Host

Philippa Lamb

Guests

• Sarah Walker-Smith, CEO, Ampa
• Joe Dubbin, Managing Director, Cripps Leadership Advisors
• Melanie Coeshott, career coach, Blue Diamond 

Transcript

Philippa Lamb: Hello, this is the Insights In Focus podcast. I’m Philippa Lamb, and today we’re exploring what makes a good leader and how accountants can build the skills to take on senior executive roles. If America is run by lawyers, then the UK is run by accountants – so said one anonymous headhunter in a recent report for the FT, and the data backs them up. Around a third of today’s FTSE 100 CEOs have previously served as CFOs. So, what makes finance professionals such a good fit for the top spot? And beyond financial acumen, what other skills and capabilities do they need to really nail it?

Sarah Walker-Smith is Group Chief Executive of the legal and professional services group Ampa. She’s joining us remotely, as is Melanie Coeshott, a career coach and mentor at Blue Diamond. She specialises in advising accountants and finance professionals. And Joe Dubbin is Managing Director of executive search firm Cripps Leadership Advisors. He’s here in the studio with me. Hello, everyone.

Joe, as I said, your firm advises on strategic hiring and leadership. Just to kick us off, what would you say are the key skills and behaviours that your clients are really looking for in a CEO?

Joe Dubbin: It’s an interesting question, and one that I think has changed markedly in the last four years or so. Given the world’s complexities and some of the volatility that we’ve seen, in many directions, CEOs now are having to be across a very, very broad range of issues, which often are not something they have first-hand experience with. So, I think people who are able to be comfortable with that breadth and also build effective teams around them, including a partnership with the CFO, and recognise that they don’t need to have all the answers themselves, that’s the sort of behavioural capabilities that are really in most demand at the moment.

PL: So, it’s a mindset shift since the pandemic?

JD: Absolutely, yeah.

PL: Because in the years before that, we heard a lot more about the so-called soft skills, influencing skills, understanding organisational culture, that sort of thing. But there’s more, this is different.

JD: I think so, because there’s a great deal of ambiguity and how to manage the forward-looking picture for businesses. And therefore, you are having to keep people focused, enthused, manage your stakeholders, be they shareholders, the board, your team, the wider business, to give them the confidence to plough on and do what they need to do, even though what lies ahead might not be quite as certain as it might have been five years ago, 10 years ago.

PL: Obviously, the business landscape, the economic landscape, that’s all shifted, but is hybrid playing into this as well, in a significant way?

JD: I think it’s one of a number of factors, which kind of illustrates the point that you have got economic, technological, societal, logistical challenges, which really didn’t manifest historically as they do today. And I think you’ve got all of them at play at the same time. So that just makes the role of the CEO, and anybody at the top table in the C suite, a much wider and more thoughtful place than it would have been historically.

PL: Melanie, you coach accountants and finance professionals. Would you agree? Have the requirements, has the skill set changed in recent years?

Melanie Coeshott: Yes, I have definitely seen a mindset change as well, I would really agree with what Joe’s saying there. I think overall there’s going to be this mindset change in us as individuals as we progress through different stages of our career, but also the overall mindset that what got us here in the past isn’t necessarily what’s going to be required to take us forward. And also, looking at the people around us, helping to bring them along on the journey no matter how ambiguous or uncertain it might seem is really key for moving forward. And realising that we can’t do it all alone, that we are going to have to bring other people on that journey, no matter how blurry or uncertain or volatile it might be.

PL: Sarah, are you seeing this reflected in the leaders that you work with?

Sarah Walker-Smith: That’s absolutely spot on, and I agree with the points already made. It felt like we had to rewrite the playbook during the pandemic, and it still feels to a certain extent that we are rewriting it partly because of the ambiguity externally, but also because of the way people work these days is very different to how it used to be. It’s not just the breadth of what you need to be able to do but it’s the ability and the agility to move quickly and to make quick decisions, sometimes being very strategic, the next minute having to get involved in something quite detailed, but things are moving very, very quickly.

I would really endorse the point about connection. Connecting with our people is vital, but the way we do it now is different to how we did it four years ago. We need to be comfortable with multiple different platforms, trying to retain visibility. We have around 1,500 people spread across the country – it’s actually in some respects easier to be visible in this hybrid world more frequently. But also, the face-to-face interactions feel incredibly important now, and I think we have to be much more mindful and thoughtful about how we do that. Ultimately, chief execs need an awful lot of resilience because of this constant need to adapt and change style and pace.

PL: You started life as an accountant, didn’t you? How long did you work in practice?

SW-S: Eight years. I qualified as a chartered accountant, like most people do, and then moved to Boots, the chemist, in an operational risk review and left there eight years later as a marketing director, so I’m not quite sure what happened to me at Boots! And then obviously into law firms where I’ve become a chief executive.

PL: So how did you find that shift into the corporate world? What were the challenges?

SW-S: I think the pace. Typically, as an audit professional or an audit manager, you could focus on one big job at once and really get into it. And suddenly, in industry, it doesn’t work like that, there are different things coming at you and you can’t plan it in quite the same way. So, you have to adapt very quickly to being much more commercial, much more adaptive, and getting used to different stakeholders as well. Certainly, in my first experience at Boots, some of the marketing professionals I was working with were so different to some of the pharmacy experts within Boots, who were so different to the finance team, and the rest goes on. And particularly the on-the-ground people in retail, again, it was a different skill set. One of the things I learned very quickly was to adapt my style to the people that I was trying to influence and lead and talk to, and I think that felt like probably the biggest learning curve at the beginning.

PL: Thinking about what you learned in the early days in audit, do you still use those skills at all?

SW-S: Oh, 100%. You know, you can take the accountant out of the girl and all of that. But I feel, honestly, if I hadn’t had that foundation, I think my job would be much more difficult now. I loved audit, because you did get to see a huge variety of different businesses, different sectors. You wanted to add value over and above the statutory audit, so you were constantly looking for improvements to put into the management letter, you were looking for opportunities to add value. It gave me a huge understanding as to how business works, and how business models vary across different sectors, and not a day goes by when I’m not using some of that insight. I can quickly flip back to financial analysis and understanding things like the balance sheet and gearing leverage, all of those wonderful things that if I hadn’t had that grounding, it wouldn’t come quite naturally. And it’s very helpful to flip back into it when I need to use it, even though I’ve got some fantastic people around me, clearly, who understand that far better than I do. But it’s helpful to have it there.

PL: You’ve got the technical knowhow, but is it the capability to actually overview a business that’s the most important thing?

SW-S: That for me is why I’m not surprised by the statistic you gave at the beginning of so many accountants, CFOs, becoming CEOs, because I do think it’s one of the rare roles where you do look at the whole business through many different lenses. You’ve learned that through your training, and it carries right through.

PL: Now, I want to ask Joe what clients are looking for at the moment, but before I get there, Melanie, you advise accountants, you see a lot of them. We talked a little bit about hybrid and different ways of working. I’m wondering if we’re thinking about people, accountants with leadership ambitions, how do they prepare themselves for those future roles now? Because I think it’s fair to say, training has perhaps had some catching up to do since the pandemic to this shifting way of working that we’ve been exploring. What do you tell them that they should be doing now to prepare themselves?

MC: Any kind of preparation needs to be intentional and focused, and like any kind of training, whether it’s physical training or not, these are muscles that we need to hone and strengthen. As accountants and especially diligent auditors etc, we’re typically used to being reliable doers, and that’s not going to really take us to some of those leadership positions. We can’t spend our life being those reliable doers. So, looking for opportunities to think and act more strategically – and when I’m talking about strategically, it’s either taking things from the short term, medium term to the longer term, but also being able to zoom out and see things from that broader, bigger-picture perspective as well. Now, this might be in people’s remit today or it might not be, but regardless of that, being intentional about this and trying to put ourselves in different perspectives and see challenges or issues from different angles is a great way of training these muscles to be prepared for future roles.

PL: Joe, as I mentioned, a third of FTSE 100 CEOs, they’ve been CFOs. You must have seen a lot of accountants resumes over the years – how do they stand up for applicable skills as CEOs?

JD: I think CFOs often become CEO as the natural successor within a company where they’re already known. And that may be because that’s the right path for the company, but often it’s because the company’s circumstances are different, they’re maybe not in that growth phase, it may be that there’s more of a consolidation or a rethink around what the strategy might be. A company might be struggling, and when you bring in somebody who has been trained in more cold-eyed analysis of what the business environment is, and how the company really is performing, that can often be very comforting to the board to have that type of leadership.

PL: A safe pair of hands. And I don’t mean that in a derogatory way.

JD: It’s often used in a derogatory way when it shouldn’t be, I think it’s absolutely right. The point that Melanie makes around being that strategic thought partner and being commercial is something that we’re seeing CFOs being utilised much more for these days. It really is a very broad role. The scope is very varied, and increasingly so if you think about the digital agenda that’s now being tucked underneath the CFO, so they have real business impacts. And so I think they’re actually getting better prepared naturally for CFO roles, because the CFO role is now probably twice the size it was 10 years ago in some instances. I think they are getting the exposure across the business – and externally, importantly – that makes them better suited to leadership afterwards.

PL: Attitudes to risk – are they different? As CEO, it’s part of the job, isn’t it?

JD: I think the stereotype would be that CFOs are risk-off and CEOs are risk-on.

PL: How do you make that transition?

JD: Well, being self-aware, first of all. Having the right team around them, having the right board. It’s about having that balance between the risk taker and the risk mitigator. That’s just healthy, and you want to have a robust discussion within the company and at the board level. There’s no reason why that shouldn’t be led by the more conservative approach.

PL: Conversely, where would you say they’re lacking as leadership candidates? What are their weaknesses?

JD: If they haven’t developed beyond that task-orientated, completer-finisher, must make everything perfect and come up with the answer stage. You do see CFOs, who really do hang on to that, and I think that’s where they probably cap out, because you do have to step into the world of the ambiguous, the unknown, the not quite certain, the what’s our best guess here. So I think it’s letting go of that. They often have very large teams, or have developed teams, so the core leadership and delegation can be there, and may be sometimes better than in other parts of the organisation. That’s an asset. And the other point is, often CFOs have seen a number of different sectors and different business settings, and that can be hugely valuable, just bringing some diversity of thought and experience into a company if they’ve had the opportunity to be adjacent in other verticals.

PL: Sarah, what’s your take on this? You made that move from practice to industry. I’m wondering about corporate structures, ways of working, because they can be very, very different. I think you alluded to that a bit yourself, when you went and made that move to Boots, how radically different it was.

SW-S: Well, one of the things that I did was I made sure that I continued to learn, and in several different ways. I found mentors and people who could help explain all of this stuff to me, I didn’t make assumptions that I understood everything. But I did an MBA, which brilliantly balanced the ICAEW qualification, and then I went on to become a chartered director so that I fully understood governance and corporate structures. So, I think there are things that can neatly sit alongside as additional qualifications that give you that additional vocabulary and that additional confidence. Because Joe’s absolutely right, as a CEO, you are trusting your instincts a lot more and you don’t always have time to get all the answers, to get all the data, to get all the analysis – and even then, that’s historic, nobody can see into the future. So, any of the tools that you can add, whether it be through on-the-job learning, mentoring, or additional qualifications, gives you the confidence to use those instincts. Certainly, that’s how I found it.

PL: Melanie, that’s obviously why accountants come to you. Do they come to you because they feel they’re not sufficiently supported in their career development, in their lifelong professional development, as they might be in their jobs?

MC: People come to me for all different reasons. Sometimes it is because they are getting the full support from their organisation to help them continue to grow and build that self-awareness and that intentional, continuous improvement that Sarah was talking about. Sometimes they come to me because they’re lacking direction and clarity in terms of where they want to take their career next. But going back to one of the points that you’ve talked about before, in terms of the training this can be a useful foundation for any number of finance roles, but I think that initial training is just the first step. Having that growth mindset and being able to look for those opportunities – as Sarah said, things like the MBA that will complement the accounting qualification – and looking for those opportunities to put some of this thing into practice is very important and also why people are continuing to grow and enhance their skills to step up into other, more senior roles or step across into a CEO role.

PL: Joe, accounts are not the only contenders here if third of the country take that CFO-to-CEO route. Who are their rivals? Where did the other two thirds come from who make it into the CEO spot?

JD: Typically, I think you’re looking at people who have come from operational backgrounds, so have run business units and then naturally step up to run the company, or people who’ve been very successful in commercial and business development strategy. They’re the two main competing areas that we see. Just to add to the point that Melanie was making, the other thing that I would advise aspirant CFOs or aspirant CEOs is the sooner you can build your team at whatever level and delegate to them, the more you’re able to take on and develop yourself. As those new areas come in, if you’re still in the weeds of what you used to do, and you haven’t created an environment around you where you’re handing that off, you can’t dedicate the time to studying and learning the new aspect of your role. And I think that’s something which the best leaders, whatever their background, consistently do, they create success underneath them, which allows them to progress and it gives them the bandwidth and headspace to take on the new or the novel, or the extra.

PL: In terms of the leadership philosophy of CEOs now, I’d be interested to know your thoughts about how that’s changed, what organisations look for now. The days of charismatic leadership are perhaps gone, but obviously not entirely gone, we still see them in the business landscape. If we’re thinking about what sort of person works well in that very public-facing and investor-facing spot, whose favourite now? Attitudinally, what are they looking for?

JD: I think naturally we’re all sceptical of very big personalities. A slightly more humble approach is typically better received externally. It’s not to be meek but talking about us and we, rather than I and me, both in how you think and how you communicate. And I think recognising that success is a concerted effort, you need an organisation to deliver. It’s not just the brilliance of one individual, or rarely is it the brilliance of one individual. It might be the brilliance of half a dozen people. And being honest about that. I think what externally is most valued is an authenticity. Do we instinctively trust what this person is saying? We might not agree, we might have a different view, but do we believe that they believe what they’re saying? And I think that finding your authentic voice as a leader is something that is probably one of the hardest things to do. We all think we should be something else at some point, or a version of what we think good looks like, and then it suddenly clicks of what your best version looks like. Whatever your professional background, getting to that point where you’re comfortable enough in your own skin to be authentic is a huge step forward.

PL: That’s the maturity point, isn’t it? A confidence point. Sarah, what’s your experience of this? When do you think you got to the point where you were actually leading as yourself rather than the version of yourself that you wanted to present to everyone?

SW-S: The honest answer is during the pandemic. I think I thought I was being authentic before that, but I still had a bit of a barrier. I was holding parts of me back, I probably was still a bit more concerned about what a chief exec was supposed to look like and be like, particularly in my sector. There’s lots of history there. And I remember two steps. The first one was going for the final job interview for the role that I’m in now, which was about five years ago, where I’d been through a six-month process, a whole headhunter process run by very large headhunters. I’d been through psychometric testing, levels of interviews, done tests, you can just imagine I’d done this whole thing. It got to the final day when I had to go and do a presentation, and the night before I wrote a very accountancy-type presentation – it had graphs in it, and numbers, and all sorts of things. And I just suddenly had this moment where I thought that’s not who you are really, Sarah. I ripped it up and I went in with a photograph of a ballerina and talked about a story about who I was, what my values were, and I had this attitude that if they didn’t hire me, it was a win-win because I would be in the wrong place if I was being that authentic in the interview and they didn’t want me to be authentic.

So that was that was the first step, and thankfully, they did hire me. But it wouldn’t have been a fail if I hadn’t been hired because I would have been in the wrong place, and I’d got myself back into that mindset. But then even that, I was holding something back until the pandemic, and that moment when you had to constantly talk to your people, they saw into your life, into your home, you had to share your hopes, your fears, and take them through this really very difficult period when you didn’t know any more than they knew. And that was the final bit of the jigsaw for me really.

PL: Hearing you tell these stories I am really loath to get into any sort of gender stereotyping around leadership. But I would be interested to hear everyone’s thoughts about that. Whether you, in the course of your careers, genuinely do see differences in the way that men and women lead, or is that just gone now? Melanie, what’s your feeling about that?

MC: That’s a tricky one, isn’t it? I’ve had some experiences with amazing female leaders and amazing male leaders, and unfortunately, I’ve had some experiences with the opposite as well, with both genders.

PL: But did they lead differently?

MC: It’s difficult to do this without stereotyping. I think the women naturally will be looking to forge those relationships earlier on. The male leaders that I’ve worked with and for have been interested in relationships, but it’s kind of to serve a purpose. I feel like with the female leaders it’s come more naturally to them. And then sometimes leading from the back, or that kind of servant leadership has been much more evident with some of the female leaders that I’ve observed and witnessed.

PL: Joe, you see a lot of people, do you see any differences?

JD: It’s hard to answer that question. What I do see is good and bad leadership, and I think it can manifest in different styles, and from different genders. I think the best leaders have the same attributes whether they’re male or female, and similarly it’s the same as for the worst.

PL: I’ve just thrown this in because it occurred to me. Sarah, I’m going to ask you, too. I suppose where it’s coming from for me is that when I think about all the old tropes there used to be about women being better at the soft skills, more collaborative, more compassionate. I’ve never really understood whether that’s true or not, if I’m totally honest, what’s your take?

SW-S: I would say that people are people and those leadership qualities can be found in men or women. So, I agree absolutely with what Joe and Melanie have said. However, this is more to do with the perception, and I guess what it feels like out there. Not so long ago, I went to a chief executive dinner led by a major organisation where I was the only woman in the room apart from the people serving the dinner. It is still a very male-dominated culture that I’m in, but it’s changing very, very quickly. And it does need a shift in mindset of the recipients, not necessarily the leaders, because I would absolutely agree there are as many fantastic empathetic male leaders that I’ve met as empathetic female leaders; there are some female leaders who are more autocratic. It’s not necessarily a gender-based thing of the individual, but it is a perception and an expectation.

So what I’ve learned to do over the years is use it as an advantage and embrace that difference that if I am the only woman in the room, as I have been an awful lot during my career, that gives me a huge advantage to stand out. I try and shift it into a positive mindset rather than get all upset about it. I was still the first in the top 50 law firms to have a female chief exec. But there are loads of others coming through now, which is brilliant. So, I think it’s shifting, but I do agree it’s more of a perceptual problem than an actual problem. I think people are people and I don’t think it’s quite as gender stereotyped in terms of their attributes, but it may be in terms of how they’re perceived.

PL: Moving on to a different thought, Sarah, you left the profession, I think, eight years you did. I’m interested in what Melanie and Joe think for those people who are thinking they will leave practice and go into industry. When is the best moment to do that? Melanie, do you have thoughts on that?

MC: I have some personal experience as well. I’m also a chartered accountant and a member of the Institute. I trained in practice, similar to Sarah. I was an auditor for just three years and then I moved into industry and had a 20-year career in various finance and accounting roles. For me, that was the right time. But I know for other people the right time might be after getting some experience as a manager or a senior manager or even as a partner. So, I’m not sure there’s a right time. I think there’s a right time for the individual.

PL: Joe, with a hard-headed career development perspective in mind, when would you say?

JD: I think it’s absolutely right to move when you’ve taken what you think you need from the profession and you’re leaving on the up curve, as it were, rather than staying too long. We typically see people leave post-qualification. They’ve got the ticket, they want to go and do something else, they might go and do an MBA and join a different profession or go into industry. And then the next point where it tends to be the biggest move is just approaching director. So I know I’m wanted here, but I don’t think I want to be a partner. You’ve got quite a bit of experience then and your option set’s quite interesting. A lot of people from the profession often join a client. That’s a well-trodden and good route, it’s de-risked for both paths. But I don’t think there’s an optimal time.

PL: Is there a moment when it’s too late?

JD: We’ve discussed this in another conversation recently. Unlearning learned behaviour is always difficult no matter who we are. So, it’s just making sure you’re going into whatever role, perhaps if you’re coming up post-partnership, and you’re still looking for something executive, that transition can be quite difficult. It’s incumbent on both parties, the company and the individual, to be really honest about what that transition will be like, where it will be easy and where you can bring value immediately, and where you’re going to have to work quite hard to recalibrate how you present how you bring yourself into the company and what to expect. Typically, we see partners go into a plural career rather than an executive career, but they do transition into executive roles, and being mindful of the time it takes to readjust is OK. I think it’s when the expectations are misaligned and that conversation hasn’t been had and, you know, “we’re all experienced people, it’ll be fine”. Well, sometimes it’s not.

PL: That takes us back to the always learning point, the importance of that. Just to wrap this up, I’d like to ask you all, if you were young accountants now, and you were thinking not necessarily that you’d like to leave practice, but that you might potentially want to do that, what would you be looking ahead down the line at now in the next three to five years, what would you be working towards to upskill yourself for that? Melanie?

MC: Having spent some time in audit, so putting myself in the position of the young auditors, I’d definitely be working on expanding my mindset. We’ve spoken a lot about mindset in this podcast so far. But expanding my mindset in terms of having that growth mindset. What can I learn? This is not about what I already know, it’s not about the expertise that I’m bringing, that’s kind of a given. But it’s now that curiosity – what can I learn? So, what can I learn about people? About the people I’m going to be working with directly and my wider stakeholders? And also, what can I learn about the business? How can I complement the skills that I already have with learning some useful commercial or industry-relevant skills that are going to help equip me on the next steps of my journey?

PL: Yeah, interesting take. Sarah?

SW-S: I agree with the growth mindset, absolutely. But if I can expand that as well into an external mindset, I think both in terms of understanding the world, but also really building your network, find role models out there that you want to learn from and watch and pull ideas and insights from. But really do establish yourself with as broad a network as possible, it will always come back positively to support you in the future. You don’t know how it’s going to do that at the time you’re doing it, but having a solid network will help enormously with any options that come in the future. And back to that open mindset: your plan won’t happen. That’s probably the one thing you do know. So look for opportunities rather than a plan.

PL: Joe, what’s going to put them at the top of your list?

JD: I think both of those answers are absolutely spot on in terms of thinking about oneself, and recognising that you have to be intentional about your own growth and development and knowing that it does take work. From a skills perspective, anything in the technology, systems, processes, transformation space, we do a lot of work for financial sponsors and private equities where you’re carving out or you’re creating new and medium-sized enterprises and the remarkable amount of work it takes to stand something up to build an organisation and to get all of the functionality in place, nobody thinks about it properly.

PL: Everyone’s just used to it all being there.

JD: Yeah, and it’s considered to be relatively unglamorous, but my word, it’s so valuable, and very hard work. So, if you can just get some exposure to that, maybe directly or indirectly through your career, once you get to the top, I would reckon eight times out of 10 you’re going to face something that is pretty hard work in that area. So if you’re comfortable with it I think that’s massively advantageous.

PL: Thank you all very much, such an interesting conversation. We’ll be back in late May, and the Insights series sharing news and developments from all corners of accountancy and ICAEW, that will be with you early next month. Meantime, why not try ICAEW’s other podcasts? The Tax Track is, unsurprisingly, for tax specialists, and the newly launched Student Insights series is aimed squarely at young professionals – the sort of people we’ve been talking about today. You can find them on any podcast app, or the ICAEW website. Thank you for being with us. If you’re finding these podcasts useful, please do subscribe to the series and you’ll never miss an episode.