You’ve achieved a major milestone in your finance career: you’ve been promoted to a finance leadership role, and that’s primarily because of your technical expertise. Then you’ve realised that the person you were when you managed just spreadsheets is a totally different person from who you should be now that you’re managing people. No doubt, you’ve spent all these years sharpening and honing your finance technical skills, and now you’re distraught because you are caught in between your first team conflict, your team’s morale is running low, or a performance review turned challenging.
You’re like many finance professionals who get thrust into leadership roles with plenty of technical skills and limited people skills. The good news contained in this article is that leadership is not an inherent skill that you either have or don’t have. No matter at what point you’ve found yourself as a leader, you can figure out how to lead a finance team. Now let’s discuss how you can build and hone those leadership skills.
Why Finance Managers Struggle With People Leadership
Until now, you’ve been the finance professional who handles complex spreadsheets confidently; now you are in a leadership role, and burnout freaks you out. As a finance manager who has been promoted to a finance director or other finance leadership position, you struggle with leading people because, all this while, your job has been to find the “right” answers. You have spent a long time dealing with whether numbers are balanced or not, and that compliance, logic and spreadsheets all tally up. Little did you know that humans are delightfully messy, ride on emotions, and can be totally unpredictable, unlike the numbers.
You’re still wired towards fixing data problems, figuring out what went wrong yourself and focusing only on tasks instead of human relationships, even as a finance leader, because your promotion often came about because of your technical expertise. You still struggle to have an uncomfortable conversation with a team member about their communication skills and would rather resort to fixing their spreadsheet yourself. As a finance leader, you cannot lead your team the way you handle data, and you cannot always fix team conflicts with logic. Understanding that you need an entirely different set of skills as a finance leader is a major step towards dealing with being the one who solves the problems and becoming the leader who trusts in their team.
How to Lead a Finance Team When Your Strengths Lie in Numbers, Not Leading
Leading people when you haven’t yet built up your leadership skills can seem like speaking a foreign language you have no knowledge about. One truth remains: to succeed in leading, if this is your current situation, you don’t need to magically be transformed into an extroverted person if you are not. You can instead use your analytical skills as a strong foundation for success in leading a finance team.
Now, instead of using your analytical skills for spreadsheets, you can use them for pattern recognition in the team you lead, and this will help you tune into the workflow of your team, the existing bottlenecks and signs of burnout. As a leader who does not have the people skills yet, some great places to start are by practising active listening, curiosity and absolute transparency. Don’t feel ashamed to tell your team that you are adjusting to managing and leading people; it is also not out of place to ask each team member what type of support they look forward to from you. Accept that you don’t have all the answers and resist the pressure to act like you do, this will build your credibility more than you know because your team needs a leader who is reliable, protects their time and eases the challenges of organisational bottlenecks.
How to Build Your Leadership Ability As a Finance Leader
At this point, you probably understand only too well that your job has fundamentally changed. Before you got promoted to finance leadership, you used to be an individual contributor whose organisational input was measured by what you did personally. Now that you lead a finance team, your success and input lie greatly in what your team achieves, and this can be a difficult transition to accept for many finance professionals with excellent technical skills. In this situation, don’t fall for the trick of resorting to doing the technical tasks because you are good at them, because each minute you spend doing this you lose an opportunity to lead.
Admit that you are not expected to be the best finance professional at this point, because a finance team whose leader solves everything never learns to do anything. Explore delegation. This practically involves handing over tasks and ownership to individuals, asking them to take a process towards a defined outcome, and helping them understand why the task is important, and even establishing their authority to make certain decisions. You also need to accept the obligation of having difficult conversations; it’s natural to be tempted to avoid them. But having difficult conversations is a core skill of finance leaders, and when you take the step to address team challenges early, you prove yourself a kind leader. In all you do, let your key goal be to protect the time you need to lead your finance team instead of spending it on technical tasks.
It can be intimidating to take on a leadership position if you have no prior experience in people management skills, but it is completely doable. You may turn your analytical expertise into a potent leadership tool by changing your perspective from individual output to team empowerment. Keep in mind that all you need to do is lead, support, and have faith in your team; you don’t have to be the loudest person in the room or know every technical solution. Your finance team will flourish under your consistent, genuine leadership if you embrace the learning curve and give human connection equal weight with financial accuracy. Leading others can be an enjoyable and rewarding journey.
If you recognise yourself in this, you are exactly the kind of person I work with. I help finance leaders develop the people and leadership skills they were never trained for through 1:1 coaching for finance leaders and through wider finance team development. The best place to begin is a Free Chemistry Session, a relaxed conversation to explore the challenge you are facing and to see whether we’d be a good fit to work together.