As just about any finance professional knows, there’s a huge need for FP&A teams to become more strategic partners to the business. When we surveyed more than 300 CFOs on how FP&A can play a broader role in guiding corporate planning and performance, 75% said they wanted their teams to have a significant and strong impact on their organization—but only 46% believed they could have that kind of impact in the near future. What was the disconnect? The chief reason cited was a lack of time for strategic planning.

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WHAT is Bottom Up Leadership?

Bottom-Up leadership is thinking differently and being the pioneer amongst the other executives who promote a better way of thinking and doing. Bottom up leaders contribute towards the career journey of an individual, with the principle of “lead as if you were following”.

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This will not be news to some of you, but taking a route through Finance business partnering is now the best way to achieve your ambition of getting into a CFO role.

It used to be the case that financial control and reporting was the established path to the Chief Financial Officer’s chair. A solid Financial Controller was seen as not only the CFO’s right hand person, but the CFO’s natural successor.

This, I believe, is not the case any more.

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There are three areas you need to develop in if you want to be a good Chief Financial Officer or Finance business partner – business acumen, tools/techniques and behavioural skills.

And my intention is to unpack these three areas a little bit, so that you can get to grips with planning your development journey more effectively.

In another article I shared my belief that Finance business partner is the new best route to a CFO role. That is to say, core CFO skills are Finance business partnering skills. And well-developed Finance business partnering skills are what you need to be a CFO.

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An Introduction to Personal Effectiveness for CFOs and Finance Professionals is a book that I wrote to give an outline of some core behavioural skills that are essential to business-focused Finance but don’t receive enough attention.

The book arose out of a reading project I undertook in order to get a well-rounded view of CFO and Finance business partnering roles, and the skills and behaviours involved. And I think it’s only fair to acknowledge the influence of at least some of the books I read. In fact, I’ll mention just two, because these are the most relevant to the subject matter of this book.

Firstly, a kindle-only book by Alan Warner, Finance Business Partnering - The search for value, was useful in suggesting a skills framework for Finance business partnering. Warner’s analysis is where I got the three categories that I now talk about - Business acumen, Behavioural, and Technical.

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