When a CFO is tasked with transforming a finance team, it’s the type of opportunity that may come along only once or twice in a finance leader’s career.
For Carol Lowe, CFO, Sealed Air Corp., it was a lot of hard work and “a tremendous amount of fun” because, as she explains, “There’s nothing like pulling together as a team, not just within finance but across the company, and knowing that you’re really able to make a difference when you align on those key strategies and goals and together and you all drive toward them.”
However, turn back the clock to 2012, and the future of Sealed Air Corp was less than clear. A previous management team had overpaid for an acquisition, and the company’s stock had dropped by more than half. Moreover, there was a sense that the company may have been resting on its laurels.
Says Lowe: “Had things not changed, we could have been a company featured in Jim Collins’ book Good to Great. But we would have been an example of a company that had let hubris set in.”
With little tolerance for hubris, Lowe set out to evaluate her team members and began by listening: “I wanted to hear how they thought, how they assess things, whether they even recognized that we had a significant challenge in front of us and would be willing to respond with a sense of urgency.”
This is an assessment with which finance leaders have become increasingly tasked as finance professionals become more tightly aligned with the operational areas of business and help to drive their company’s strategy.
Enter Ash Noah, VP, CGMA External Relations, AICPA, who has created a talent competency framework as a culmination of gathering employer insights gleaned from consultations with hundreds of finance leaders around the world.
“This is about moving your finance professionals from their comfort zone, or from their wheelhouse of technical expertise, to the value zone,” says Noah, who together with Lowe will pull back the curtain on talent assessment during a live webinar titled “Talent and the Future of Finance: How Strategy-Minded CFOs Are Transforming Finance Using Talent Competencies and Automation.” Tuesday, Dec. 20th, 3pm EST
Also joining the discussion will be Michael Shultz, director of finance transformation, BlackLine, who will discuss how the move to new talent competencies and technologies are helping to transform the role of finance in business.
Meanwhile, it may not come as a surprise that Lowe succeeded in energizing her team as well as Sealed Air Corp., but don’t take my word for it. Instead, join us when she explains in her own words how she helped to reenergize the market leader using finance competencies and strategic insight.
See you next Tuesday, December 20, at 3:00 p.m. EST.
TALENT & The Future of Finance Register Here.