By Paul Giuffredi
Paul Giuffredi is a Finance Director of entrepreneurial companies. He has been Finance Director of PE backed, family owned and AIM listed companies in a variety of business sectors.
Many of you will be aspiring or even experienced Finance Directors. In order to reach this career goal there is a lot of focus on professional qualifications and long hours of hard work in the office but when the opportunity finally beckons, how much of your success in such a role is down to your skills and how much to the personal relationship with the CEO?
Chances are that you wouldn’t have been shortlisted for a Finance Director position without ticking all the skill and experience boxes. The competition is too fierce for headhunters not to come up with a healthy list of candidates who can do the job. Given this, what then is the major factor in you getting the job?
In my experience it is whether the CEO likes you and feels that they “can do business with you”. In order to pass this test you should probably be yourself but there are some pointers you should consider in the process...
If you take an FD role where you and the CEO struggle to get on, things will eventually end up in tears. Should that happen, someone will have to leave the company and that won’t be the CEO. A sobering thought particularly if it was your first FD position.
I have been the FD of four different companies. In some of these I have got on fantastically well with the CEO (including my current boss in case he should be reading this). In other roles this was not always the case and there is one, safe to say, where we don’t exchange christmas cards any more.
The high stakes challenge for the aspiring FD is to work out at the interview stage which CEOs they will get on with and which they won’t.
A couple of key things to consider.
Firstly, how much effort is the CEO putting into the process? If they want to recruit someone to be their “wingman” on a six figure package in only two interviews, it suggests a lack of engagement on their part. It could be the private equity investor has insisted that the incumbent FD has to go and the CEO is acceding to this reluctantly. Sometimes the chairman foisters the change on the CEO. Either way, if the CEO doesn’t want a new FD or considers the role relatively unimportant then there could be trouble ahead. Therefore the more interview stages the merrier and greater the likelihood of future success. If the chairman rather than the CEO seems to be running the process, this could also be a bad sign.
Secondly, how much of the interview process is fixated on technical expertise and how much on cultural fit with the CEO and the organisation? Most of the effort put into finding someone with the right expertise will be done by the headhunter. Once you get to the 2nd meeting with the CEO, it will usually be about finding out whether you have shared business and other values to form a team to drive the company forward. I had a prospective boss who took strenuous efforts to keep topping up my glass with the finest boardeax at an “informal” final interview. Obviously he was trying to discover the “real” me and I was treading the fine line between being authentic and drunk. Fortunately that one worked out well and 3 years later we successfully sold the business and he realised his millions from it.
There will always be an element of chance involved. Good luck at picking the right CEO to work with.
Have you discovered any tricks to mainitaing a good working relationship with your CEO? Have you had any dilemmas at the workplaces that have made you change your relationship building tactics? Share your thoughts and comments below.
Paul
This is such an important point, and my first FD role was marred by exactly as you said, a lack of a good bond with the CEO, a thoroughly nice bloke but it just didnt work, and in that scenario the FD will always be the one to leave. The impact on confidence was huge and also adds a sometimes tricky conversation point at subsequent interviews.
Great blog
Wayne
Posted by: Wayne Orr | October 11, 2011 at 12:35 PM