Your job as a finance professional revolves around numbers; so far, you have honed your technical skills, you make the right analysis, you do thorough work, and you can produce accurate finance models, but the challenge of communicating clearly the insight these models contain is what you are struggling with, and each time those growth-focused ideas you have are pushed aside because the decision-makers do not understand what you are saying.
In the finance industry, being able to communicate clearly is a non-negotiable soft skill. As a finance leader, this very skill is what you need to move your ideas to organisational projects. In this article, we will help you learn nine communication techniques that will help you communicate clearly with your team, stakeholders in your organisation and even outside your organisation.
What Does Clear Communication Involve
A key component of your professional life and teamwork is the capacity to clearly communicate your requirements, wants, expectations, and insights. Communication can be so important to get right. Ultimately, we work with and through others and need to be able to communicate well to get things done. It sounds like it should be simple; we’ve been communicating in various ways ever since we were born. Yet, it can be surprisingly complex to master clear communication and to keep everything together all of the time.
Why Clear Communication Matters More in Finance
Your training as a finance professional has instilled in you the skill of precision; this very skill can have negative effects, especially when you are communicating with non-finance people. A couple of reasons create this challenge for finance professionals:
- For one, the job of finance requires being detailed and not omitting anything because omission is risky.
- Then there’s the issue of finance language; terms like ‘accruals’, many acronyms, ‘working capital’, ‘variations’, etc. – all of these mean specific things to finance professionals, but not to people who are not in finance.
- A finance leader is also often seen as the bearer of bad news, because you have the responsibility of talking about missed forecasts, cost reductions, overspending, etc. Discussions like these need a good level of clear communication; if not, the listeners may stop paying attention to the discussion and start defending.
- Finance people address different types of people every day: junior colleagues, other departments, perhaps stakeholders in other organisations, etc. All of these categories of people require different angles of communication.
The finance leader who is able to make sense of the numbers while communicating is the one who gets the audience to act on the purpose of the discussion.
9 Techniques to Communicate Clearly as a Finance Leader
Let’s group these techniques into three categories. The first category is awareness, and this means who you are talking to; the second is content, and that is what you are saying; and lastly is delivery, and this means how you say the content. For implementation, you don’t need to work with all nine at once; pick at least two and start.
Awareness
Know Your Communication Style
It is natural for finance professionals to be cautious, logical and detail-orientated when communicating. But for those whom they often talk to, mainly non-finance people, they have the tendency to make snappy choices and focus on the broad picture. This difference in communication style may create friction, although neither communication style is wrong. Common instances may include a CFO or finance director who loves to go by the details before speaking, which may be considered slow to some. You must take note of how your audience responds to your natural communication style and then make the necessary adjustments: for those who are interested in the large picture, begin with the conclusion, then add the details as a backup.
Understand Your Audience Before You Write a Word
Before you start working on the meeting presentation, ask yourself these three questions:
- What does my audience already know?
- What decisions do they need to make?
- What will your audience be worried about?
For a board, what they need is the necessary decision and risk; an operational manager looks for how the decision affects their team and the budget, and your team needs clear goals to work on. Each audience has a defined need, and you lose credibility if you communicate to all of them in one manner.
Check Understanding Through Feedback
You know that your presentation is working when people take actions positively towards it. So while speaking, look at the energy in the room that signifies if the audience is not following. Are people now using their phones, have glazed eyes, or are they repeating the same questions again? Check the headline of your presentation; maybe there’s something to add or adjust. You can also ask a trusted eye to look at your presentation; there’s no harm in that.
Content
Be Clear on Your Message and the Outcome You Want
Before you start the presentation, it will be practical to ask yourself this question: what do I want my audience to understand and decide? If you cannot pinpoint them, then it will be difficult for your audience too. Here are some pointers you could use in your presentation:
- Repeat your key points at the beginning and end of the presentation.
- Group the details of your presentation into a theme.
- Start key themes with the answer; for example, you could say, “We are 2% behind budget as a result of delayed contracts; my recommendation is to pause recruitment for X period of time.”
Choose the Right Channel
If you are going to deliver a sensitive presentation such as a forecast downgrade, it would be best to do that in person or via video conferencing first before sending out the message in writing. You can do routine updates via email; choose a video call when you need to invite questions or watch facial reactions during presentations. So after you have prepared the presentation, the next valid question is. Which channel will be best for this message?
Delivery
Manage Your Presence
Your composure sets the pace in the room; this is because people read meaning into your message from your composure. Come prepared, on time, and use a matching tone for the room, whether the audience is a formal one or just a team catch-up. A composed finance leader delivers bad news in a manageable approach.
Use Your Voice for Impact
Your voice has 4 areas of control, and this includes volume, tone, pace and empathy. Go slow when you are talking about important numbers, stop for a moment when you get to a key point and make sure not to read your slides word by word. If you aim to improve your communication, there’s no harm in recording yourself so you can have a rewatch and adjust accordingly.
Translate Finance Language into Business Language
This is one of the areas finance leaders find communication difficult: use simple language when you are communicating with non-finance people and make sure to explain what a technical term means the first time you use it. When you are talking to people who are new in finance, take extra care with them.
How to Put it Into Practice
For the next presentation you will be handling, do these:
- Before you start putting together the presentation, write one sentence message you want to convey.
- Identify the decision you want your audience to take before putting the presentation together.
- Cut out unnecessary details from your presentation.
- Replace finance jargon with simple business English as much as you can.
- Ask one non-finance person if he can understand the presentation
Communicating Clearly With Your Team
Everything we have discussed so far applies to your team too. As a finance leader, this is because clear goals, constant feedback and using less finance jargon will make meetings a calmer atmosphere and spur participants to action. For more on this, do read our article on how to lead your finance team and not just manage it.
You Can Learn Clear Communication
Being able to communicate clearly is not an intrinsic trait of humans; it’s a skill you can learn. Again, you don’t need to start with all nine techniques here, but you can pick two and start with them, then take note of how people who handle communication clearly around you do it and practise what you learn too.
But if you want to get ahead faster with your communication skills, then our coaching for finance leaders is a great place and space to start to work on the personal challenges you face in your role.
If you are not sure about what career coaching means for you now and would like to just talk about where you are now, where you would like to be and whether we can be a great fit, then book our Free Chemistry Session for starters.