The CFO can’t do it alone: Building high-performance finance teams (Part 1)

If your CFO or FD is the single point of failure, your business has a scalability, risk and execution problem.

In the previous article in this series, we explored how the modern CFO has become a strategist, technologist, risk navigator, communicator and change leader. This expanding mandate can expose an uncomfortable reality: No CFO or FD, however capable, can personally deliver everything now expected of the finance function.

When every major financial decision, forecast, control issue, transformation project and investor question routes through the CFO, the problem is not workload; it is operational risk. A finance function built around one exceptional individual will eventually constrain growth, slow decisions and weaken resilience.

Finance teams must collectively deliver the capability the business needs. So, what does this look like?

High performance is systemic

Hiring good people matters, of course. High-performance is not developed simply by recruiting several high performers and putting them into the same organisational chart, however. Performance is the outcome of an interconnected system — how work is designed, how roles fit together, how managers lead, how decisions are made, how people develop and what behaviours the organisation rewards. As such, a strategic approach to human resources is required.

A technically excellent team will still underperform if responsibilities are unclear, managers are overloaded, decision-making is slow, career-development opportunities are limited or the CFO micromanages everything.

Start with the work

Most finance teams evolve incrementally. Roles are added when workloads become unmanageable. Roles are replaced like-for-like, and responsibilities accumulate around the people available at the time. Transformation requires a different starting point.

Leadership teams should first define what finance must enable over the next three to five years. This might include:

• Stronger financial control and cash visibility
• Faster forecasting and scenario planning
• Better pricing, customer and product profitability insight
• Greater commercial support for operational leaders
• Systems implementation and process automation
• AI governance and data quality
• Acquisition integration or exit readiness
• Improved risk management and investor reporting

Only then should the business determine which work can be automated, which decisions require human judgement and what capabilities are needed across the team.

Organisations achieve stronger returns when they intentionally redesign roles, workflows and decision rights rather than layering new technology onto outdated processes.

The objective is not to create a larger finance structure. It is to create a better system for getting commercially important work done.

Complementarity not homogeneity

A high-performance finance team should not consist of clones of the CFO. It needs complementary strengths:

• The Financial Controller protects integrity, discipline and control.
• FP&A provides horizon-scanning analysis and challenge.
• Commercial finance translates data into operational action.
• Finance business partners influence decisions across the business.
• Systems, data and transformation specialists improve how information is produced and used.

The right combination depends on the business model and growth strategy, but the principle is consistent: capability should be distributed across the function rather than concentrated at the top. This means moving beyond job titles and traditional career histories.

Stronger businesses define the capabilities they will need next. 

Building bench strength

The CFO sets the direction, but the everyday experience of the finance team is shaped by Financial Controllers, Heads of Finance, FP&A leaders and other managers. They translate strategy into priorities. They allocate work, set standards, give feedback, challenge performance and develop future leaders. They also determine whether employees feel able to raise concerns, challenge assumptions and suggest better ways of working.

This management layer is frequently overlooked. Strong technical performers are promoted because they understand finance but receive limited support in learning how to lead people. This matters because managers are among the strongest drivers of engagement, execution and retention. Where the management layer is weak, finance transformation slows and the CFO becomes the escalation point for too many decisions.

A high-performance finance strategy must include deliberate investment in management capability — coaching, delegation, feedback, workload planning, conflict management, change leadership and team development.

Collective accountability not individual heroics

Many finance cultures unintentionally reward firefighting. The person who stays late to repair a broken forecast or the manager who personally resolves every difficult issue are viewed as indispensable. The technically strongest individual is promoted, even if they struggle to empower others.

These behaviours may solve an immediate problem, but they create dependency and hide weaknesses in processes, systems and capability. Performance should instead be assessed against the outcomes the finance function exists to deliver.

Best performance-management practice emphasises regular, two-way conversations rather than relying on annual appraisals. Narrowly designed performance-related pay can encourage unintended behaviours when targets fail to reflect the full contribution expected from employees.

Finance leaders need to recognise not only what people deliver but also how they deliver it. Collaboration, knowledge sharing, responsible challenge and team development should carry real weight.

Make learning part of the operating model

High-performance finance teams cannot depend on occasional training courses to remain relevant.

As AI and automation assume more routine execution, people will need to become better at setting direction, exercising judgement, validating outputs and understanding commercial context. Learning must therefore happen through real work — practical use cases, cross-functional projects, mentoring, peer challenge and structured experimentation.

The best leaders involve their teams in collective development — redesigning a forecasting process, testing AI-supported analysis, documenting quality controls and sharing what worked and what did not.

The goal is not technology for technology’s sake; it is to create a finance function that continuously learns how to perform better.

Workforce design is a strategic investment

In progressive organisations, the people function is a powerful driver of change. It is involved before structures and roles have been finalised.

Its contribution should include:

• Translating business strategy into a workforce and capability plan
• Redesigning roles around future work
• Mapping skills, leadership depth and succession risk
• Assessing internal potential and external talent requirements
• Developing finance managers and future leaders
• Aligning performance, reward and career structures
• Supporting retention, mobility and organisational change
• Measuring whether people investment is improving business outcomes

It is about balancing future demand for skills against the available supply, so that the right people are deployed at the right time, cost and level of capability. Through assessment and profiling, HR should have a significant strategic role in selecting, developing and advising senior leaders.

In progressive organisations, HR is not viewed simply as an administrative support function. It is a strategic partner, advising on people strategy, organisational design and performance improvement. 

 Key leadership questions

• Where is the CFO still the single point of failure?
• Which finance capabilities will the business need most over the next three years?
• Are managers equipped to build capability, not just control output?
• Do performance, reward and succession plans reinforce the behaviours the business needs?

The answers will reveal whether the business has built a genuinely high-performance finance function or remains dependent on the capability and resilience of a few individuals.

The leadership takeaway

A high-performance finance team is a connected system of complementary capabilities, strong managers, clear accountability, continuous learning and shared commercial purpose.

Technology will change tasks. New roles will emerge and existing roles will evolve, but the organisations that gain the greatest advantage will be those that create the conditions in which people can use their skills collectively, rather than relying on one exceptional leader to hold everything together.

The CFO can’t do it alone. If they must, the business has a resilience problem. The strongest CFOs do not simply carry more; they build finance functions that improve decisions, protect value and scale with the business.

• Transformation
• Recruitment
• Finance
• Strategic HR