or directly lined up to like, what's going to be the most value added thing for the company. So what happens with a lot of folks who are in FP and A, who are great at serving their business partners, being in great relationship with them, doing great analytics for them, building reports for them, is they're often doing that stuff in the wrong direction, so they're not pushing it towards where the company needs it the most. So then what happens is if you go down that path for long enough, you sort of don't impact the business the way that you should. So I think for me, having a proactive FP and A culture is all about taking a step back and saying, what is the ideal vision for FP and A. Like, what is the ideal vision specifically for the four key elements in my FP and a operating system which is reporting, analysis, forecasting and business partnering. If you can set a concrete vision for each one of those four and then look at where your team is at today and then start to move towards that vision, you will become a proactive FPA organization.

All right, so what I really like about that video is just the whole idea that if you focus on the vision and what's most important in all the work you're doing and you make sure it's aligned, you'll end that squeaky wheel and be much more productive. He talks about FPA and the four areas of fpa, but if you think of the different areas of finance, whether it's, you know, your accounting, your FPA team, your ap, your ar, your treasury, whatever it might be, it could be investor relations. What's the vision of those organizations? How does it support the overall company? And how is the work you're doing proactively helping you achieve that vision? That's the way I think about that. So when we talk vision, right, having a vision statement is something you should have in your FPA organization, your finance organization, not just your business. I had the opportunity with Ron Montero. We went and did training. It was in New Orleans with a company, and we helped them create their vision, mission and values for their finance staff. And it was really productive to watch everybody think through that and work through that. So, right, the vision is, where do you aspire to go? Like Southwest here? Be the world's most loved, most efficient and most profitable airline. Maybe yours is, you know, be the finance organization that is efficient and that the business leaders love, whatever it might be. But that's a vision. What do we aspire to be and it should be aspirational. Then we have our mission, which really defines our business and objectives and how we will reach them. So a simple example. Everybody's heard of Apple. Let's take Apple to bring the best user experience to its customers through innovative hardware, software and services. So how could we apply that to our finance organization? You know, to bring the best financial analysis to the businesses through partnering, reporting, storytelling, visualization, you know, whatever those key things are. But really think about what that means for you. From there, you're going to want some values Company I think that did a really, really good job with its values that I was very impressed with was Zappos. So as an example, you know, do more with less. Be adventurous, creative and open minded. Create fun and a little weirdness. Love that one, right? Just be different. Deliver wow through service. So what are the core values of your finance organization? And so once you've done that, you've created that mission, that vision, the values, that's where you go on beyond that. And here's a little bit of fun. Here's me eating some cereal, having a little fun at the Peter Drucker quote, culture, each strategy for breakfast, right? So when you've aligned your vision, your mission, your values, then it's making sure that that culture permeates throughout the organization. The reality is people don't rarely leave organizations, they often leave bosses because they don't create that healthy culture. You ever worked for someone who micromanages or expects you to work 24 hours a day, Those are no fun situations. And so once you've, you know, you've created that, here's really kind of what you should expect, right? You want to have the most effective team possible. And first you want to be to deliver results. That's the number one thing. If we're not delivering results, doesn't matter if we matter. If we have a great culture and a nice vision and mission, we have to be helping the business accomplish its goals. So when you're establishing that vision, mission and setting the culture, ask yourself each of those questions. Next one. To have fun and be more fulfilled. We want to have fun at work. We want to be fulfilled. If we're miserable, there's a problem. Next, as an organization is critical to help develop a growth mindset. I remember at American Express that was a really big push. They were bringing around the books. We all did a bunch of training to help us make sure we were thinking from a growth mindset perspective than a fixed mindset. And then that last One to grow as individuals and, and as a team. The best managers help teams grow, but they also help individuals grow and become leaders. It's not one or the other. You do both together. And then I think the last thing when it comes to setting a mission, vision, those guidelines, remember it's a living document. You don't just do it and forget about it. Never look at it again, never think it exists. I mean, that often happens. An example, when I was in grad school, our ethics teacher brought in a copy of Enron's Code of Ethics. It was this book. She had bought it online and she said when she, when it came to her, the version she bought online, it was obvious it was still in the original packaging and had never been opened. Probably not too surprising giving what happened to Enron and the year before they actually won an award for having one of the best, like ethics guidelines globally, they'd won some big award. So it just goes to show, if you don't practice what you preach, it doesn't mean a whole lot. Right? Feel free to ask questions if anyone has them. As we're going through this, I'd love any questions. Put those in the comments. Now, where I want to talk about is surveying the landscape. And this is something that's, you know, constantly ongoing and I think a lot of, a lot of work has to take place at some point. You have to assess your finance function. You can't figure out where you want to be till you know where you're at and where you want to go. And that starts with where you're at. So there's several ways you can do that. Benchmarking, you know, what, what is considered best in class, maybe looking at some of these maturity models. FP&A Trends has one on their website, AFP. In the back of this, in the appendix of this, there's some different links to one. I've done some, you know, a little bit of benchmarking and assessment stuff. So that's the first, second stakeholder surveys. Have you gone out and asked your business partner interviews? There's some really good maturity models and we'll talk a little bit about each of these. So really the benefits of the assessment, you can see them here. I'm not going to read all of them, but, you know, understanding, as I mentioned before, that current and future state diagnose problems and build employee trust, that's huge. I've seen that where, you know, I got a new CFO and he sat down and really asked us to assess how we were performing. There were Some difficult conversations in there. You know, hey, I feel like we're not doing this or doing that. And, you know, the new CFO acknowledged it and said, hey, we need to improve. So it's a great way to build trust when you do the assessment and then you actually implement things based on the assessment. I saw a company that was really good at that, that we did training for, where they had everybody's list of things. And every month it was a focus of how do we make sure we're working on meeting the values. We said, you know, allowing people to not work, to live, but, you know, to not be at work all the time, to have their side life and different things, and they'd come up with all these plans. Now it's also a great communication tool. And then last, those assessments help you build the organization's capabilities. You know, if you did an assessment today, one of those things may be around AI, right? And we'll show an example. 1. So here's the things to review during an assessment, and then the next slide. I'll come back to the AI thing. So just give me one second here. But, you know, for me, obviously, you need to review people. That's very important. And. And when we say people specifically, hey, you know, how are they doing on their deliverables? What's their competency? What's past performance? In addition to that, you're looking at your structure, your resources, and then also gets a little bit back to, you know, benchmarking. But what's your current practices against best practices? So as we get into that, I want to spend a few minutes here assessing your team's capabilities. So if I'm doing that today, you know, under technical skills, I might start with a generative AI or artificial intelligence. And, you know, you could have something as simple as. Like, it has here below average, average, above average, excellent. But you could also have comments. You could have subcategories. You can be as light or as detailed as you think is necessary in these ratings. And what you'll quickly find is, you know, where are the strengths of my team and where are the strengths of individuals? Like, if I look at this assessment here, you know, it's. It's really easy to see, okay, this person's below average in influencing and storytelling. Okay, so, you know, they're below average or average on four of the six things on human skills, where they're only one on the technical. So it tells me, all right, I need to focus on my human skills with this person. But you also need to know what's their what do they think they need to develop? Where's their area of focus? Because maybe as you look at this person and compare it with the rest of the team, there may be others that are really strong on the human, and they like focusing on the technical skills and building the models. So it's two things, you know, this assessment helps you understand where each person's at, where you're at as a team, how to focus those areas to improve. But with that, you also have to understand, you know, where people want to be. You, you'll have some people that may be below average in areas, and they only want to come up to average. It's not an area they want to spend a lot of time. So you got to look at that and say, how do I manage those two things to create the best team that I can create? And I still remember when I first became a director, speaking to this example, I went through and looked at our team like, okay, we have several solid finance people. That's nice, that's good. But one of our biggest problems for this organization is we had terrible data, and we didn't have somebody who could clean and really help improve the quality of our data. So the first hire I hired was someone who was working on a master's degree in data science and had an undergrad in statistics, had no interest in being a financial analyst, a finance person, but it was what our organization needed. Later on, a year later, the first hire I did after looking at the team was someone with more finance skills because the focus now was much more around finance and improving the relationships and the reporting to the business because the data was in a much better shape. But I can only do that by assessing where the team's at to determine, hey, those are the needs we, you know, we have as an organization. And give me one second here. Sorry about that. Let me bring that back up. All right, so here, as we mentioned, you know, the next thing is you need to retain the talent. So you've done the assessment. First, with that, people don't leave bad companies, they leave bad managers. Second, when it comes to retaining talent, there are multiple components to that. There's compensation. People don't need to be paid the highest out there. You don't need huge salaries. They do need to feel like they're being paid fairly, you know, that they're getting their market value, and they feel like you're. You're treating them well. Beyond that, it's, hey, are you. Are you recognizing the work of your people? Are the good employees being recognized? Are you developing them? Can they take courses? Do they get time to work on bettering themselves? Whether it be AI skills or Excel skills or data storytelling, whatever it may be that they need to work on? Because I know I've been in some virus. There's never time to work on anything. They always want you to, but they don't help carve that out for you. And that is a manager's responsibility. To a certain extent, us as individuals have to find ways to carve out time, but as leaders, we need to help do that as well. So, you know, really think about that. Think about the people you have in your team. Are you developing them? The great leaders? And I love this whenever I interview them. I interviewed a guy recently that one of the things he was most proud of is several of the people that had worked for him had gone on to be more successful than him. They'd gone on to have successful roles. He's like, I really like developing people and I know I'm doing a good job when they go on to be successful and they go on to be leaders and often surpass what I'm doing. So to bring this back around and then we'll open it up for, for questions, we just have a few minutes left. Here is, you know, really the key takeaway is I want to go back to the flywheel we showed at the beginning or the framework if you need somewhere to start. If you feel like your organization's toxic, that it's not effective, you have very friction Finance. Start with looking at your culture, your mission, your values and behaviors, both internally and externally. Don't just talk to your finance people. Talk to the business and understand what they think of your values, your behaviors, the work you're doing. That also gets into surveying that landscape. Look internally and externally, and sometimes you may have to bring in new people or shuffle the bus. Anyone who's read, you know, good to great, Jim Collins, one of the first things he says is make sure you have the right people on the bus. You have the type of people that fit your culture, that fit your organization. Then make sure they're in the right spot on the bus. And that can change where you need to put people. And then it's attract, retain, and develop, you know, and in that attracting part, don't make your interview process impossible with like 20 interviews. Nobody wants to go through that. You'll lose the best talent. Get back to people quickly. Retain is about treating them fairly, and then development is showing an interest in them, creating those opportunities, carving out work that allows them to develop. And so that's what we have for today. Again, you know, huge thanks to Maxio for sponsoring this session. We have it going on, you know, both YouTube and LinkedIn today and it will be recorded and available for people to watch next week. We're going to talk about how do you ensure your processes are best in class, how do you think about those and what's a framework for analyzing your processes to improve them. And then on the 20th we'll talk about tools and how to think about technology. So I'm going to go ahead now and just open it up to any question questions that people have and I'll hang on for a few minutes. Please feel free to ask any questions you have about about people and creating that world class finance team that will move the business forward and help you, you know, create better faster decisions or make help the business make better, faster decisions moving forward. So would love to get your comments and I think, you know, as we're waiting for comments come in, one that I common get is how do you manage things if you inherit a team and you don't feel like they have the skills that are needed And I, I've had that happen. You know, there's couple options you have is first you got to do those assessments so you can decide is there somebody I can train, is there somebody I can teach? And then it's having those difficult conversations with management to say hey, I think we need to make some changes whether it's moving someone to another team, sending someone out for development, whatever it may be. But you need to, you know, tread lightly and really have those conversations and make sure you have documentation to support any decisions you make as sometimes we all know there may be situations where you may have to move somebody out. All right, I'm going to go ahead and just give it another minute or two here, see if any other questions come in and then we will, we'll wrap up. All right, I'm not seeing any questions out there so we'll go ahead and wrap up but you can always reach out to me. And again, a big thank you to Maxio for sponsoring this event. I look forward to discussing processes and tools in the next couple weeks. Thank you very much everyone for joining me and have a great rest of your day. Finance team or you know another way to say that is a high performing team. You know, dynastics kind of from sports teams have won a few titles, some of them, some have never done it. So I'm hoping one day to experience that dynasty in my sports life. But as we move to finance, I really like this slide because I think it covers really well how we should think about creating high performing finance organizations. At our base is the culture. Just like any great organization, you have a healthy culture. Then there's three pillars. There's the people, which I have as the first one. There's your process or processes, and then the tools you use. And you know, I would argue people is most important of these three. Obviously in the picture, not quite the case. And then at the top.