This is not a lesson about developing finance strategy, at least not directly. This is a lesson about backing up and first developing a mission statement and discovering the values you want the financial function to embody inside the organization. Let's go back to our theme of how we prioritize the development of the finance team, beginning with you becoming the CFO. From there, you build your team around what you believe is required to become a level two Center of Excellence or better, and then you move beyond to add massive value to the organization and other external stakeholders, possibly one day to evolve into a level three world class finance function. In this lesson, we're going to look at your first hundred days from a strategic perspective. We identified back in our first lesson that the modern CFO has the ability to think strategically.

Let's take a moment now. to consider what that means. There are generally three approaches to thinking strategically, and they deteriorate rapidly, the more you procrastinate, and as you work your way from left to right on the screen. Insight is the holy grail of strategic development. It's premised on possessing a deep understanding and intuitive belief of what is possible. Some are better than this than others.

But for examples of great strategist, think of Steve Jobs, jack welch for inspiration. Planning is the most common way mere mortals think strategically. And they'll say this to be little strategic planning. In fact, there are more organizations doing no planning at all. Then there are organizations that have formal planning processes. General Eisenhower was once quoted as saying plans are worthless, but planning is everything.

Keep this in mind. Planning is a conscious attempt to consider your current situation, envision the future and then build plans to move in that direction. Planning In and of itself does not guarantee success. But it's been proven to be more effective than the third approach, which is to simply respond. The problem with a response approach is that no one is really sure of the destination or the road to get there. It's exhausting to work in an organization, or for a supervisor that is constantly going in a million different directions, asking you to put fires out.

Now you can't avoid response type thinking all together. But with a little insight and some planning, the idea is to minimize the ad hoc approach as much as possible. So how can you approach your first hundred days from a strategic perspective? Well, first start with your own principles. And I could have just as easily called these values, however, I avoided doing so because I didn't want to confuse them with the values we will discover as a team in a moment. My own operating principles, give my staff and colleagues and indication about what I'm all about.

Now let's consider values. Perhaps your organization has already discovered its values. And value is something you stand for. And I say discover because really, you can't pick values or order them like you would a Big Mac, you need to reflect upon what your organization and your team represent. Now, whether the finance team needs its own value statement or not is entirely debatable. If the company has published a value statement, I'd use this and then figure out how to internalize it inside the finance group.

I like the notion of having the value statement documented, because this too will facilitate the right discussion between myself and my staff. Values define expectation. What is and is not acceptable values will help me build commitment in my team, which as we learned in the last lesson increases productivity. So what I have done with my teams at some point during the first hundred days, is to have them sit down and consider what they think the values are of our organization. If your organization already has this document, you can ask them to consider What those values mean in the context of the finance function. The list presented here was the outcome from one of those very brainstorming type of discussions I had with one of my teams.

By the way, keep in mind that you're still new here. And by facilitating this very frank discussion with your staff, it can be very enlightening. I was organized a slogan contest as part of a social activity with my staff. And the submissions were very enlightening about my newly adopted organization. I have seen all too often that cynicism can learn just beneath the surface, and you want to get that out early, so I can factor into your go forward plans. After the brainstorming session, we took it a step further, and we grouped the random list of values into themes.

And by the end of the session, we landed on three primary themes for our values, entrepreneurial learning and development and ownership. Note that you can use this technique to facilitate a broader strategic discussion with others in the organization. If your company is one Those that has not taken the time to consider mission, vision and values. From this point, I took the pen and artfully took the feedback of the team and crafted them into some pretty statements along these lines. But the words don't build lasting commitment. It's what you do with these words that makes them important and meaningful.

If these were to be our values, then I wanted evidence that we lived up to them. So I had the values inserted into our standard HR performance evaluation forms, supervisors and employees, were asked to identify situations where they were living the values during each evaluation period. By now you should be recognizing how I've been able to structure regular conversations with all staff about the important things I want us to achieve and represent in the organization. With our values now discovered, the next important piece of propaganda that I felt important to articulate was a mission statement for the finance team. As opposed to having the team brainstorm the development of the statement, I took a different approach. I wrote it myself, and then I gave it to them to beat up.

It's highly unlikely that anyone on your staff or the company think about this as much as you do. But if you carefully read this mission statement on the screen in front of you, you can argue about why finance exists, or what our value proposition is. I've used this particular mission statement three times, tweaked for different contexts, each time private versus public operating business versus a head office, etc. The most interesting application of this tool is to sit down with your staff, either collectively or individually, and discuss each of those underlying words and phrases inside the mission statement. Remember what we learned in the last lesson about the four essential ingredients of a high performance team and the stages of team development. You can easily spend an hour talking about the mission statement, which is an effect aligning the staff to what you expect.

If you carefully read this particular mission statement. You'll notice that all functions within finance are addressed. There's something for everyone The mission statement, the accounts the analysts, the tax people the internal audit function. Hopefully by now you're sensing a theme. Everyone has a role to play, whether you are an administrative assistant or a director of tax. Once again, you can now perform a gap analysis.

At the strategic level. Once you have the mission statement to find, you can go function by function and describe the current situation and compare it against the expectation as defined by both the maturity model and the mission statement. What falls out of this activity is a list of action items. You can call this your Strategic Action Plan. Or you can call your own list of 101 things to do. So on this screen, I just took my annual plan for my finance function summarize my initiatives into one of five themes.

Having an action plan of 101 things to do gets a little overwhelming to deal with, but having a list of five Strategic Initiatives makes communication a heck of a lot easier, even if there are 101 action items in a list and behind. In the back of my mind, I was taking A finance function from level one compliance to hopefully a level two Center of Excellence. What does having a maturity model, a competency map and a strategic plan have in common? They're all tools to build alignment. To enhance alignment. We talked about the importance of embedding these tools into the HR mechanisms, such as the job descriptions and the performance evaluations that we already have in the organization.

It's crucial that you find ways to bring life to these sorts of words. Otherwise, it's all for naught and your own credibility we questioned the Jim Collins quote says it best building a great company has 1% vision and 99% alignment. So we are now working towards a specific destination. This is some pretty touchy feely stuff. It's easy to spend a lot of time on this. And if not properly used, going forward, you could expose yourself to criticism that it might have just been a big waste of time, particularly for a bunch of bean counters.

My own observation is that this is really nice too. From a staff perspective, in the course of engaging staff for a couple of hours over a couple of weeks, you're able to generate, buy in, gain insight and build some relationships. Once it's done, it's not something I revisit very often. But certainly at the end of the year as part of a collective performance evaluation of the finance team, it's appropriate to pull it out and challenge ourselves as to whether the words were effective or not. value and mission shouldn't change that often. And the next lesson we're going to discuss structuring your financing.

Until then, peace