This blog is by Leila Singh, Leadership & Career Development Consultant at Success Redefined Limited and you can find out more about Leila and her work here.
Your Finance Team Is Technically Strong. So Why Isn’t the Business Listening?
Ask a Finance Director about their team and they’ll often tell you how capable they are. The reporting is accurate. The deadlines are met. They know the numbers inside out.
Then comes the frustration: “We have the insight, but the business doesn’t always involve us until the decision has been made.”
If that sounds familiar, the question may not be whether your team needs more technical training. It may be whether they have the relationships, confidence and communication skills to make their expertise count early enough.
Why good finance insight arrives too late
A finance professional can produce an excellent analysis and still have little influence over the outcome. By the time their report reaches a stakeholder, a preferred course of action may already have taken shape.
Imagine a commercial team working towards a new deal. Finance could help test the assumptions, explore the margin and find a way to make the deal work. But if colleagues expect finance to say “no”, they may wait until the proposal is nearly complete before bringing them in.
At that point, finance faces a difficult choice: raise concerns that feel like an obstacle or stay quiet about a risk they can see.
That is an expensive position for any business to put its finance team in. It can mean rework, slower decisions and missed opportunities to improve the deal while there is still room to change it.
I have worked in both finance and executive sales, spanning 25-years, so I understand why those conversations can become difficult on either side. The opportunity is to help finance become a partner colleagues want to involve while options are still open.
If this is a pattern you recognise, you can view my Expert Services Directory listing and send me an enquiry about the challenges you’re seeing in your team.
Is your team known beyond finance?
Here are two questions I would ask a Finance Director looking at their team’s development.
First, who do your finance people speak to regularly outside the function?
- Think beyond the meetings they are required to attend.
- Do they understand what matters to colleagues in Sales, Operations and other areas of the business?
- Are they curious about the pressures behind the numbers?
Second, who seeks them out before making a decision?
- When a stakeholder is weighing up an investment, a customer proposal or a change in direction, do they think to involve someone from finance at the start?
The answers can reveal a gap that a performance review might miss. Someone can be highly capable, respected within finance and ready for more responsibility, yet remain largely unknown to the people they need to influence.
That does not mean they should spend their week networking for the sake of it. It means building enough trust and understanding that a useful conversation can happen before a decision becomes difficult to change.
Sometimes that starts with a simple question: “What are you trying to achieve, and where would a finance perspective help?”
Developing finance business partners takes practice
Finance business partnering training is most useful when it changes what people do in real conversations. Your team may need support to:
- turn financial analysis into a clear recommendation that a non-finance colleague can act on;
- ask better questions about a stakeholder’s commercial priorities;
- challenge an assumption without closing down the discussion;
- speak with confidence when senior people disagree; and
- build relationships across the business before an urgent issue arises.
These are finance influencing skills, and they become stronger through practice. A presentation or workshop can start the conversation, but people also need opportunities to apply what they learn to their own stakeholders and decisions.
For a Finance Director, the result to look for is straightforward:
- Are your people being brought into more useful conversations, earlier?
- Are they helping colleagues make better-informed choices, rather than explaining the financial consequences afterwards?
If you are considering how to develop that capability, visit my directory listing and use the contact form to tell me where your team is getting stuck.
Start with the people who are ready to contribute more
Often, the greatest opportunity sits with your experienced finance professionals. They know the organisation, understand the detail and can see patterns others miss. Some are already doing the work of a strategic partner, but have not yet developed the visibility or confidence to be recognised as one.
Give them a clear expectation that building relationships and contributing to decisions is part of their role. Then give them support with the conversations they find hardest, whether that is challenging a senior stakeholder, presenting a recommendation or making the first approach to a team outside finance.
This also matters for your future leadership pipeline. If you want more of your own people ready to step into senior finance roles, technical strength alone will not tell you who can earn trust and influence across the business.
So here is the question I would leave you with: when the next important commercial decision is taking shape, will someone think to involve your finance team before the options narrow? If you are unsure, there is useful work to do.
I’m Leila Singh, an FCCA qualified leadership development specialist and founder of Success Redefined. Drawing on more than 25 years in Corporate Finance and Sales, I help organisations develop mid to senior finance professionals who can influence stakeholders, contribute to better decisions and become trusted strategic partners to the business.
To explore what this could look like for your finance team, visit my Expert Services Directory listing and send me an enquiry.
