Costs: coping with ambiguity

Summary: [You might care to view the post “Costs: beyond preventive power” before this.] The job in the complex new global reality may well have become ambiguous, limitless and stressful. Balancing between various challenges isn’t easy.

Ultimately the company’s total performance is important. So knowing what and how of business processes isn’t with intent to interfere with them.

Short and long terms

This means understanding the contributions of various functions, business units, business managers, suppliers and so on. Their individual strengths and weaknesses have to be identified, and current performance explained.

The objective is to improve the collective performance. For instance, in the short-term, influencing efforts to create accountability, and stimulate better performance in specific units or departments.

Or they could also facilitate developing a long-term strategy for the company’s future survival, through the changing of processes or systems.

A well-functioning unit

With the hard facts at their fingertips, finance people are able to argue the point in current and day-to-day business needs, as well as facilitate the activity of the management think-tank in enterprise-wide or future initiatives.

This needs nurturing an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust. Active listening helps, besides a personal relationship built with each of the company’s department and business unit heads.

It also means recruiting and managing a highly skilled backup staff to analyze and collate data collected from the length and breadth of the system to produce meaningful information.

So Finance must be a well-functioning unit getting accurate data feeds in all situations, organizational forms or IT processes. Their credibility depends on it.

Limitless ambiguity

Some Heads of finance of earlier times appeared to be glued to an armchair out on the back porch, not to be disturbed!

Not any more. Their job in the complex new global reality of mergers, acquisitions, and regulatory scrutiny of conduct and compliance, may well have become ambiguous and limitless.

Keeping balance

Experienced CFOs have some advice on coping with on-the-job stress –

• Spend time to gain trust and credibility
• Prioritize consistently
• Listen before you act

Keeping a balance between the various challenges is not at all easy. On the job stress is mounting – a turnover of about 13 percent for Fortune 500 companies showed in 2006.

Adapt and perform

We begin to empathize with the human element! For people immersed in the numbers and unused to being pleasant and friendly, perhaps the best way to cope is to first find a mentor - and learn the art of communicating freely.

It’s a lonely job, they say. But if the company is to adapt and perform in the face of challenges, so must its key people.

Comments/opinions anyone??