The right CFO can help you plan for growth, manage your finances and navigate new tax regulations. They also have much experience working with other departments and stakeholders in your company.
Ultimately, you want to hire someone to grow your business while remaining profitable. To help you find the right person for your position, we’ve put together a list of key characteristics to look for in your next CFO.
Qualifications
If you’re in the market for a CFO, it’s essential to consider the qualifications necessary to hire the right one. You’ll want someone who understands how a company’s financials work and how to use them to drive growth.
Moreover, the job requires a firm grasp of risk management. This means understanding it through a commercial and a financial lens and taking proactive steps to mitigate it.
A good chief financial officer will also have excellent communication skills. This is important to set clear priorities and uphold staff morale.
A CFO must be able to explain complex financial information clearly and concisely to all stakeholders, including investors, shareholders, and other company officials. They also need to be able to lead in the boardroom and guide their fellow executives to decisions that put their business in the best possible financial position.
Experience
A CFO will help your company achieve its goals through financial planning and analysis. This can include creating financial strategies for the business, defining metrics for economic performance, and collaborating with other executive team members to ensure financial alignment with your business’s overall strategy.
A good CFO will have extensive experience in financial management, accounting, and leadership skills. They also need to be able to provide connections to investors, banks, suppliers, and other business stakeholders.
Hiring a CFO is a complex process that requires careful attention to detail. A mistake can lead to wasted resources and lost opportunities.
Culture Fit
When hiring a CFO, the culture fit is as important as the qualifications and experience. Hiring someone who doesn’t fit in with your company’s values and culture can be disastrous for your team.
It can cause conflicts, misunderstandings, and poor performance. Furthermore, a bad culture fit can introduce harmful workplace practices that may take years to untangle.
The best way to avoid this is by identifying your company’s values before you begin your search. You can also tap into your network to find candidates with those values.
While a good salary and benefits package is always a top priority, cultural fit is equally crucial to your business’s success. Employees are more likely to stay with the company for a long time, which can also help prevent costly turnover.
Personality
Before hiring a CFO for your business’s financial planning needs, it’s essential to understand their personality traits. This can help determine whether they fit your team and company culture well.
Personality is how an individual combines physical and mental qualities, ideas, aspirations, ambitions, aptitudes, and interests. It also reflects their temperament, emotions, and persona.
Psychologists have long been trying to categorize personality through traits that predict behaviors. One popular framework is the so-called “Big Five” model, which consists of openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
The Big Five isn’t a definitive way to determine leadership, but it does offer some insights into how personality can be used to assess candidates. It’s worth remembering that people high in a trait, such as openness or agreeableness, are likely to be friendly and cooperative; this is a great attribute to have on your team.
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