Jan. 21, 2020
002: Four Key Finance Leader Responsibilities
Leadership can be your defining characteristic to help advance your career. In this episode, I talk about the four key areas of responsibility that Finance Leaders must be doing every day: 1) influencing, 2) growing your people, 3) achieving results, and 4) seeing the future.
- Influencing is about achieving buy-in about a big idea you have or creating positive change in your organization
- We continually grow our people to mentor our team members to achieve their goals, become better in their roles, and develop potential for greater responsibility
- Your credibility as a leader depends on you achieving results
- Seeing the future means we study industry trends so we can make recommendations to senior leaders on strategy development.
You can download the free Leadership Guide for Finance and Accounting Managers here. The original show notes are no longer available.
Please visit stephenmclain.com to access more resources.
Transcript
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Welcome to the Stephen McLain show and the finance leader podcast where leadership is bigger than the numbers. I am your host Stephen McLain. And this is the podcast where we will focus on developing leaders in finance and accounting. always talk about leadership, because leadership is where we get to make positive change, we get to lead our team, and we get to give them hope. And we get to make changes for the better in our organization. And for our team. I'm reminded of a quote, not quite sure who said this. But leaders instill in their people a hope for success, and a belief in themselves. I believe that leadership development is critical, and especially in finance and accounting, where we tend to focus on becoming the best technical experts in knowing how to do the right journal entries or do the right analysis on on a projection, how to develop the greatest budget. You know how to classify certain transactions into the right accounts, which is all very important in this field, don't get me wrong, we need to know our field, we need to know the technical aspect of our field. But what we are really missing is leadership. There's definitely a leadership gap in the finance and accounting field leading your finance and accounting team, and I'm particularly focused around is in the corporate environment. Again, I am Stephen McLain. I am a retired US Army finance officer I did finance and accounting in the army for many years. And after I retired, I transitioned to working for a variety of different companies in the corporate world. I've worked for a restaurant company, a manufacturing company, insurance company, and also in healthcare. And I believe that the challenges that we face in finance accounting, especially and leading and managing their real, we deal with complex problems, as we support the organization, we get tied up in monthly close for way too long. And in each period, often on the times that I spend the things that I've seen is that the monthly closed process is complex, is has procedures that are archaic, they're unnecessary, it is it is cumbersome, it is troublesome. And I believe that these are these are places where we can make some improvements, we all need to get better at the processes that we have. And that takes leadership, good leadership, fights complacency. I believe that we can build a great forum here, amongst finance and accounting leaders, where we get to talk leadership, where we get to talk, how can we bring about change in our organization for the better. And that's what I'm gonna, that's what I'm gonna be focusing on week to week, as I be able to put out this podcast for episode number two, we're going to talk about the impact of great leadership, we're also going to talk about the four major areas that I believe that finance and accounting leaders should be focusing on continually that's influencing that's growing others, achieving results. And then seeing the future because I believe leadership can be your defining characteristic amongst your peers, and in your organization. It can be your brand, and then your advantage. as you go along in your career, yes, you need to be knowing how to do your job from a technical aspect. But once you start applying some better leadership skills, and growing your soft skills, you're going to get recognized by the senior leaders. And you're going to be seen as someone who's greater potential to rise above your peers. So this is where a lot of discussions that we're going to have is going to be growing leadership, and knowing how to not just manage your finance and accounting team, but to lead them and to focus on these areas we're going to talk about today. So I believe that leadership is also it's wrapped up in those virtues and characteristics every day, like that are very essential to and how to get your best out of your team. And that is building trust. That's showing integrity that's having a high and honorable character, and also in doing a little bit better job and the management aspect of your of your role. And that is prioritizing tasks and resolving conflict, and that includes resolving conflict within people and resolving conflict within time.
also providing purpose, how many times you've worked on a team. And other than the fact that you've got a task today, and you've got another task tomorrow, and you've got a couple tasks The next day, and then next week, you get to do it all over again. And then next month as you go through clothes, and you've got these other tasks, there's just reoccurring tasks on the calendar, how many times that your manager provided purpose, or your controller provided purpose. So the CFO has gotten everybody together and says, This is our purpose as an accounting department. This is our purpose, as the department supports the greater organization. What is your purpose for being here, other than just doing a journal entry every day? How are we supporting the organization? in the journal entry that you're doing? It depends on one or It depends, of course, the industry that you're in, you're not just doing a journal entry, you're not just doing a projection, you're actually fulfilling a purpose so that other folks in the organization are delivering whatever service it is that your organization does. And that's important. That manager who grasped that concept of communicating that you're not just doing a journal entry will make a difference. And that's what I'm talking about and leadership, along with that, along with that purpose, is that communicating that long term vision? Where is this organization going? Where's the finance and accounting department fitting into this? What's the strategy, that's what leadership is all about? leaders influence a positive change, we are never complacent, we have a lot of influence. within the organization, we have a lot a lot of influence within the budget process, both for planning and execution. And we also, since we work with the numbers every day, we, if we do it, right, we get to also have a lot of influence to the use of our expertise and knowing how to grow the business. And also knowing how to help craft a strategy and helping to advise the executive team, we also get to develop our team collectively. That is how do we get our team together to solve a problem together? It's not just individual team members doing this task and this task and this task. But how can we get everybody together to solve a task collectively? How can we start sharing information? How can we start to get people to get out of their cubicle, and to go across the hall or across to the next cubicle, to start to have a conversation to solve a problem that takes leadership. And that's why we need to be focusing on growing our leadership. The first area that I want to talk about is influence. influence is about using our communication skills and our negotiation skills to convince others to buy into an idea that we are passionate about, or that we believe is right for the business. The area of influence is present in every gathering of people every meeting that we have, that presents an opportunity for us to talk about ideas, of course, within the context of the meeting. It's about bringing forth the details and the numbers and presenting a picture and presenting how our idea can grow the organization, how can move forward, how does it fit into the strategy, or maybe there's something that we're seeing that others aren't seeing. So again, every time you get to meet with your peers, you get to meet with people across the organization, you get to meet with senior leaders, it's an opportunity to show your influence to present different ideas, a different way of looking at things, different way of interpreting the numbers, a different way of showing what's possible. And that's what I mean by influence within the within the finance context.
And for very specific things that I think that you can be doing is that we need to continually improve our processes, there's nothing more frustrating than try to complete, for example, a monthly close without a good set of processes that make sense. And a lot of times and a lot of things that I've seen of working in these various organizations is that the monthly closed process is a disaster is not a good set of processes. And it doesn't make sense about we're continually moving reports around in circles sometimes and it doesn't necessarily make sense that it stays the way it should be. So I would challenge all of you out there in your monthly pros closed process. How can we make it better and that's when that's where influence comes across in conjunction with monthly close we need to advocate for better systems, better ways of of our numbers that are being processed and better information systems and decision making systems. Nothing more bothers me more than seeing accountants and financial analysts who are continually doing cutting and pasting of reports from one report to the next. I just don't, I just it just bothers me to see how many people they're spending their time just cutting and pasting instead of doing analysis, instead of thinking about numbers they're doing, and I think a better system, if you bring it if you're able to introduce a better system into your organization, where it cuts down on the cutting and pasting when we actually get to have our people sit and look at the numbers and do some analysis and get some insights, figure out what the narrative is around how the numbers are going. So that we can, so that we can communicate what we're seeing to senior leaders so they can make better decisions. That's where I want you to go, that's where I would like to see our managers grow and how our managers go about their day a little differently is that I want you to turn your team members into not just report builders and cutting and pasting hours, but actually into people who are thinking and developing insights. We also as as, as leaders, we also need to continually look to research our teams better for success. And that can be just a variety of different things. It could be infrastructure, again, it could be better systems, it could be more training, and we're going to talk about that on the next category could be anything that they need to make their job a little bit better, we need to use our influence to do that. And again, the greatest opportunities that we get to use our influence is that we get to move the organization in a positive direction to improve and to grow. The second area that leaders need to focus greatly on on a daily basis is growing people, we have the great privilege to help others to achieve their goals and to exceed their potential we get to inspire others to become better. And we get to help our team members develop really effective individual development plans that support their career growth, and also improve their relevant soft skills. And every team member needs an individual development plan. And yourself, you need to have one too, you need to set the example you need to have a set of goals that you're working on how you're going to achieve those goals, and then what training you need to do what you need to be working on whether it be a certification or an advanced degree, or you just need some gap training on a skill that you don't have just need a very detailed written plan, you also get to teach how to conduct critical tasks and steps within each person's job role, we get to get to have that great role as teacher. And if a team member is either having a difficulty on figuring out how to do a task, then we either can find them some training, or we can go bring them into a conference room would grab a whiteboard, and we start we start whiteboarding, a solution, and you start doing some training, even if it takes 15 minutes, 15 minutes, can have a huge impact on your team member and know and being able to move forward in whatever tasks that they're working on. So I'm just encouraging you to grasp that role as teacher, whenever it comes up and be looking for that opportunity. I love doing it. I love getting in front of a whiteboard, and kind of plotting out or writing out how to do a better analysis or a better way to figure out a projection or just how to develop solutions around whatever problem we're having. just encourage you to just be able to grasp that role. And Bill have that great impact even though it's 10 to 15 minutes, you just can have a huge impact. Just trust me on that one. Also, another area that you get to work on in growing your people is that showing how your team members can become more proactive within their role every day, they should need you less than less.
And they should be learning how to talk to people across the organization, talking to their peers, using others around two to put together the missing information they have with them coordination they have. And that's going to take some encouragement, because especially if you're dealing with you know a team of introverts, you just need to encourage them to get up, get out of the cubicle and start walking around and talking to people. Your team should become better every day. We don't be complacent when growing our teams, it should be something that should be just come natural. You should wake up every day. How am I going to make my team better? How am I going to make my people better. The third area that leaders need to focus on is achieving results. Because if you don't achieve your results, you're not going to see it be seen as a credible leader. You will not be seen as effective if you can't complete tasks. You can't achieve your goals if you can't meet certain metrics. But if you can't explain the aspects or the lines of business that you're responsible for, or whatever you're the you're responsible for, and if you can't explain the variances and the differences in the numbers, if you can't communicate a narrative, if you can't come in with a high level of excellence, if you can't achieve those results, people are the leaders are just not going to see you as a credible voice, or as a credible leader. And so again, we need to make sure we're meeting our deadlines or meeting the expectations of our boss and the expectations of the of the executive team or the project managers or whoever we're working with. To deliver results we are we're meeting their expectations or exceeding their expectations. Giving results is about achieving high level of excellence. It's about managing our time. Well, it's about establishing priorities. It's also about knowing what the priorities are of the organization, and making sure that our priorities match up with the organization's priorities that they match up with our boss's priorities, and the priorities of the executive team, we help build the business, we try to figure out our role on that, we try to figure out insights and explanations that give senior leaders an edge on making the right decisions. nasod achieving results is all about. The fourth area that leaders need to be focusing on is seeing the future as leaders, we continually assessing what may happen tomorrow by using calculated risk, some intuition and some analytics. But you also need to be thinking about and seeing what's going on in our industry, we didn't know what our industry is thinking about know the relative trends within our industry. Seeing the future is about gathering some information, seeing what people are talking about, and then trying to apply some knowledge. And some, of course, some intuition and some maybe a little bit of guesswork, along with what the strategy of urbanization is, and then seeing how it matches up. And it goes back to our using our influence to developing maybe a great perspective on how our organization fits into the future within the industry that we are in. How does our organization fit into the trends that we are seeing, we need to be reading the journals, we need to be reading the websites, we need to be reading the experts in our industry. And we need to start figuring out, as we look at the numbers, and as we look at our own numbers, we need to figure out what's going to work for us and what won't. And I'm telling you, instead of just seeing what our daily task load is, and this marking off the task, marking off a task and marking on the task, which is of course important, we talked about them achieving results. And if we can start to gain some insight around where we think things are going how the world is working, that affects our industry, especially if it's heavily regulated, if you're in health care, you need to be figuring out where healthcare is going. Or if you're in a trend in the transportation sector, how is trends, you know, government transportation departments, affecting how you can move things around, you know, start to start to see where the influencers within your industry are talking about. Now, of course, being able to see the future takes a little bit of skill, and it takes a little bit of experience. And kind of figure out you know, if you're if you're seeing something,
and start to start to see if you're if over time, if your what your insights are, and how to fix your organization, see if they're matching up. And then you can make some adjustments along the way. But what I would recommend is that start to grow this skill, start to grow this area of your leadership development. Because once you once you're in meetings with senior leaders and starting to talk about talk about strategy development, and how their how their current operations matches up with a strategy, and if you have that knowledge, if you've done your reading and research and figuring out things, you can then start to provide your own insight with the knowledge you have of what your team is providing to your organization in a bit of a little bit of an insight to help them to do their job better. So, again, let's not just do our task list. Let's start to get beyond get beyond our desk and beyond what we are responsible for and start to really see the organization as a whole start to see the organization and how it fits into the industry. How? Where are we going? Where's the industry going? How are government influences going to affect us industry? How are other players within the industry going to affect us. And then we can start using, again, offering those great ideas with relevant data. And it's all about helping the senior leaders develop a competitive competitive advantage for the future. And with all these four areas, and all the things, we're talking about leadership, it's about setting yourself apart. If you're seeing the future, if you're starting to do research and providing a little bit more insight, you're going to get recognized, you're going to get recognized. For going a little bit above and beyond, hey, today, I want to give you an area that you can have an easy win. And I really want you to start with growing your people, does every team member have a written individual development plan that has goals on it. So if you don't, this is an area that you can start working on with your team members. Doesn't matter what your company's policy is, maybe you do have some sort of policy around goal setting and individual development plans or whatever it is, but maybe your company has tools that you didn't even realize that they have. But let's start getting something written whether it be within a within a company system, or just a word document or an Excel document something with a this is this is the the goals that each person wants to achieve. These are some skill gaps that we have, or something that we want to work on. And this is some training, maybe we want to accomplish over the next year. And that training can be either a variety of online courses, maybe there's some free training that your organization provides, is depends on what business you have. Some provide a whole catalogue of free courses that you can do. Or you can go online and find some free courses or go on on various sites, various sites that have skill development areas that you can work on. Or it could be you know, even as simple as advanced Microsoft Excel skills, you can go on microsoft.com and figure out what training needs to be done. And also, second to that, start scheduling. If you haven't already, start scheduling some one on one meetings with each of your team members. I would say if you could do it every week, that'd be great. But at least every other week, start having one on one session and start talking about goal setting. And even some performance improvement, really great open dialogue, not a one way discussion, but something where there's a two way discussion, and you really start to have them talk about how to improve. So I think this is an easy men. Growing people should be the area that you focus on the most. You get your team trained, you get your team ready. And that way you can focus on some of these other areas you can grow in your own leadership. So today in this episode, we talked about the impact of leadership and we talked about those four major activities that leaders to be doing every day that's influencing that's growing people that's achieving results and seeing the future. And you can find this episode and all episodes. on Apple podcast, Spotify, and all the other places where podcaster
can be. You can download the show notes at Stephen McLain calm next episode, we're going to talk about building trust because trust is what keeps an organization together. And trust has the power to help you exceed your potential. Because without trust, you'll never achieve excellence or team goals. That's what we're going to talk about can be a great discussion. I hope you enjoyed the show, please join our community on Facebook, the finance leader podcast Facebook group. This will be our community to grow within the finance and accounting profession. Until next time, you can check out more resources at Stephen McLain calm and sign up for my updates so you don't miss an episode of the show. And now go lead your team and see you next time. Thank you
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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also providing purpose, how many times you've worked on a team. And other than the fact that you've got a task today, and you've got another task tomorrow, and you've got a couple tasks The next day, and then next week, you get to do it all over again. And then next month as you go through clothes, and you've got these other tasks, there's just reoccurring tasks on the calendar, how many times that your manager provided purpose, or your controller provided purpose. So the CFO has gotten everybody together and says, This is our purpose as an accounting department. This is our purpose, as the department supports the greater organization. What is your purpose for being here, other than just doing a journal entry every day? How are we supporting the organization? in the journal entry that you're doing? It depends on one or It depends, of course, the industry that you're in, you're not just doing a journal entry, you're not just doing a projection, you're actually fulfilling a purpose so that other folks in the organization are delivering whatever service it is that your organization does. And that's important. That manager who grasped that concept of communicating that you're not just doing a journal entry will make a difference. And that's what I'm talking about and leadership, along with that, along with that purpose, is that communicating that long term vision? Where is this organization going? Where's the finance and accounting department fitting into this? What's the strategy, that's what leadership is all about? leaders influence a positive change, we are never complacent, we have a lot of influence. within the organization, we have a lot a lot of influence within the budget process, both for planning and execution. And we also, since we work with the numbers every day, we, if we do it, right, we get to also have a lot of influence to the use of our expertise and knowing how to grow the business. And also knowing how to help craft a strategy and helping to advise the executive team, we also get to develop our team collectively. That is how do we get our team together to solve a problem together? It's not just individual team members doing this task and this task and this task. But how can we get everybody together to solve a task collectively? How can we start sharing information? How can we start to get people to get out of their cubicle, and to go across the hall or across to the next cubicle, to start to have a conversation to solve a problem that takes leadership. And that's why we need to be focusing on growing our leadership. The first area that I want to talk about is influence. influence is about using our communication skills and our negotiation skills to convince others to buy into an idea that we are passionate about, or that we believe is right for the business. The area of influence is present in every gathering of people every meeting that we have, that presents an opportunity for us to talk about ideas, of course, within the context of the meeting. It's about bringing forth the details and the numbers and presenting a picture and presenting how our idea can grow the organization, how can move forward, how does it fit into the strategy, or maybe there's something that we're seeing that others aren't seeing. So again, every time you get to meet with your peers, you get to meet with people across the organization, you get to meet with senior leaders, it's an opportunity to show your influence to present different ideas, a different way of looking at things, different way of interpreting the numbers, a different way of showing what's possible. And that's what I mean by influence within the within the finance context.
And for very specific things that I think that you can be doing is that we need to continually improve our processes, there's nothing more frustrating than try to complete, for example, a monthly close without a good set of processes that make sense. And a lot of times and a lot of things that I've seen of working in these various organizations is that the monthly closed process is a disaster is not a good set of processes. And it doesn't make sense about we're continually moving reports around in circles sometimes and it doesn't necessarily make sense that it stays the way it should be. So I would challenge all of you out there in your monthly pros closed process. How can we make it better and that's when that's where influence comes across in conjunction with monthly close we need to advocate for better systems, better ways of of our numbers that are being processed and better information systems and decision making systems. Nothing more bothers me more than seeing accountants and financial analysts who are continually doing cutting and pasting of reports from one report to the next. I just don't, I just it just bothers me to see how many people they're spending their time just cutting and pasting instead of doing analysis, instead of thinking about numbers they're doing, and I think a better system, if you bring it if you're able to introduce a better system into your organization, where it cuts down on the cutting and pasting when we actually get to have our people sit and look at the numbers and do some analysis and get some insights, figure out what the narrative is around how the numbers are going. So that we can, so that we can communicate what we're seeing to senior leaders so they can make better decisions. That's where I want you to go, that's where I would like to see our managers grow and how our managers go about their day a little differently is that I want you to turn your team members into not just report builders and cutting and pasting hours, but actually into people who are thinking and developing insights. We also as as, as leaders, we also need to continually look to research our teams better for success. And that can be just a variety of different things. It could be infrastructure, again, it could be better systems, it could be more training, and we're going to talk about that on the next category could be anything that they need to make their job a little bit better, we need to use our influence to do that. And again, the greatest opportunities that we get to use our influence is that we get to move the organization in a positive direction to improve and to grow. The second area that leaders need to focus greatly on on a daily basis is growing people, we have the great privilege to help others to achieve their goals and to exceed their potential we get to inspire others to become better. And we get to help our team members develop really effective individual development plans that support their career growth, and also improve their relevant soft skills. And every team member needs an individual development plan. And yourself, you need to have one too, you need to set the example you need to have a set of goals that you're working on how you're going to achieve those goals, and then what training you need to do what you need to be working on whether it be a certification or an advanced degree, or you just need some gap training on a skill that you don't have just need a very detailed written plan, you also get to teach how to conduct critical tasks and steps within each person's job role, we get to get to have that great role as teacher. And if a team member is either having a difficulty on figuring out how to do a task, then we either can find them some training, or we can go bring them into a conference room would grab a whiteboard, and we start we start whiteboarding, a solution, and you start doing some training, even if it takes 15 minutes, 15 minutes, can have a huge impact on your team member and know and being able to move forward in whatever tasks that they're working on. So I'm just encouraging you to grasp that role as teacher, whenever it comes up and be looking for that opportunity. I love doing it. I love getting in front of a whiteboard, and kind of plotting out or writing out how to do a better analysis or a better way to figure out a projection or just how to develop solutions around whatever problem we're having. just encourage you to just be able to grasp that role. And Bill have that great impact even though it's 10 to 15 minutes, you just can have a huge impact. Just trust me on that one. Also, another area that you get to work on in growing your people is that showing how your team members can become more proactive within their role every day, they should need you less than less.
And they should be learning how to talk to people across the organization, talking to their peers, using others around two to put together the missing information they have with them coordination they have. And that's going to take some encouragement, because especially if you're dealing with you know a team of introverts, you just need to encourage them to get up, get out of the cubicle and start walking around and talking to people. Your team should become better every day. We don't be complacent when growing our teams, it should be something that should be just come natural. You should wake up every day. How am I going to make my team better? How am I going to make my people better. The third area that leaders need to focus on is achieving results. Because if you don't achieve your results, you're not going to see it be seen as a credible leader. You will not be seen as effective if you can't complete tasks. You can't achieve your goals if you can't meet certain metrics. But if you can't explain the aspects or the lines of business that you're responsible for, or whatever you're the you're responsible for, and if you can't explain the variances and the differences in the numbers, if you can't communicate a narrative, if you can't come in with a high level of excellence, if you can't achieve those results, people are the leaders are just not going to see you as a credible voice, or as a credible leader. And so again, we need to make sure we're meeting our deadlines or meeting the expectations of our boss and the expectations of the of the executive team or the project managers or whoever we're working with. To deliver results we are we're meeting their expectations or exceeding their expectations. Giving results is about achieving high level of excellence. It's about managing our time. Well, it's about establishing priorities. It's also about knowing what the priorities are of the organization, and making sure that our priorities match up with the organization's priorities that they match up with our boss's priorities, and the priorities of the executive team, we help build the business, we try to figure out our role on that, we try to figure out insights and explanations that give senior leaders an edge on making the right decisions. nasod achieving results is all about. The fourth area that leaders need to be focusing on is seeing the future as leaders, we continually assessing what may happen tomorrow by using calculated risk, some intuition and some analytics. But you also need to be thinking about and seeing what's going on in our industry, we didn't know what our industry is thinking about know the relative trends within our industry. Seeing the future is about gathering some information, seeing what people are talking about, and then trying to apply some knowledge. And some, of course, some intuition and some maybe a little bit of guesswork, along with what the strategy of urbanization is, and then seeing how it matches up. And it goes back to our using our influence to developing maybe a great perspective on how our organization fits into the future within the industry that we are in. How does our organization fit into the trends that we are seeing, we need to be reading the journals, we need to be reading the websites, we need to be reading the experts in our industry. And we need to start figuring out, as we look at the numbers, and as we look at our own numbers, we need to figure out what's going to work for us and what won't. And I'm telling you, instead of just seeing what our daily task load is, and this marking off the task, marking off a task and marking on the task, which is of course important, we talked about them achieving results. And if we can start to gain some insight around where we think things are going how the world is working, that affects our industry, especially if it's heavily regulated, if you're in health care, you need to be figuring out where healthcare is going. Or if you're in a trend in the transportation sector, how is trends, you know, government transportation departments, affecting how you can move things around, you know, start to start to see where the influencers within your industry are talking about. Now, of course, being able to see the future takes a little bit of skill, and it takes a little bit of experience. And kind of figure out you know, if you're if you're seeing something,
and start to start to see if you're if over time, if your what your insights are, and how to fix your organization, see if they're matching up. And then you can make some adjustments along the way. But what I would recommend is that start to grow this skill, start to grow this area of your leadership development. Because once you once you're in meetings with senior leaders and starting to talk about talk about strategy development, and how their how their current operations matches up with a strategy, and if you have that knowledge, if you've done your reading and research and figuring out things, you can then start to provide your own insight with the knowledge you have of what your team is providing to your organization in a bit of a little bit of an insight to help them to do their job better. So, again, let's not just do our task list. Let's start to get beyond get beyond our desk and beyond what we are responsible for and start to really see the organization as a whole start to see the organization and how it fits into the industry. How? Where are we going? Where's the industry going? How are government influences going to affect us industry? How are other players within the industry going to affect us. And then we can start using, again, offering those great ideas with relevant data. And it's all about helping the senior leaders develop a competitive competitive advantage for the future. And with all these four areas, and all the things, we're talking about leadership, it's about setting yourself apart. If you're seeing the future, if you're starting to do research and providing a little bit more insight, you're going to get recognized, you're going to get recognized. For going a little bit above and beyond, hey, today, I want to give you an area that you can have an easy win. And I really want you to start with growing your people, does every team member have a written individual development plan that has goals on it. So if you don't, this is an area that you can start working on with your team members. Doesn't matter what your company's policy is, maybe you do have some sort of policy around goal setting and individual development plans or whatever it is, but maybe your company has tools that you didn't even realize that they have. But let's start getting something written whether it be within a within a company system, or just a word document or an Excel document something with a this is this is the the goals that each person wants to achieve. These are some skill gaps that we have, or something that we want to work on. And this is some training, maybe we want to accomplish over the next year. And that training can be either a variety of online courses, maybe there's some free training that your organization provides, is depends on what business you have. Some provide a whole catalogue of free courses that you can do. Or you can go online and find some free courses or go on on various sites, various sites that have skill development areas that you can work on. Or it could be you know, even as simple as advanced Microsoft Excel skills, you can go on microsoft.com and figure out what training needs to be done. And also, second to that, start scheduling. If you haven't already, start scheduling some one on one meetings with each of your team members. I would say if you could do it every week, that'd be great. But at least every other week, start having one on one session and start talking about goal setting. And even some performance improvement, really great open dialogue, not a one way discussion, but something where there's a two way discussion, and you really start to have them talk about how to improve. So I think this is an easy men. Growing people should be the area that you focus on the most. You get your team trained, you get your team ready. And that way you can focus on some of these other areas you can grow in your own leadership. So today in this episode, we talked about the impact of leadership and we talked about those four major activities that leaders to be doing every day that's influencing that's growing people that's achieving results and seeing the future. And you can find this episode and all episodes. on Apple podcast, Spotify, and all the other places where podcaster
can be. You can download the show notes at Stephen McLain calm next episode, we're going to talk about building trust because trust is what keeps an organization together. And trust has the power to help you exceed your potential. Because without trust, you'll never achieve excellence or team goals. That's what we're going to talk about can be a great discussion. I hope you enjoyed the show, please join our community on Facebook, the finance leader podcast Facebook group. This will be our community to grow within the finance and accounting profession. Until next time, you can check out more resources at Stephen McLain calm and sign up for my updates so you don't miss an episode of the show. And now go lead your team and see you next time. Thank you
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