The CFO can’t do it alone: Building high-performance teams (Part 2)

Business growth stalls when finance capability can’t keep up. While a strong CFO or FD is critical, sustainable growth will depend on the team around them.

Building a high-performing finance team requires two things. The right capability and the right team dynamics.

Technical capability will only take you so far. Creating the right culture and team dynamics ensure those skills translate into faster decisions, better execution and greater organisational resilience.

The goal is to build a finance team that performs collectively: one in which people trust each other, challenge constructively, take ownership and combine different strengths around a clear commercial purpose.

This kind of people-first approach is not a ‘soft’ issue. It is a commercial lever. High-performing, productive cultures improve decision-making, execution, accountability, retention and, ultimately, sustainable growth.

High performance happens between people

Organisational charts show reporting lines; they do not show how the team really works.

They do not reveal who influences decisions, where information becomes trapped, which relationships are productive or why some people remain silent during important discussions.

These dynamics directly affect business performance.

Can the Financial Controller challenge an unrealistic forecast? Will an analyst admit that the underlying data is unreliable? Can a Finance Business Partner question an operational director’s assumptions? Do emerging leaders contribute ideas or does the most senior voice automatically prevail?

Yes, the capability of the individuals matters, but so does the quality of their interactions. A technically strong finance team can still underperform when relationships are weak, responsibilities overlap or colleagues do not feel able to challenge each other.

Equally, a team with varied levels of experience can deliver exceptional results when people communicate openly, understand their roles and use their different strengths effectively.

 Constructive conflict

Finance must challenge assumptions, highlight risk and sometimes deliver uncomfortable messages. A high-performing team will not always be harmonious. Constant agreement can be a warning sign. The important distinction is between productive and destructive conflict.

Productive conflict tests ideas while protecting relationships. People debate evidence, assumptions and priorities without making the disagreement personal.

Destructive conflict creates defensiveness, distracting politics and a culture of blame. Information is withheld. Meetings become guarded. Decisions take longer because people are managing relationships rather than addressing the commercial issue.

As a senior leader, you set the standard. Psychological safety matters. People must believe they can question decisions, admit uncertainty and raise concerns without fear. We are not talking about ignoring accountability; we are talking about creating spaces where everyone can speak honestly before an issue becomes a problem.

Silence should not be mistaken for agreement. It may mean people have concluded that speaking up is not worth the risk.

Trust is not about comfort. It is what allows teams to move faster, challenge earlier and take ownership without waiting for permission.

 A shared commercial purpose

The best commercial cultures are built around a clear purpose. To learn more, read A purpose-driven organisation: Creating cultural synergy.

Too many transformation initiatives are imposed from the top down rather than built collectively. Teams work better when they understand what they are collectively trying to achieve. Engagement from the outset is key.

A clear purpose connects different areas of the function. Financial control protects the integrity of the numbers. FP&A looks forward. Commercial finance turns analysis into action. Business partners influence decisions across the organisation. Systems and data specialists improve how information is produced and used. These need to be aligned towards the same goal, reinforcing each other, not competing for status or attention.

Senior leaders must translate the wider business strategy into clear team outcomes. Once the required outcomes are clear, roles, responsibilities and development priorities become easier to define.

Clarify roles and decision rights

Ambiguity undermines performance. When accountability is unclear, work is duplicated, decisions are delayed and territorial behaviour grows. Issues move upwards because nobody is certain who owns them. The CFO should not need to referee every overlap between the Financial Controller, Head of FP&A and Finance Director.

The team needs clarity about:

• Who owns each outcome
• Who contributes to the decision
• Who has authority to act
• When escalation is required
• What good performance looks like

Clear decision rights allow people to operate with greater confidence and autonomy. They also expose where genuine capability gaps exist. This is particularly important during finance transformation.

New technology often changes responsibilities, workflows and approval processes. Unless these changes are made explicit, old ways of working continue beneath the new system.

 Leadership throughout the team

“Leadership is not a position. Leadership is an act, a behaviour. And that means everyone can actually be a leader.”

The CFO sets direction, but the daily experience of most finance employees is shaped by the managers beneath them. Leaders need to trust their teams to come up with the answers, to take responsibility for ensuring the right outcomes. Trust your people to do the job they were hired to do. When you give them autonomy, they invariably rise to the challenge.

Progressive companies are eschewing the rigid, top-down structures that inhibit innovation for flexible, bottom-up ways of working that are more agile and commercially creative. Trusting people and giving them more autonomy leads to greater levels of engagement, empowerment and, as a result, productivity.

Managers remain involved in every detail because they do not trust the team. As such, the team never develops because managers will not release control. The result can be weak delegation, inconsistent standards, poor feedback and continued escalation to the CFO.

Senior leaders should assess managers on more than their personal output. Can they create accountability? Do they develop other people? Is their team becoming stronger? Have they built credible successors? Can they handle challenge and disagreement constructively?

A manager who consistently delivers but leaves behind an exhausted, dependent team is not building sustainable performance.

 Changing leadership behaviours

Coaching helps leaders understand how their behaviour affects the team. This is particularly valuable for technically strong finance professionals moving into broader leadership roles. The behaviours that made them successful earlier in their careers — personal control, attention to detail and solving difficult problems themselves — can become constraints when they need to delegate, influence and develop others.

 Coaching can help a finance leader:

• Delegate outcomes rather than tasks
• Give clearer feedback
• Handle conflict more effectively
• Adapt communication to different people
• Recognise when their style is closing down discussion
• Move from providing every answer to asking better questions

Its value lies in turning awareness into action. A leadership profile might show that somebody becomes overly controlling under pressure. Coaching helps them identify when that behaviour appears, understand its impact and practise a more effective response.

Coaching should not be reserved for underperformance. Used proactively, it helps capable leaders adjust before unhelpful behaviours become embedded.

 Mentoring accelerates judgement

Mentoring serves a different purpose. For an emerging finance leader, this can be invaluable.

A mentor can help them prepare for situations they have not yet faced — managing a difficult board relationship, leading a systems implementation, rebuilding an underperforming team, integrating an acquisition or stepping into the CFO’s responsibilities. Technical training alone cannot fully replicate that experience.

Mentoring also supports succession. It gives future leaders access to organisational knowledge, broader networks and candid conversations about what senior responsibility involves.

The strongest mentoring relationships do not create replicas of existing leaders. They help individuals build confidence, judgement and an authentic leadership style of their own.

Reverse mentoring can also be valuable. More junior or digitally confident colleagues can help senior leaders understand emerging technologies, changing workforce expectations and how leadership decisions are experienced elsewhere in the organisation.

To learn more about the business benefits of coaching and mentoring, download the factsheet.

 

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Make team dynamics visible

Exceptional performance begins with accurate insight. Team difficulties are often described vaguely. Someone is labelled “difficult”, another person is considered “not strategic”, two colleagues are said to have a “personality clash”. Assessment and profiling can create a more constructive and objective starting point.

Used well, they provide insight into communication preferences, motivations, decision-making styles and likely responses under pressure. At a team level, they can highlight:

• Where similar styles create blind spots
• Which voices dominate
• Who is being overlooked
• How individuals approach risk and uncertainty
• Where communication is breaking down
• Whether the team has enough behavioural range

The purpose is not to categorise people or declare that certain personality types cannot work together. Different approaches can strengthen the team, if everyone is given a voice. A detail-focused controller and a fast-moving commercial leader may frustrate each other, but both perspectives are valuable. Profiling helps them understand the source of the tension and agree how they will work together more effectively.

To be clear, an assessment should support judgement, not replace it. And a profile should be the start of a development conversation, not a final verdict on somebody’s ability or potential.

Combining interventions

Coaching, mentoring and profiling are most effective when connected.

• Assessment identifies strengths, risks and development needs
• Coaching helps the individual translate that insight into changed behaviour
• Mentoring allows them to learn from somebody who has faced similar challenges

The same principle applies to the wider team. Team profiling can surface differences in style, trust and communication. Facilitated team coaching can help colleagues discuss those findings, establish clearer working agreements and address difficult relationships. Individual coaching can support leaders whose behaviour has a particularly significant effect on the group.

Some of the most powerful breakthroughs we have seen in our senior leadership team development work have been generated by honest answers to these simple questions:

• You get the best out of me when…
• You get the worst out of me when…
• You can count on me to do…
• What I need from you is…

These interventions must sit within a wider system of role clarity, accountability and performance management. They cannot compensate for poorly designed jobs, confused structures or behaviour that senior leaders are unwilling to address.

In brief

The CFO cannot build a high-performing team by focusing only on systems, structures and technical capability. Senior leaders must pay equal attention to the human interactions: how people communicate, how disagreement is handled, whose voice is heard and which behaviours are rewarded.

Leaders should ask:

• Can the team challenge each other constructively?
• Are difficult issues raised early?
• Are roles and decision rights clear?
• Do managers develop others or solve everything themselves?
• Are key relationships helping or obstructing performance?
• Are our leaders developing?
• Do we have genuine insight into how the team functions?

A high-performing finance team is not one without tension. It is one that turns different perspectives, capabilities and personalities into stronger collective decisions.

The CFO can’t do it alone. Nor should they have to. The real measure of finance leadership is not how much the CFO can personally carry, it is the quality, resilience and performance of the team built around them.

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