CFO’s checklist: 5 essential leadership traits for better FI performance

Before COVID-19, banks already faced a battery of challenges—from a volatile rate environment shaving margins ever thinner, to increasing compliance costs and ever-evolving customer expectations—and the arrival of a pandemic only heightened them.

In today’s environment, an agile culture of real-time responsiveness separates thriving FIs from the ones that struggle. As CFO, this culture begins with you. So how do you know if you’re leading your team in the right direction?

1. You’re fearless and flexible in the face of change.

By now, we’ve all experienced firsthand how a situation can completely change overnight. But you have the mindset required to rise to the challenge, and you lead your team by example:

• You’re not afraid to challenge your own assumptions.
• You move with, not against, the forces of the current moment.
• You know that looking backward, or dwelling on what you thought was going to happen, only keeps you from making the best decisions right now.
• You keep moving forward, leading the way for the rest of your organization.

2. You spot problems before they get out of control.

Just as Ben Franklin knew an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, you know that your strategies are only as relevant as your most recent data, so you don’t wait for monthly or weekly reports.

Instead, you provide business unit leaders with daily access to actual metrics, keeping everyone focused on the KPIs that are most important to your organization. As a result, your team can respond more quickly to changing conditions and keep your institution a step ahead of competitors.

Conducting financial analysis and risk identification functions on a rolling, continuous basis also helps identify talent risks or gaps, and provides information for more accurate budgets and forecasts.

3. Your employees are united by a shared sense of purpose.

CFOs play a critical role in driving a performance culture throughout an organization—both by encouraging performance-driven behaviors, and by supporting the acquisition and retention of top-performing talent. CFOs increasingly work alongside CHROs to develop KPIs, provide transparent and relevant performance reporting, and manage to FI goals.

One way to accomplish this is through a real-time dashboard tool that presents it in a visual, easily understood way. When all employees can see the impact of their work on the organization, it unites them in a shared sense of purpose, so everyone feels aligned on the “why” behind their day-to-day tasks.

4. You reduce lag times everywhere you can.

As any experienced CFO knows, efficiency isn’t really efficiency if shortcuts you take now end up costing more time later. Manual environments, like spreadsheet software, can be time consuming to set up—and full of opportunity for human error.

Automating financial reporting and analytic functions, on the other hand, offer true efficiency. They enable you to perform accurate analysis in a fraction of the time, and share it with colleagues just as quickly.

When you free up superfluous demands on top talent, you give them back time they can now spend communicating with other business leaders, educating all levels of the organization on opportunities to improve, and advocating the adoption of a performance-driven culture.

5. You choose the right tools for the job.

In a world where data dating back even one month can become irrelevant in a matter of days, your ability to drive higher performance comes down to having the right tools. (As the saying goes, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.) Flexibility, accuracy and immediacy are the name of the game.

With Banker’s Dashboard, CFOs can track key performance indicators (asset yields, funding costs, net interest margin) daily, spot subtle changes immediately and make course-correcting decisions more quickly. It interfaces with your core system to automatically deliver the most accurate data in easily digestible formats, and help you drive higher performance in every dimension of your financial institution.

For more information on how Banker’s Dashboard can transform your ability to drive success at your institution, contact us today.