Insights From Senior Accounting & Finance Leaders
Last week [axr] hosted series 14 of our popular F2L event, facilitated by keynote speaker (and co-director of [axr] recruitment and search), Greg Madden. Greg spoke about the small steps you can take every day to ensure you’re always steering your career in the right direction and opening yourself up to opportunities.
The Finance to Leadership Incubator or [F2L] has been designed to assist talented Accounting and Finance professionals to develop their careers into leadership roles.
[F2L] is a series where a future leader will learn about the career journeys of Senior Finance and Accounting leaders who have successfully transitioned into key finance leadership roles. They will provide insights into how they accomplished the move, the challenges they faced and share their learnings.
So, what did we learn on the night?
1. Planning is key
Most people spend a minimum of 40 hours a week doing their jobs, and probably a lot more time during the week simply thinking about work. We often spend more time day-to-day with our colleagues than we do with our family members and our lifestyles are usually determined by the amount of money we earn. In reality, our careers really do impact a large part of how we live our lives, yet not many people can honestly say that they ended up in their roles due to planning out their careers. In fact, I often hear people attribute successful careers to “simply being in the right place at the right time”. Careers are formed off the back of millions of small decisions every day to ensure you are continually improving your skills, broadening your knowledge and working towards an ultimate goal, all of which takes planning.
A piece of advice from Greg on how to do this best is to constantly be thinking 18 months ahead;
“How can I be deemed more valuable to a business a year and a half from now?”
2. Understand your skills
No-one is perfect and nobody can be expected to know everything, particularly in the professional world. One of the most valuable things to take from the F2L session was understanding your skills and recognising your skills gaps.
We often talk about adding value to a business, which is understandable considering they’re literally paying you to provide worth. But only focusing on the areas you are strong in can be detrimental to your career. Greg suggested that every time you take on a new role, you should have 60% of the skillset covered, and 40% to learn. This means you’ll have an existing skillset you can leverage off and therefore add some value quickly, whilst also learning and developing the rest. Not only will this keep you feeling challenged and make the role more rewarding overall, but it also keeps you feeling in control of your career as you are constantly seeking new knowledge and actively adding to your skillset.
3. Be compelling
Whilst having a certain level of technical competency is extremely important for your career, it really is only a portion of what makes you a compelling future employee. There are many other aspects employers look out for that separate the best candidates from their cohort and that is their personal value proposition. This includes personality traits such as resilience and tenacity, their ability to work as part of a team and influence stakeholders as well as overall professionalism and reliability. Usually these are things you’d learn about someone slowly as you get to know them overtime, so how can you exhibit these traits in an interview? Two ways Greg mentioned you could do this are:
- Use clear examples – people judge others based on previous behaviours, so the more you can lean on previous examples, where you’ve acted in certain ways or dealt with certain situations, will allow interviewers to start to build a better understanding of who you are. Always ensure these examples are clear, concise, outcome-focused and very relevant to the question being asked.
- Network – people are generally heavily influenced by people they trust and the professional world is often a lot smaller than we realise. Getting in front of people and having genuine positive interactions with them regularly will naturally help you to build a strong personal brand across the industry. There’s nothing more valuable than someone putting in a ‘good word’ or providing a glowing off-record reference to help get you across the line in a job process.
“F2L run by Greg was very helpful in putting career planning on a page. Whilst many concepts are not necessarily new, Greg was able to structure the thought process and provide valuable advice on career planning”
The Finance to Leadership Incubator is an opportunity for participants to think, discover and implement a career plan. The ability to listen to highly successful Accounting and Finance people, ask questions, engage with peers and discuss career challenges to provide greater career clarity. [F2L] will equip future accounting and finance leaders to have better career conversations and make decisions that help maximise their career potential.
Want to secure your seat at our next event or hear more about how you can optimise your career path in the finance and accounting world? Reach out to Amanda Dinte or a member of the accounting and finance team today.
Or you can visit her page HERE.
