Team building is one of the touchy feely rules of the operator CFO. Some of you may have an HR department who can do some of this for you, but many of you don't. And even if you do, the HR department is unlikely to understand the finance function better than you. In this lesson, we're going to talk about building your finance team. Let's begin with a few comments about high performance teams. Just like any other department, you want to create a finance team that you and anyone else would characterize as high performance.

So what are the essential ingredients? Let's start with these four. First, we have clarity of goals, where every member of the team must accept and be clear about what this team is striving for. Secondly, we have clarity of roles, where every member of the team must know what is expected of them. Thirdly, we have clarity of process where every member of the team must know how things will be done in five We have clarity of rewards where every member of the team must know how the reward system will work. Think about the four essential ingredients in the context of your own team and in the broader context of the organization.

These may be clear to you, but are they clear to all your staff, I suggest pausing the video for a moment to reflect on these four essential ingredients. Next, since you're in the first hundred days of your appointment, your team is new, you are new to the leadership role. In this case, team development principles are important to consider. This is one of my favorite models because I've experienced firsthand the challenges with building a team that is aligned and productive. This is seemingly easy to do on paper but extremely difficult to do in practice. I worked on a project recently for the accounting profession to design and write a new certification program.

Coming up with the vision and the parameters was the easy part, aligning dozens of academics from different legacy See bodies different universities in different regions of the country to see and interpret the vision the same way was the harder part. This requires these very experienced and senior educators to set aside their own teaching philosophies to allow us to come up with a consistent looking and feeling program. Let me walk you through this model. Using this experience. As an example, you can insert your own experience and decide for yourself whether this model resonates. forming the team was the easy part.

We brought the team of academics together face to face for a weekend workshop to kick things off in the formation stage of team building. I think the face to face discussions are very important for building alignment. Something gets lost in communication when you rely on conference calls and emails. Lots of wonderful discussions and introductions to new people come out of this initial meeting. While everyone walks away feeling good about the team, little actual work is accomplished storming happens when the rubber meets The road and suddenly there are real deliverables. As work products get reviewed and you receive updates from various team members, you may quickly see the impediments emerging.

Storming tends to be short term counterproductive and frustrating, however, is an important stage to work through, because it's during this stage that the new ideas will emerge that will improve the overall end product. So as the leader you don't want to discourage and avoid storming altogether. But at the same time, you want to move through this phase as quickly as possible and maintain the interpersonal relationships between the various team members. norming happens when the team members begin to set aside differences and reach acceptance of the four essential ingredients that we talked about a moment ago. For my project. This took us a while to achieve and required constant communication and follow up face to face meetings to reach alignment.

And of course, performing is when everyone is singing from the same song sheet. The key takeaway from this slide is that don't Expect to go from forming to performing over the course of one meeting, particularly if there's new members to the team. The evolution of team development takes time and takes a lot of your effort to achieve. So what we're talking about in this lesson all boils down to people. Human Resource Management will break this into categories such as recruiting, development, promoting and terminating. What the HR department knows less about is what technical and enabling competencies you need present within the financing team to be successful as a function to deliver on your mandate.

Technical competencies are those that pertain to such things as accounting, tax finance systems, etc. Enabling competencies are your softer skill competencies such as leadership, communication skills, ability to meet deadlines, negotiation skills, etc. I dealt with a lot of competency maps in my higher education work. So I thought to myself, why don't I get Adaptive competency map for the finance department and use it as a human resource tool to make me a more effective operator CFO. So that's what I did. I came up with six groups of competencies that mixed together the technical enabling competencies, individual leadership, financial awareness, technical skills and knowledge, administrative efficiency, communication and negotiation skills, and marketing and knowledge of the business.

These competencies are applicable across the finance function and to all the people inside the finance department. I developed this map during my first CFO appointment and adapted in later CFO appointments. One adaptation I had to make was when I went from a private company context to a public company, I'm sure there's all sorts of adaptations that one could argue for. And I don't suggest that the map itself contemplates every unique situation. What I'm trying to highlight to you is an approach to building your team by asking the question, What is the message to finance in your organization, I'm not going to go into a whole lot of depth on the competency map, as this is a course unto itself. But I'm going to give you an overview and tell you about how it works and why it's a useful tool for building your team.

Let's just familiarize ourselves with the map itself. It's not the same competency map, as we looked at in the first lesson. This map was for you, the CFO, this is a competency map for your department. So for instance, if we look at one of the six competency areas, say financial awareness, we have a listing of different competencies. The first one says implement cost measurement and containment processes, which is actually a shortened description, but you get the idea. Now ask yourself, Is this a part of our mandate?

Heck, yeah, look at the next one. Interpret financial information and ask yourself the same question and hopefully you'll agree that this two is pretty important and so on and so forth. Managing working capital, understand articulating shareholder return and value creation, etc, etc. Let's just look at a drill down of one more section say administrative efficiency. The first competency is meet deadlines. What do you think of that sort of enabling competency inside your department?

How about organization and filing a paper file? So the next one electronic files are these examples of enabling competencies that have brought application to every member in your team. Of course they are. So on the screen before you is a list of all the sub competencies identified for each of the six areas that has relevance for my particular situation. Keep in mind that the map looks at the finance function as a whole. We'll see in a moment how the map gets divided between the various staff members.

You can pause the video here to review the listing. For a much more detailed view. The map has been separately provided in the supplemental materials for this course. Not all competencies are relevant or as relevant for all staff positions. Here is a five point scale of applicability that can be attributed to each competency and staff member. So for instance, your administrative assistants may not be expected at any competency at all, in generally accepted accounting principles, but your controller darn well better be an internal expert.

So the competencies get distributed across your team. I developed this competency map to assemble my team and then develop them as necessary, then map itself is less of a performance evaluation tool, though there may be some correlation in certain areas between your proficiency and your performance. Let's pull this together and build our finance team. First, we list the competencies we want to have in our finance department across the top. Next, we list our resources down the left. This will become a rather large grid as you can appreciate.

And finally, we specify the proficiency requirements for each position. The higher the value, the higher the expectation with a zero having no awareness have five being an internal expert. Technical competencies tend to be distributed to the relevant positions. Enabling competencies tend to be relevant to all positions. Note the highlighted cells. I've tried to identify one or more internal champions for all the competencies, and in most cases, it's someone other than yourself.

In fact, I tried to make everyone an internal champion of something. For even my administrative assistant, I made her the God of all files, paper, electronic or otherwise. Having done this, you can now ship the map off to HR and have them write job descriptions along these lines. It's not quite genetically formulated, but it is a formulated approach to ensuring you build the right finance team. What's that you already have a team well then the second step is to assess the team. After observing your team for several months, you should have a good idea idea of everyone's strengths and weaknesses.

This can be a little confusing here, because you will document the level of proficiency, not the expected level of proficiency that we just documented above. So for instance, maybe your controllers not all that good with gap, hem relies heavily on the auditors to get the accounting, right. You wouldn't assess them as either proficient or an internal champion, even though that's what the expectation is, perhaps the individual is developing competence in other words as three, given their limited experience and the role, you do this for your entire team across all the competencies. And what you're left with is a gap analysis of your strengths and weaknesses by competency and by position. Now you have a tool to support recruitment and development strategy. To embed this methodology even further into your human resource management process.

I embedded the competency map into the performance evaluation form. Now you have a tool for facility Taking a discussion with a staff member around competency development of competency, promotion, stretch assignments, etc. And one final thought around building your team, I'd like you to consider the productivity continuum. When you have a highly committed staff, you typically have higher productivity. The opposite is obviously true. Take a moment to consider examples of individuals that exemplify both extremes of the level of commitment they display.

The highly committed employee is far more likely to get things done, do the right the first time and be a valued member of the team. Whereas when you have an employee who is disengaged or even hostile, consider how much or little work you actually get out of this resource. Also, consider how much disproportionate time this individual sucks out of your day. The stat I heard at a recent conference, were that 25% of employees are of the highly engaged variety well 14% Said are at the other end disengaged. In the middle, we have a huge opportunity to engage 61% of the staff who are doing nothing more than punching a clock. Whether you motivate this group of workers or not ultimately determines how efficient and effective the finance function becomes.

And these first hundred days, the CFO will work to effect positive results through positive changes, improve or renew commitment of staff. Keep in mind that as productivity improves, more time is available to pursue continuous improvement and perhaps move from level one maturity to level two or three. And finally, maintain the enhance the relationships you have between you and your staff. using tools such as a competency map, allow for all conversations to have a backbone. staff know where you're coming from and what is expected from them in their current and future positions. Makes perfect Damn good HR practices.

That's all for now. So until next time, don't stop, stop, stop, go stop.