Chris Festog is the Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Mutual of America Financial Group.
Ezra Bailey
If you think back to the strategic planning you’ve led or been a part of for your team or business, did it entail a top-down process taking many months to sort out all the challenges and steps necessary to drive the organization successfully into the future? While this type of strategic process is essential to align organizations, especially during highly transformational periods, an effective chief financial officer will also focus on creating an organization that thinks and acts strategically from the ground up.
This shift in perspective can be the linchpin to developing the essential building blocks of a world-class financial organization.
Strategic Focus
When I joined Mutual of America, the first process I completed with my new team was a strategic assessment of my new assignment. What was our end goal? What did a finished product look like? What were the strengths and weaknesses of our team, technology and processes? From this, we created one- and three-year plans of what we were going to focus on and who was assigned to achieve each initiative.
This strategic process builds and accomplishes many things. Most importantly, it builds honesty. Working through a strategic process requires an honest assessment of what is working and what is not. Which processes, data and people need to be improved?
This analysis can build a clear vision for the team of what will be addressed as part of this plan and create the end goal(s) to work toward. Casting this clear vision focuses the team, particularly when many day-to-day demands can cause urgent issues to push out the strategically important ones.
This vision also ensures that each person on your team knows their assignment and how it fits into the overall goal of improving and innovating in both the short and long term. And clearly defining objectives and ownership over critical strategic objectives creates organic accountability throughout your team.
Strategic Alignment
However, having a clear strategic direction for your financial team will only achieve so much if it is not aligned with other areas within the company. Once we completed our one- and three-year plans, I sat down with other departments, such as information technology, sales and operations, to share the finance team’s vision and objectives.
Taking this step introduces transparency from a finance team regarding what it finds important and how it is trying to improve. Being honest with others in the company about skills or knowledge that your team needs to further develop, and then revealing a focused commitment to improvement, sends a powerful example across the organization.
Importantly, it also serves to better align with initiatives in other areas of the company. Not all departments of a company work through a disciplined, ground-up strategic process, but introducing your own strategic thinking and well-defined objectives can inspire other departments to undertake a similar effort. This interactive process creates a dialogue between divisions, providing critical feedback on the finance team’s initiatives but also integrating those initiatives across the company.
Strategic Culture
It is a constant battle for a CFO to advance strategic and important work while quieting the tyranny of the urgent that so impairs their day-to-day effectiveness. But this discipline must be cultivated throughout the finance organization. Building awareness and teaching a strategic thought process to leaders and managers will help move each individual and team from functioning in a reactionary way to focusing on essential improvements. Rarely do answers to urgent matters result in innovation.
Like other jobs throughout my career, at Mutual of America, I have found that taking time to honestly assess team opportunities for improvement creates a healthy foundation for innovative problem solving and process design. Integrating this honest, continual improvement approach to work also serves to enhance the hybrid work environment, navigating away from just doing what has always been done to creating a dynamic improvement model that requires the engagement of a finance team from top to bottom, both in the office and out.
Given corporate finance’s breadth and depth of perspective over the entire company, a CFO is in a unique position to drive a strategic perspective, not just throughout their own team but across the organization. Teaching your team about the business, driving honest assessment of performance and developing thoughtful, strategic, innovative improvements to workflows, technology and people will transform your financial organization. The lasting result: a new generation of leaders who lead with thoughtful intelligence and intentional effort.
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