030: Becoming a Trusted Business Advisor

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on the podcast this week, I am talking about your transition to become a trusted business advisor to help senior leaders grow the company.

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As finance and accounting professionals, we need to develop beyond sending reports and creating financial statements. But to dig deeper and send insights and relevant knowledge, so key decisions can be made. It's about building the business exceeding expectations, and doing our part in achieving the long term vision. Enjoy the episode. Welcome to the finance leader podcast where leadership is bigger than the numbers. I am your host Stephen McLain. This is the podcast for developing leaders in finance and accounting. This is episode number 30, and the end of season three, and today I will discuss how we can become a trusted business advisor by helping senior leaders build the business and I will talk about three recommendations. Number one, tell a story with the numbers. Number two, work with your IT team to make reporting better. And number three, partner with leaders at all levels from around the company, author and Napoleon Hill said, strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle, finance and accounting leaders should continue to strive to become trusted business advisors, we need to do our best to help senior leaders build the business, we must go beyond the daily fight to get our tasks done. We need to think bigger. every task and requirement requires a new mindset and a new approach. a different mindset means that once you complete that report, what does it mean? How can you use that information to make the company better and exceed expectations? Everything we do is about building the business, everything. I want you to approach every meeting, every discussion, and every piece of analysis with growing your influence, to talk about how to make the business better. Every number you talk about is a story. It's not only about what happened, but also what could happen. Become a storyteller.

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Talk about the possibilities.

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translate your numbers into the language of your audience. Every number you talk about represents people it represents potential, and also represents the company's vision, I challenge you to grow into the role of leader as trusted business advisor to push the organization to do better, to achieve the impossible, and to help senior leaders to even see what they can't see, finance and accounting leaders often possess critical insight that others do not. And the numbers reside reality, what you did and what you didn't do on this forum. I want to go beyond our usual function, to real leadership, to real impact, to make a difference, to influence leaders from around the company to achieve the vision and achieve the strategy. I want you to become more than the person who punches the clock every day, I want you to become a leader who changes the culture for the better who helps to grow the business. This takes strong leadership and strong leaders who think differently, I want you to embrace the role as advisor, not just someone who produces reports and analysis to get someone off your back because that mentality produces bad work and it produces complacency. It produces information that doesn't help it produces the routine in the mediocre, you may be dealing with multiple requirements at the same time, which then allows no too little time to do real thinking to find insights. This is a multiple level leadership failure. And you probably don't have the right tools to do your job. And the team culture is probably lacking in real substance. It's not just about producing numbers. It's about what those numbers mean, and how we can work together to build the company doing the same work every day is nothing but complacency. It's mediocrity that will run you aground and it will destroy your experience.

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And it will not help you advance in your career and to become a better senior leader than probably what you see already.

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How can we do better you can get to a place where your voice influences positive change and other leaders will want to listen to you you get the opportunity to guide others to greatness. Now I want to talk about three recommendations that I have for you to help you shift to become that trusted business advisor number one is to tell a story with the numbers. Now on a few episodes ago on episode 28.

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I talked about monthly clothes and also encourage you to tell a story with the clothes slides.

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Every number is a story I want you to learn the skill of telling stories about The numbers do your best to help senior leaders understand the performance of the business and understand what really happened behind those numbers, we often don't have enough time to do this right, we do exactly what we did last month, we put a table or a graph on the same slide we move on, we change the numbers that may be in the notes at the bottom, or we change some numbers, we change something in the title, because we have too many requirements, and not enough time to think we need to find more opportunities to save time. So we have more time to think, and more time to talk with others about growing the business, we often don't have the right tools to give us more time to do this analysis and to think properly. And then this leads me to the next recommendation. Number two, you need to work with your IT team to automate and produce better outputs. This is a time saving recommendation. You need to partner with your IT team and find out what they can do find out what the possibilities are with the tools that they have, you may be able to use some capacity in some tools that you don't realize they don't even realize that they have to program or develop routine reports so that you as an analyst or analyst on your team, don't have to waste time producing, formatting and going in and pulling the same data that you do every month or every week, it is possible working with your IT team that you can program this and then have it automatically be submitted to you in an email or go into an application and just request the data. And so there it's possible, I want analysts to spend their time analyzing and not just formatting and not cutting and pasting. But doing real analyst work, figuring out what happened, partnering with others, partnering with people who own the metrics and figuring out what happened behind those numbers. Now, I realize not not all IT systems are the same.

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Every company has something different. Maybe yours isn't very robust. And maybe you don't have a data warehouse. But investigate, figure out what you do have find that it person who knows really what's going on with the systems that you have, and then try to go into and exploit all the possibilities, find out what that it system can really do find out every possible way that you can help save yourself time by creating automated reports that using all the time, so you don't waste your time doing that. But you spend more time figuring out what really happens that I was spoiled in the Pentagon with an amazing IT team and a great data warehouse, we often could get routine reports programmed. So it was one tap of a button to get a detailed report along with the current data, and also charts and tables so that it was easy to add to a presentation.

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It saves so much time we didn't waste time, every time creating the same report, tap the button and we got a PDF and the data in an Excel and we just had it and we could just add it to our presentation. And we can start figuring out what these numbers really meant. Now can you get this level of support? Probably not. But you can ask, and you can find out what your IT team can do. Probably no one has asked them, ask them what they can do and how they can make your job easier. I'm sure that there's someone on the team that can help you figure out how to maximize the systems that you do have to make your job a little bit easier. Number three is to partner with leaders at all levels around the company. Now I talked about this often in the episodes, I believe that you need to be making connections throughout the company. So you can advise and influence continue to build trust with leaders find out what the pain points of the leaders you are talking with. And then address what kind of metrics they are using. Be careful about taking on something you can't do. You want to advise you want to help them understand their numbers, understand how to maximize their budget and figure out how their metrics affects the profit loss statement. And with this insight, you can help senior leaders to do their job better.

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This is a relationship building recommendation. So you can advise how department leaders can meet their goals and again to maximize their budget, and to see how they can achieve the metrics that they are responsible for we are educating others when we partner with senior leaders and department heads and other managers, I believe in reaching out across the company to improve what we are doing. I liked partnering with those leaders of the metrics I was responsible for to really dig into the processes.

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What do these metrics really mean? How do they change? What affects them? What can I do to figure out what is happening maybe we can find an insight which can translate into efficiencies or a positive change on the profit and loss statement. The possibilities on what positive effect you have are endless. It's all about becoming a leader. So becoming an influencer is talking with people it's bridging gaps of communication is going beyond what you're doing every day on your laptop. It's going beyond what you're working on. In your IT system or working on your Excel spreadsheet, it's about talking with others and about how to make the business better.

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It's about how you use the information in the data, you have to find insights that really create positive change, and to help others find other insights. So you can maximize, then you can exceed expectations of all your stakeholders for an easy win. Today, I'm going to ask you a few things. How can you tell more of a story with the metrics and reports you are working with, and I want you to really develop that skill and figure out how you can contribute in a more effective way to grow the company who can you partner with today, which department heads are managers or senior leaders that you routinely work with that you can truly partner with the figure out some key insights and to figure out how you can translate the numbers you're producing every month into something that's truly usable, to make a change to make a difference and to find out what the company is really doing. So I challenge you to do that. starting this month, I wanted to share some information that I saw, and that there was a news report by CBS News that highlighted a study in a survey done by the organization called for acumen.

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And they found that during the pandemic, that only 49% of managers had shown appreciation for their teammates. And I was really surprised by that, that we're not showing more appreciation for our team. While we're going through a very tough time, especially during those first couple of months, when we were totally locked down in a quarantine not allowed to really go anywhere and are allowed to do anything. We're trying to figure out how to even get groceries, how to even entertain ourselves how to deal with children at home, and every other challenge about being in a confined space and very limited opportunities to do anything that we were normally used to.

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And I'm still surprised by this 49% that means that only half are really getting showed any kind of appreciation for the work that they're doing, even during this very challenging time. The other part of the news report that was shared said that 64% of workers said they would work harder if they were shown appreciation. So I think we're missing an opportunity to show some appreciation, it doesn't have to be false or fake appreciation, I'm really challenging you to look at what your team is doing and address the things that they're doing well, and you'll be surprised and going to be challenging you as managers of teams, as leaders, as senior leaders, to really look at what the things your team is doing in all these challenges. And I think you're missing out on some opportunities to really build up your team all reminds me that we still have a long way to go, it's still gonna be a while before we get back to what we used to call normal, we have a lot to go through, there's still some challenges that we're facing, there's a lot of social issues that our world still needs to face and needs to come up with solutions. In the next few weeks. We are facing a presidential election in the United States, which is going to have a lot of ramifications and issues going into the future.

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And the result of that election is going to bring about a number of changes no matter which way it goes. So I'm asking you, as leaders out there is that to get more involved with your team, even if you've gotten back in the office. And I know that some companies have made a decision to get back in the office or they have sent some teams into the office, some teams will probably stay remote, and they won't get back into the office.

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But I'm just asking you as leaders is that to get involved, and find out how your team is struggling. And that includes struggling with the children in their schooling in any kind of relationship issues may be having. And you don't have to get too deeply involved in the issues and just kind of gauge and see what kind of issues your teammates are having. Because your company probably has some wellness programs. I've talked about this before, your company probably has some programs that your teammates can probably tap into and probably can help them out a little bit with some of the struggles that they're having, you know, not to get too personal. I know some people like to keep that distance, and they don't like to share very personal information. But I think as leaders, I think we have a responsibility to ensure that our teammates are doing okay, trying to maximize the best they can and the situation that they're dealing with. And you don't have to get too deeply involved. At your one on one you can start to gauge whether people are having some problems and then you can match them up to a resource that your company may have. I think it's the minimum that we can do. I believe that as leaders we need to get more involved and we need to really show care and concern for our teammates because what they do on their personal life and what affects them in their personal life does affect them on their work life. And I believe that when you do start to pursue an Ask your teammates for issues that are bothering them when they are away from work, that that's an investment, they'll come back to you while they are working on a project for you in a project for the company. And I think it will give you incredible dividends later. So encouraging you to really invest in your team to make sure that they have the resources they do, including mental health resources, because I think it'll just make the entire team better and the organization better. I have a free guide for you. It's called the leadership growth blueprint for finance and accounting managers. In the guide, I talked about three leadership areas, communication, team growth, and empowerment. Plus a few recommendations around challenges with the systems you are probably using to complete your work. The link to the guide is in the episode description.

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Or you can go to Stephen McLain calm. Please use it to help you with a few leadership wins today. Thank you. This episode is sponsored by my new online course offering through finance leader Academy. It's called advance your finance and accounting career, developing a promotion strategy that will set you apart. Are you having difficulty getting recognition from your leadership, despite all the hard work you pour into your job and your organization.

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This course helps you analyze what you bring to the organization, how you can set yourself apart from your peers to high visibility work, and developing your leadership skills. Plus how you can devise a strategy to move ahead, you can go to Stephen McLain calm.

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For more details. Today, I talked about how we can transition to trusted business advisor so you can help grow the business. And I talked about three recommendations. Number one, tell a story with the numbers. Number two, work with your IT team to make reporting better, so you save more time and number three partner with leaders at all levels from around the company. Now this is the end of season three. The next few weeks, I will be offering some bonus content until season four debuts on November 10. Thank you for the incredible support. I hope this will be a forum for you to grow your leadership and finance and accounting. You know how I feel about our profession. I believe that we need to be leaders, we have insights, and we need to grow our influence throughout the organization. So our company gets better we get out of the complacency mode, we continue to improve, we continue to help others grow the company and that requires strong leadership. We care about our team, we want to empower our team so that they can get beyond just doing that spreadsheet and that report. So they grow into strong leaders.

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Thank you very much for all the support. I want to continue to bring this forum to you and to address issues so that we can become better at our profession and better at really becoming true leaders in our organization. Thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed the finance leader Podcast. I am dedicated to helping you grow your leadership. I hope you enjoyed the show. You can get this episode wherever you find podcasts. 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 I'll see you next time. Thank you

030: Becoming a Trusted Business Advisor

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