Victor’s 10 Reflections on Leadership - 3. You will miss some interdependencies in complex work - plan for them next time
Steve Rosvold 00:05
Welcome to CFO talk. I’m your host, Steve Rosvold, Chief Learning Officer at CFO.University. Joining us from Wichita, Kansas today is Victor Ojeleye to discuss one of his 10 Reflections on Leadership.
The third reflection you captured covers Interdependencies in Complex Work. It sounds like a learning opportunity. Would you tell us more about this reflection?
Victor Ojeleye 00:37
Yeah, this is direct feedback I got on a project we were working on during budgeting as an FP&A team leader in a regional business. There are things like tax rates, methodologies, and in your business that you often are asking questions about. A long list of different business drivers that we were working on. And as a new, global team, our regional leaders, were all asking questions around what are the things that we need to be aligned on? What’s our point of view for the U.S.A. versus Latin America versus Europe? There was a particular driver that that we were asking questions about. And we did finally get to alignment on, but as we eventually got to that final result, we learned that we could have gotten to that answer much faster.
So, we got the feedback. I took that feedback and asked myself, How can we plan for these interdependencies as we go through this budgeting process next year? We have so many things we’re doing, we want to be efficient with our time. We need to learn how to get better. It was a simple learning opportunity for me to write down and say, hey, when you’re doing things that are large and complex, you will miss some things, right? You might not know what you don’t know. Being new to the role with this great opportunity, I want to make the most of it. Next year, I’ll be able to flag it and put it as a workstream to ask, “What are these things we can all get aligned on earlier on? How can we communicate it, learn it faster and be better?”
That was one bit of direct feedback of how do we can plan better for the next time.
Steve Rosvold 02:08
That’s great, you know, a little bit of project management, continuous improvement all rolled up into one. I like the time for reflection that you took to recognize where you stumbled and what you learned from it. So taking that time is really valuable and a great lesson to all of us. Make sure we’re improving our processes and not worry so much about stumbling. Worry about learning from those stumbles. That wraps up this video short taken from our longer interview with Victor, Reflections on Leadership. CFO.University is a community of member scholars, companies and trusted advisors committed to the professional development of chief financial officers. Learn more about us at CFO.University.
Until next time, Enjoy. Learn. Engage.
Find Victor’s other Reflections on Leadership HERE
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