001: Developing Leaders in Finance and Accounting

Welcome to the Stephen McLain Show and the Finance Leader Podcast. I am your host, Stephen McLain. This is the podcast for developing leaders in finance and accounting. My desire for this forum is to be the place for finance and accounting professionals to grow your leadership because you are working in a very complex world with very tight deadlines, and you're probably dealing with a crazy monthly close process. And we're going to be discussing how we can make our way, work our way through those kind of things. You're probably using a lot of older accounting and finance systems that really don't meet the current needs of the business. And we're going to start building a community right here on this podcast and across my platform where we can start looking at how we can make those improvements. We're going to start looking at ourselves. We're gonna start to bring, start improving where or what we can do within our leadership skills are soft skills on how we can make improvements to the to our team and improvements to the department that we're in. We'll be on the finance side, accounting side, the auditing side, and we can start to as we start to grow, we're going to start to set ourselves apart using strong leadership skills were gonna start getting that recognition from senior leadership that we can bring better ideas, new ideas and that we can help grow. That business will be growing a new line of business. Or we can find ways within the P and l statement that we can find ways we can save money and we're gonna start doing that. We're gonna get out of that management role of just doing tasks, accomplishments every day and we're going to start bringing up new things were starting firing up our team. I understand your challenges and struggles. I've been there, I've dealt with monthly close. I've dealt with tight deadlines. You're doing your best with the accounting systems of finance systems that you're working with, but your models are probably outdated, and you're probably up against a lot of pressure with deadlines. I have seen accounting and finance teams spend days chasing small variances and how to explain what happened. So I understand that I understand having to deal with senior leaders who want to know answers and your China chase, probably a monthly closed process. That probably tends to be a little circular, probably has a lack of communication and really a lack off a good set of written down processes that that will make it a lot easier. So So I know I've been there, and you're also probably tryingto, you know, balance our accounts or calculate projections with old models or wrong assumptions. I've seen plenty of those in my time between working and the, uh, previously working in my previous career as a U. S Army finance officer and also with my role in consulting with a variety of companies across different industries. I know that your team probably spends an unbelievable amount of time, you know, cutting and pasting ports instead of doing, you know, real accounting or finance work. And we're gonna change that. We're gonna make some changes. I want you to be able thio, change your mindset so that we could get out of those old processes. We can start to make some changes. We can start to make some recommendations, get this, get this whole process on paper and figure out how we can make this a lot better for our team. We can get our team prepared and get their process is a little bit improved. That gets us out of that every day. Task management. And then we can get a warning to the leading and getting better ideas and influencing working with our senior leadership to make the business and organization a lot better. So this form is not going to be a highly technical discussion, but it's gonna be what you're facing and challenging every day. Those tips and tricks strategies around improving your leadership skills, and we're gonna talk about that on this form. I want to be ableto help you in growing your influence in your organization and how you can also improve your potential for advancement in your career. I want you available to influence better processes, better systems, better ways to communicate better meetings, better ways to make everything better in your department, and then that will. That will eventually get that recognition from that senior leadership that we're going thio Bill, help us in our career. So with my platform, I want to go to work with you again, almost strategies to be able to help you build your potential for advancement. Beyond that leading that team that you're doing right now, I see you as being able to grow, you know, into that into that next level that you know, that senior senior manager, and on to that next level director level, our vice president level vice president of finish planning and analysis, or your accounting side, a za controller and any of those kind of that same line on the task or chart that VP director level. And then also we want to be able to move beyond that into CFO and eventually CEO. That's going to require you to get beyond just the technical that's going up. This is why this platform and this form is going to be important for you because we want to be able to emphasizing girl of soft skills, but also be able to focus you on leading and looking towards the future, bringing out the best ideas because that's how it's you're gonna be able to get advanced. And I have some beliefs and I have some experience and the things that I've seen what what I think works and what doesn't. We're gonna talk about a lot of those things. I don't think being an extreme technical expert is gonna just get you into that CFO level. I think you're gonna have to improve all those skills. Yes, You're gonna have to be smart on projections and you're gonna You're gonna have to know the proper lays Thio how counting is done. So you can, uh, Lee and best Judgment as those departments are gonna be fulfilling those roles. But I really think that I mean, overall, it's gonna be a pathway in the combination on the technical in the art of knowing the business. Well, then, being able thio really speak until that story around the profit and loss statement, it's gonna involve you. You really getting to know the business Well, get understanding how strategy works, understanding how develop relationships across the team across the entire company, to be able to bring the right people together so that you could form and develop a great strategy and it's gonna get out of that. You got to get out of that mindset of that daily manager mindset. I've got three tasks today and my team's got to get them done. Yes, we need to get those tasks done, but I need you to get that team to take more responsibility for that. See, if you start looking at, you know, beyond those three or four tasks that you have for this week, so again in this forum, we're gonna we're gonna do this together, we're gonna grow our leadership. We're gonna support each other. We're gonna look at how to grow the business and how to bring new ideas and build our relationship. So I again, I'm Stephen McClane. I am a retired U S Army finance officer serving over 21 years on active duty. In a couple of years in the reserves, I were resource management budgets and auditing and a variety of other finding out support roles for the U. S. Army, culminating in my career working for the U. S. Army staff at the Pentagon and working on a development of the U. S. Army's budget do budget cycles. Before I retired someone this again on this first episode, we were talking about howto what what's the importance of this form is gonna be. But we're also gonna talk about a couple things, and so the help you can take away a couple of things you can you get. You get a couple of easy winds and start thinking about your own leadership. So we're gonna talk about the office environment about how super competitive it is. We're gonna talk about why improving your leadership is going to be so important, why you should be investing in yourself. And we're also gonna combine all that in knowing that leadership Can you be your defining characteristic? It could be your brand and your advantage that you could get that attention and recognition from senior leadership. You're more than just the everyday manager. You could bring some great ideas and you can really help grow this business. Help them, Cicely, the executive team get in front of them and you can help them grow the business. And then I'm gonna want you on their team. They're gonna want you closer when you bring more ideas and it's gonna be just a fantastic way. The launch of your career. All right, We're gonna be talking about the competitive the office environment is nowadays you're dealing with tough deadlines you're dealing with, you know, senior leaders that are being pulled in many directions and you're dealing with ineffective meetings and too many mirrors and too many meetings and so continue to be do you yourself competitive in this situation? You know, I need you to be engaging with those senior leaders. You know, you're You know, if you're in the accounting department, you need to be engaging with that controller If you're in the financial planning and analysis, you know, that Vice President just engaging in talking and bringing ideas and being real supportive, you know, And that comes up with the same thing. If you're as a manager or a manager, hopefully in the future, one of the things that well, I can't say you apart. Is that how you show your support for your for your direct boss? Whether you're you gotta understand what her priorities are and what she's dealing with every day so that you can provide that support and that missing, missing pieces of information or that missing analysis or that, uh, or something that you know, that requirement that she's she's working on from the CFO. And that's what I would just encourage you to do is that whenever you know your boss needs something, don't look at it is another task took it as an opportunity to be able to show support for her because she's gonna turn around and say, Hey, you know this, this person that, you know, I don't know. I manager, you know, you know, provide that quick information. And I may be looking from good in front of my boss, so that will be remembered down the road, you know, And that comes with that. You be supportive, you know, you wanna have that great, great attitude. You know, don't let things bother you. Be real positive coming into the office and have that strong line set. Hey, I'm gonna do the best I can for the business today. I'm gonna help grow it unaccomplished tasks. And I'm gonna seek out ways that I can bridge people together. And I'm gonna, you know, bring that great positive energy into the office every day. You know, as best you can again, is that in this office environment, I want you to have that strong mix of soft skills, leadership skills, technical skills and as your eyes and responsibility. You need to be looking at all those and some of those soft skills, and we'll talk about those in a later episode. But you know, communication, clear communication. We'll win the day for you so that your team is real clear on what they need to do. And your boss understands the first time what you're trying to do to help her and then bringing that confidence. There's a confidence to know that you you know your tasks and you know what's going on with your team. You know what's going on in the department and you know what's going on in the company and you know you're strong and how what you bring every day that's gonna be a game changer for you. Because not a lot of people have confidence in their ability to, you know, stand up in front of people or being able to breathe with a couple of people, kind of bridge down and resolve conflict. So again, mindset, confidence, all that's going to set you a part time management, knowing what's on the calendar, knowing how to properly say yes or no to the meetings that maybe you get pulled into and having that confidence. No, I don't need to go to that meeting. It's not gonna add any value. Or maybe I need to send somebody else and I can look at something. Look at another requirement that can be supportive to the business. Being able to manage your time properly, saying yes and no to the right things and priorities and that task helping your team prioritize and helping them get away from distractions s o. They focused on the most important things for the day. Relationship building again goes, goes back to what I've already said before. We're going to try to develop win win solutions, a person that's focusing on when also wants that other person to win just as much as you do. It's a give and take instead of just taking, taking, taking, that's a win lose situation. We don't want those. We'll talk about those again our episode. And we don't want to act like those few people we know who they are. They're insecure in the office. They're real paranoid. We don't want to act like that. We don't want oh lowered ourselves to that level. We're gonna do our job. We're gonna try to bring the best we can every day and avoid and don't get brought into the drama of the insecure people. We're also gonna be wanting to be organized, you know, leadership, Strong leaders air are also very well organized. They know their teams. They have their team ready, working on the most critical tasks in support of the organization. And finally, we also have to be able to achieve results and meet all over their lives because we're not gonna have any credibility if we can't get anything done and we can't get anything done on time, leadership is important because it's gonna give you the opportunity to influence positive outcomes a positive change. This is why you should be investing yourself and whatever way you feel comfortable doing, you know, doing some self-assessment of figuring out what kind of skills that you need to work on. Because once you start to grow in your leadership, you're gonna be able to empower others to be able to take on more responsibility and do more things that's gonna free you up some time. So that again it goes back to being able to be supportive off the higher level folks in your organization and I want you can begin with the see beyond your daily task lists and being able to support that long term vision of the organization with some effective, you know, ideas that support the overall strategy. So by improving yourself, I believe you're gonna be able to set yourself apart. People gonna take notice, people leadership positions are gonna take notice that once your team what you've been able to train and how are your team to take on some things without you without having to micromanage though you know, having to come to you all the time, you'll be able to spend a lot more time on the levels above you instead of instead of the levels below you. So that's gonna be able to set you apart. You're gonna be able to offer, you know, fresh ideas and offer a lot more support in the long run. A few other ways that you be able to set yourself apart is that as leaders, we get to be able to think in the long term. So that means knowing what the long-term vision and strategy is of your organization, not only your department, but the organization of the hole so you can start to see things. You start spending time on this and start anticipating requirements instead of just, you know, again checking off items on my to do list every day on task that you've been giving all. I got three task into my team. My boss. I'm sort of dis managing those calf. I'm looking at other ways and other things, and that's gonna be able to set me apart. We're gonna have a vision and our vision for our team's gonna be supportive of the overall vision of the organization and of the you know, the department the other way again that you can build us set yourself apart and build as your leadership grows is that you're gonna be able to see the organization as a whole. You're gonna be able to see not only how what your team does but teams across the department and and in other departments. In a few work in accounting. You see how f p n a work to support the organization? You're gonna see how everything starts to work as a whole in support of whatever your profit. Drivers are in your organization because the just everyday complacent managers, they're only thinking about how their team fits in, and they just don't. They don't invest the time and understand the long term strategy and how the organization works with the whole and that will that will be able to help you translate and talk about things with senior leaders. And you understand how all of the all the teams and departments kind of fit in together. I'm getting this thing done and getting our being our needs of customers over organization. This is gonna help you fasten a long run and understanding and seeing and how everything works together instead of just hey, what my team do is gonna grow you is gonna get you're gonna see new things. Things are gonna open up in your your eyes are gonna open up as you start to talk to other other people, understand? And then you can see how how you can support better and again it's gonna all come back to you. You're gonna get some people gonna see that they're going to get some recognition around that. So you're also gonna be able to see your team members not just as cox in a wheel trying just complete tasks. Every day, you're gonna be able to see how how important your people are and how again? Not just doing those tasks for how they're fitting into a bigger role, a bigger picture. And we're gonna talk in, You know, in the next episode of this podcast, we're gonna talk about growing people, and we're gonna We're gonna actually probably focusing a lot of episodes around growing people because when you start to grow, people start seeing people differently instead of just a person completing a task, that person's gonna grow. And then when that person on your team member grows, it's gonna help you to be able to do other things, and you're gonna grow and everyone around you is gonna grow. Start focusing on that. Leaders take a risk. We may get the task done today with okay results. And that's what's gonna happen when you start to empower. You're gonna take a little bit of risk with your team members and having them completed task without you watching and having to check every step, we're gonna take a little bit of risk. They're gonna get it done. And maybe, you know, not at the highest level. Maybe, maybe something has to be reworked later, but they're gonna get better, and you're gonna You're just gonna have to is gonna have to be something inside of you have to get comfortable with. It may take months, but I want you to take risk in that to start giving tasks over to your team members. You don't have to check every step. You don't have the check every math result, and you just can't apply that great judgment. You have that experience. You have a kind of ghetto. It's good enough for now and you're gonna give great guidance and some good counsel to your team members and how they even get better. We want to get you out of that micromanaging role and free you up to do bigger and better things. So I need you to really take risk in that area and give that feedback to your team. Members will not be little ing them. We're approaching it from a growth mindset that that we can make them better. Something that I want you to kind of look at as you're going forward. Something that you probably dealing with every month, of course, is not the clothes, and it's often chaotic for a lot of organizations and left if unless they've already gone through the drill, and the hard exercise of getting their process is done right and sequence properly. But when you start really paying attention and trying to get a couple of small wins, maybe even on your team, that kind of map out how each and every one of your team members fit into the monthly close process because you may be able to get a couple of wins and figure out and start, you know, to start to do some analysis around that. And maybe we can make maybe even make for now around the team. Maybe make that was just a little bit better. And then in the next month or two, when you start collaborating with your film managers and two, Hey, how can we make this a lot better? How can we consolidate a couple of tasks? Can we eliminate something? Do we really need every process on this thing? We were doing something that doesn't add any value. Can we eliminate something? Can we shorten the process? And maybe it's a system issue and maybe get something you're gonna have to do and working with your fellow managers to kind of put together Analysis say this system is just not working. Was too much cutting, pasting too many manual steps in this. And maybe we need to start putting together a proposal to get a better system than we can produce more automated reports out of the system, because that's really would be if if your organization has the resources as the money to be able to, you invest in a better system so that you eliminate the the continuing need for is cutting pasting? Because I know I've been there. I've done the cutting and pasting and nothing Maur demoralizing to a finance and accounting professional by continually doing, cutting and pasting from one report to the other without doing any really good analysis, using your strong analytical skills or your strong accounting skills to be able Thio deliver something great for the organization, just doing cutting and pasting. And you know that anybody could I can really do it doesn't really make you feel good at the end of the day, if you're just really just just doing that so another another as far as leadership, another another area that I really want you to start looking at. Maybe you can help you get help you down the road and enough, you know, for the future and you're doing some analysis to be a better leader. We really must be more self aware about our own actions, about our own beliefs and how we approach a situation. How you resolve conflict. How do we probably praise a team member? How do we correct a team member for poor performance? We see how start to think, how our attitude is and how we approach some of the challenging things in leadership. And you may not realize that how your maybe your facial expressions are your words that you choose or how you approach something I look at. Somebody may be affecting someone else's performance or how you come into the office and how you greet people in the morning or even when you were arriving the office. You know where you are, you timely and you being a great example of leadership. So when I want to do is how are you affecting your team members? Are you affecting them positively? Are you affecting them negatively and start to think about those kind of things And that way you can make some quick, easy wins over there over the next days, a couple of weeks and start to realize how you talk to people. He talked to people in a positive, uplifting way, and you kind of look down upon people and you talked down alarm or you criticized excessively on the wrong way. So certainly start to think about how you could influence your team better. And then we want to be able to. How do we view ourselves in relation to others, especially amongst our managers? Do we approach things with arrogance? Are we humble to be sometimes in a meeting, we don't act very confident. We act overconfidence. You know all those. All those things effect our ability to G results, our ability to influence positive outcomes on the team. So that's what I want you do over the next couple of days. A couple of weeks is to really start to look at how you affect others and how you respond and relate to others, especially your definitely number one, your team members and how you treat them and how you react with them and how you interact with your peers, other managers and your senior leaders. your facial expressions, reactions, how you respond to things. You strong things in a positively supportive way. And you have a great attitude about if you get a new task and you're like, you're like, Oh, man, only another task we gotta get done. Well, yeah. Hey, we can get that done. We get that done, we can. We can kind of take a look at it this way, and we can kind of analyze. It kind of creates. I made a couple of courses of action and maybe we can waiting to take the money and we can grow the business in a particular way. Always look at those great Those tasks or something that's coming out is a great opportunity to great things. So in this episode, you know, we talked about my vision for this platform and how how I want to help you grow is a leader in the finance and accounting profession. I'm really excited about about this opportunity to share things that I've don't dealt with, things that I've seen both in working in finance and accounting in the Army and finance and accounting in the corporate world and really excited about being able Thio help you grow talk with you And once we could become better leaders. So this is gonna be a great opportunity for us to all go together. We talked about how competitive that the office environment is, and you really need to can't stand out, prove your leadership and you available to you really set yourself apart by being instead of just a daily checklist. Manager even built Thio go yourself as a leader and we talked about why that leadership was important and you need to be able to be investing yourself When you when you do that, you can be able to create that competitive advantage for you senior leaders and you're gonna be able to find this episode and all the episodes going forward across the different podcast platforms like apple pie, podcasts and Spotify. In any other place, you build a find podcast looking forward to working with you in the future. Next episode we're going to talk about is what leaders do talk about what I believe are the four major activities that leaders do every day and how you can become effective. And if you do these four things with some soft skills kind of rolled in there. You're gonna be able to really focus and really again, set yourself apart, Get yourself a good a good ability to launch forward in your career and grow yourself a growing your team. So we're gonna do that next up. So really excited to be able to share you those four for activities. Yeah. I hope you enjoyed the show. Please join our community on Facebook. Look for our finance leader podcast, Facebook group. And this is gonna be our community to grow within the finance and accounting profession until next time you can check out more resource. Go to stephenmcLain.com and sign it for my updates. So you don't miss an episode of the show. And now I really want you to do is go lead your team. Go get some of those easy wins that I tried to help you identify today. And then I'll see you next time. Thank you.