如何打造一个高绩效的财务团队,澳洲会计师公会上海办事处微信公众号文章

现代企业的运营对财务团队的依赖日益增大，曾经的账房先生已经华丽转身为战略级的师爷。如何才能建立一个成功高效的财务团队想必是很多管理者关心的话题。全优生、长时间伏案工作的员工已经不足矣构建一个完美团队。

澳洲会计师公会INTHEBLACK会刊原汁原味和您分享打造完美团队的重要因素，通过采访企业的财务总监探讨员工的个人能力、团队沟通、内部培训等因素会如何影响一个财务团队的绩效。

A successful high-performing finance team is built on much more than just straight-A students and desk hours. Rather, scientific studies and company analysis have consistently shown that effective communication is pivotal in team performance, directly impacting a company’s bottom line.

As finance functions face increasing pressure to “add value” in the modern business environment, not enough CFOs are focusing on the teams that will drive that success, says Stuart Bilbrough FCPA, CFO at Radius Residential Care in New Zealand and author of Bean Soup: Beyond Bean Counting.

Bilbrough says successful companies rely on finance functions for more than just “bean counting”, with finance departments contributing to day-to-day transactional and compliance processes, as well as delivering high-quality and interpretative data capable of driving business decisions.

But how does a CFO ensure his or her team is equipped and motivated to push beyond bean counting and actively seek out business opportunities and innovation?

Bilbrough says it’s a combination of an individual’s aptitude, effective team communication, in-house training, providing the right tools and technology, and continued motivation.

“When I’m hiring people, what I’m looking for is an aptitude to add value,” says Bilbrough. “If they haven’t got the skills set that we are providing, I can provide that.”

But what’s interesting about Bilbrough’s approach is that he does the very thing many management teams deliberately avoid – he tells his team everything.

“I think part of keeping people motivated is communicating everything, telling them everything that’s going on unless it is really, really sensitive,” he says. “I let them know everything because nobody can be innovative if they don’t know what’s going on.”

Science backs up this strategy with hard data

A study by MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, published by Professor Alex Pentland in the April 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review was not only able to break down the very factors that characterised a high-performing team, but accurately predict which teams would be most successful based on those characteristics.

Using wireless sensor technology, about 2500 team members over a period of seven years were fitted with a badge to capture their behaviour, generating more than 100 data points per minute. The badge produced “sociometrics”, measuring a person’s tone of voice, whether they faced one another, how often they used gestures, how often they talked, listened or interrupted, as well as their levels of extroversion and empathy. The data was then compared, revealing some consistent findings.

“Productive teams have certain data signatures, and they’re so consistent that we can predict a team’s success simply by looking at the data — without ever meeting its members,” Professor Pentland writes. “We’ve been able to foretell, for example, which teams will win a business plan contest, solely on the basis of data collected from team members wearing badges at a cocktail reception.”

What was more surprising was that individual talent contributed far less to team success than initially thought.

“The best way to build a great team is not to select individuals for their smarts or accomplishments but to learn how they communicate and to shape and guide the team so that it follows successful communication patterns,”he writes.

It’s an approach that has been executed successfully by Ken Christie FCPA, CFO of NAB Wealth. What Christie found is that trust is crucial to building effective team communication.

While CFO at Bank of New Zealand, part of the National Australia Bank Group, Christie set a goal of becoming a world-class finance function within a five-year period. It’s a goal the team hit, winning numerous awards along the way. The journey started with building team trust.

“We spent a lot of time building that base level of trust to the extent that we had a clinical psychologist who came in and worked with us as a team to really understand each other’s quirks and nature and what sets people off,” says Christie.

In Christie’s experience, he has also found that identifying the ability to work and communicate with a team is key to hiring the right staff. This means they place less emphasis on a person’s technical qualification, which he describes as a “given”, focusing more on a person’s emotional intelligence (EQ), a skill that enabled better communication.

“I’m after really bright people because I’m a huge believer that if you have really bright people with strong EQ, you can just about do anything,” he says.

He says it’s critical to find the right staff, so much so that he will hold back on a role rather than hire someone who is not up to the challenge. This is something he uncovers during a rigorous interview process, which can last anywhere between 10 and 15 separate interviews.

But once you’ve found the right staff, how do you ensure they are equipped to handle the expectations of the role?

“The biggest challenge that we always face is ‘how do you get the commercial skills into a junior finance person so that they look at a problem from a commercial perspective rather than just an accounting perspective’,” says Christie.

Like Bilbrough, Christie says internal training is important in building team skills. He implements a 70/20/10 rule, where 70 per cent of training is on the job, 10 per cent is external training, and 20 per cent is provided in-house via themed “blitz weeks” or through their leadership development program, bringing staff up-to-speed on issues relevant to their roles.