C-suite: Top job skills CFOs should focus on right now

You’re always looking at ways to improve how well you do your jobs. One way for CFOs to get some great insight is to speak to your fellow execs in the C-suite.

They could have ideas about what you should focus on that might not cross your mind.

NetSuite’s recent survey of CFOs and nonfinance execs sheds light on some critical areas where CFOs can improve their performance.

Kudos to CFOs

Overall, your non-CFO peers are pleased with how well you’re managing financial affairs at your companies. In fact, they gave CFOs top marks for how well they’ve managed company finances since 2019.

However, they did have some helpful suggestions for areas where their CFOs could enhance their skills.

Team management essential

One of the top areas where nonfinance execs said CFOs could boost their performance was managing the finance team.

Forty percent of nonfinance execs said they’d like their CFOs to improve their management skills. But only 18% of CFOs felt they needed to improve these skills.

With all the focus on crunching numbers required by your job, some of the softer skills may fall through the cracks at times, especially when managing your Finance team.

Placing more emphasis on communicating with your team and coaching your people in their roles can go a long way toward improving how Finance functions as a whole.

Company collaboration

Another area where your nonfinance peers think you could use some improvement is collaboration across departments to improve business functions.

The gap is smaller between CFOs and other execs here: 36% of nonfinance execs said they’d like their CFO to boost their skills in this area, while 32% of CFOs want to improve their skills here.

Finance impacts every area of a company, so it’s essential to build relationships with every department, from HR to IT, so you’ll be able to get insights that’ll help you make better, more cost-effective decisions regarding staffing, tech and more.

Top CFO priorities

CFOs generally have different priorities when it comes to what they want to improve in their jobs.

As you might expect, the top concern of the CFOs surveyed is financing, an area where 45% of them want to boost their skills.

Most of the other top skills CFOs want to improve are also hard finance skills, including scenario planning and forecasting (40%), ensuring accounting excellence (35%) and analyzing data (33%).

All these elements are essential to your role. But it’s important to strike a balance between these skills and skills your peers find vital as well.

Moving forward

In the current climate, CFOs will want to equally value communication skills and financial knowledge.

Reason: Nonfinance execs will rely on you more to give them insight into how the company’s financials directly impact decision-making

Most nonfinance execs admitted they aren’t necessarily data driven when making decisions. While 34% described their decisions as “data aware,” 38% either make decisions based purely on intuition or on intuition first.

That’s where you come in.

Your knowledge can help execs rely less on gut decisions and more on cold, hard data. Your main goal here should be to relay this info in a way nonfinance execs can understand, giving context to the numbers and relating them to specific company outcomes and results.