The academic publishing division of a UK FTSE 100 information business ran our finance training courses as part of their Leadership Development Program. As a result of the success of these courses, the Chief People Officer decided that they wanted to go through the course on a one-on-one basis and thereafter engage in a series of coaching sessions.
The CPO had no confidence when financial matters were being discussed. They would listen to financial discussions at a Board level, but weren't able to follow them effectively, or participate and contribute powerfully to the conversations. Our brief was to change this, giving them the confidence to read and understand financial information properly, and be able to contribute to financial conversations at Board level.
We ran our Let’s Talk Finance course in person, followed by a series of ten coaching sessions which explored a wide variety of topics including business analysis, budgeting and EBITDA, as well as focusing on “real life” work issues that were crossing their desk. This included a number of sessions examining their regular monthly Board packs and annual budgeting reviews.
In one of our sessions, we focused on an upcoming financial review at the Board. We analyzed the financial information that had been circulated in advance, and our coach noticed a discrepancy - some financial commentary in the report made no sense whatsoever. The commentary was intended to explain a negative monthly variance, but it was instead explaining a positive variance. No matter how many times you read the commentary, it simply didn’t serve its purpose.
Then our coach worked out why - the commentary was mistakenly explaining a positive YTD variance from a different column. The explanation was entirely correct, but it did not explain the issue that it was supposed to address. We explored this with the CPO and the penny dropped for them, they realized why this part of the report did not appear to make sense.
In the Board meeting the next day, the CEO and the CFO reached this precise point in the report. The CEO was frustrated because they couldn’t make sense of the commentary. The CFO was frustrated because they couldn’t understand why the CEO didn’t understand their attempts to explain the commentary. So, up stood the CPO in the middle of the Board meeting and they explained succinctly to both parties why there was a financial miscommunication, what the underlying issue was, and managed to reconcile them to be on the same page. The CEO and the CFO were astounded, and asked “How on earth did you work that out?”
The answer is the CPO was able to work it out due to our powerful finance training, and our on-going coaching support.
