The challenges that organisations have had to face in recent years have led to a general ‘transformation’ of the finance function and in particular of the CFO, taking on a role that is much more closely linked to the business itself and focused mainly on understanding the future of the company.
This is a more than significant change from his more ‘traditional’ functions, related to the management of his own area and mostly oriented towards ‘explaining the past’. Today, however, he has embarked on a different path, where finance is directly interrelated with the company's business and strategy.
But as any conversion requires adaptation, the CFO must broaden his or her horizons, incorporating new knowledge that allows him or her to assume a position in which it is no longer enough to know a lot of little (finance), to have to move on to knowing ‘a little of a lot’ of the other areas, which allows him or her to exercise strategic leadership within the company.
However, there is no doubt that the figure of the CFO has all the necessary tools to take on this new role, where his or her understanding of the business allows him or her to position him or herself in a differential way within the organisation and thus take on the leadership of the change process associated with it, which is not only ‘limited’ to the digital aspect.
To do this, they must "step out" of their comfort zone (the finance area) and stand alongside the CEO of the organisation, as their natural partner, with the aim of helping to create the organisation of the future. To achieve this, they must carry out much more fluid and transversal management with the rest of the departments, managing to work with them, and not against them, as might have happened in the past.
Becoming a "business strategist" implies that the CFO must assume the role of driving organisational growth, starting from their ability to identify those business opportunities that may arise in the future and anticipating, at the same time, what will be the main challenges they will have to face to achieve these objectives.
In this way, thinking about the future of the company becomes one of their main functions.
Thus, it becomes essential for the CFO to identify key priorities and allocate the necessary resources, integrating solutions to optimise treasury management and financial processes. This approach frees the team from manual and repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on activities that provide strategic value to the company's growth.
At the same time, it would not be correct to think that all the new work involved in the "expansion" of their functions can be carried out by themselves, so they must have a team aligned for this purpose, made up of both personnel from their team and also from other areas of the company, so we are talking about a multidisciplinary team. Nor should they rule out external help when necessary as a result of those issues that require it.
This is why the proactivity that the CFO can assume, as well as the development and use of their "soft skills," becomes a critical aspect, where correct emotional management will allow them to create the necessary trust relationships to exercise open and empathetic leadership at the same time.
It should not be overlooked that although by their own position they have a "comprehensive" knowledge of the company, nothing is more important to become a "change strategist" than having sufficient skills to know how to interpret and coordinate the emotional competencies of the people they interact with.
Similarly, the monitoring and communication to the company's own Board of Directors and shareholders becomes one of the new key functions that the CFO must assume, the same if we refer to internal communication about the company's own evolution of the business.
As indicated previously, the understanding they have of the business allows them to "convert" the strategy into numbers and thus be able to communicate it in clear language, whether we refer to investors or any member of the company, so we can say that they become a kind of "translator" of the results obtained and the actions to be followed.
Therefore, their function as a business strategist is nothing more than a "logical consequence" of their new functions, which will allow them to provide greater value, which is just another interesting challenge to be achieved by the CFO and thus strengthen their orientation towards the future of the company.
