Why CFOs Don't Get It

Within the past few years, there has been a clarion call for finance professionals to "step up" and play more expansive, transformational roles in business.

The trouble is, finance leaders often lack the mix of organizational insight and intuition that such transformational endeavors demand.

As in architecture, a variety of tensions help organizations to take shape and determine the speed at which a company's leadership vision is realized. Whether these are tensions over leadership, future vision and strategy, or resource allocation, each tugs upon alignments that determine how a company completes its work.

By leveraging such tensions and learning to manage the informal relationships that organizations thrive upon, finance leaders can become the trusted providers of "second opinions" to business leaders up and down the organization. It's a role in which your ability to drive transformation is intertwined with your growing influence. However, to take on such a role first requires that you make a counterintuitive yet critical realization.