This past week, I had the chance to attend the Future of Finance Summit, brought to you by the AICPA. The Summit brought together Finance leaders from 80 companies committed to advancing the finance and accounting profession and sharing knowledge, ideas, and opportunities to help build best in class finance organizations.
The AICPA and specifically the Advisory committee planning the event (composed of senior finance leaders) had been polling their members about their top business challenges over the course of the year, and starting in mid-2021, talent started coming up as the top challenge.
That challenge around talent hasn’t waned, if anything, it’s increased in 2022, and in this week’s conference it was top of the agenda.
Starting Off With A Level Set Around The Future of Work
In addition to a number of presentations on issues and priorities facing CFOs and Finance leaders, there were a number of sessions dedicated solely to the future of work, and the topic of talent. To start the conference, Kerry Brown kicked us off with a great presentation on the current state of the future of work, how we got to where we are, and how trends are going to impact the workplace for the decade ahead. Among the many key points she made that stood out to me were:
- Kicking off the presentation with a reminder that there is no more pension at the end of the career for this next generation entering the workforce. As a result, the employer/employee contract has changed, and what employees expect out of a job and career has changed
- We used to develop leaders, and through the hollowing out of the middle management and Great Financial Crisis we moved away from it. It’s starting to come back, but there are a whole lot of leaders who haven’t gotten proper leadership training for the new world of work
- The shortage of talent is a math problem, and both an acute (short term) and chronic (long-term) challenge. There are more people leaving and less people entering. As the saying goes, “demography is destiny.”
- There is more choice than ever before.
The Importance of Psychological Safety to Unleashing The Full Potential of Talent
The second presentation that hit home on the theme of talent was Jeannine Brown’s Session on Psychological Safety and DEI. I’ve long been an advocate of team leaders cultivating a sense of psychological safety on their teams to unleash ideas and innovation, but I appreciated Jeannine’s perspective of how psychological safety contributes to this but also to creating more diverse, inclusive and equitable workplaces by empowering those, especially those who may not have a voice or as strong as a voice, or feel welcomed to speak up.
This session was a reminder yet again that great ideas can come from anywhere but only when you intentionally design a culture where people feel safe and without fear they won’t be punished for speaking up or making a mistake. And when mistakes are made, it’s met with a curiosity to learn and grow, not to punish. If you want to engage your employees, creating space for their talents, contributions and ideas is critical, and when you do that, they’re more likely to stay.
What The Next Generation of Talent Thinks About Their Careers and Wants Out of Their Employers
I was able to moderate a panel with three young professionals in the finance profession about what they are looking for out of their career, their employer, and their profession, as well as their general attitudes and preferences regarding the workplace today.
One of the points I was able to make in my panel was that inside of an organization, great ideas can come from anywhere, whether you’re the Gen Z associate just hired out of college all the way up to the CEO.
This is aided by the use of technology and collaboration tools, which can surface the people and ideas that can potentially serve as transformative ideas for new improvements, products, and services. And between the thoughtful and prescriptive answers from the three panelists as well as the thoughtful questions from the audience really proved this point. Below, you can see the incredible visual drawing that the graphic illustrator & facilitator put together that highlights some of the key themes and talking points from our hour long discussion.
As you can see, we covered everything from hybrid work, work-life balance, learning and development, what makes a great manager, career development remote vs in-office, what we want out of leaders, and anything else in between. As you can also see, there isn’t a shortage of ideas about ways in which we can solve these challenges, not just to attract the next generation of talent, but to truly make the workplace better for more people so they can contribute to the business in a meaningful way.
So if great ideas can come from anywhere in your organization whether you’re the new hire or the CFO, how do we take a hold of these and make them happen?
In our opening keynote, Kerry Brown, provided us with a nice and simple framework of Listen. Look. Act. On the listen front, it means not only accepting feedback and specific insights, but actually making sure you are doing something with them. Furthermore, I also encouraged the audience of leaders in my session about the importance of perspective taking. When you’re a leader making decisions on policies and programs that impact people who often have a different set of calculus and needs than you, it can be easy to miss the forest through the trees. But it’s really important to actually use a significant amount of empathy to truly understand not just what people are telling you, but how that makes sense given their set of constraints, priorities, and wishes.
On the Act piece, we had the privilege of hearing from Pascal Finette and Jeffrey Rogers, who encouraged us to embrace agile principles when we move from strategy to execution of new ideas, especially around iterative development and feedback loops. Trying to solve retaining talent in one fell swoop seems insurmountable, but building in some small experiments, testing them, getting feedback and building new improvements on top of them is a much more progressive approach to solving this challenge.
We saw this in action from one of our Conference Members, Amarah Johnson shared the story of her own organization’s transformation journey to building the Future of Finance Capability within her organization, which resulted in a home-grown internal talent mobility platform, and a baseline set of competencies and skills for their organization by level. It also includes a roadmap of enhancements that are coming to promote on the job learning and career development. What was impressive about this was that with just a small team, Amarah and her colleagues were able to roll out a solution that met the needs of a 1500 person finance organization.
As you can see from the image above, Finance leaders face no shortage of challenges with respect to the workplace and attracting and retaining talent. But after 3 days of learning, knowledge sharing, relationship building and creative problem solving I’m optimistic about what these individuals can take home to inspire change and improvement in their own organizations, which leads me back to the youngest generation, Gen Z.
Whenever I moderate or speak about generational topics in the workplace, I’m always cognizant that blanket generalizations are not useful and generations are not monoliths. However, I can’t help but not be inspired and cognizant on how the newest generation in the workforce is pushing all of us to think differently about how we see the workplace, organizations, and leadership.
Generations are the byproduct of what they observe and see growing up, and Gen Z certainly has seen some things, ranging from the Great Financial Crisis, proliferation of college & student debt, COVID-19, mental health issues, and more. Furthermore, there are relics of the workplace they have no idea about, such as the pension (doesn’t exist) internal development offerings that enabled employees to stay with a company for a long time.
While they may not be as experienced or have as much knowledge on some of the constraints and realities of the world and workplace, I would argue that is exactly why we should be listening to them, hearing their perspectives, and thinking about how we can integrate their thoughts and ideas especially on how we approach the workplace, careers, and learning and development. We’ve been working with the same mental models and frameworks of workplace and leadership for decades. If we truly believe that we must continue to evolve our products & services to meet the changing market, the same must be said for how we lead organizations, develop people, and promote career growth.
Albertin Einstein once said, “you can’t use an old map to explore a new world.” Gen Z Talent is helping us build the new map, and if we listen, learn and act on what they are telling us, perhaps we can build a better future of work for all of us.
PS – One final personal note – A shoutout to Tom Hood, EVP of Business Growth and Engagement of the AICPA, and his incredible team at the AICPA. I’ve had the privilege of knowing Tom for almost two decades, dating back to when I met him when he was a regular contributor and active participant at my Father’s conferences. Tom’s always supported and encouraged me throughout my career, so I was grateful for the opportunity to participate in this conference. Tom is the ultimate connector who is always advocating for people to come together to share ideas, solve problems, and support one another to advance toward a higher cause. That ethos was woven throughout the conference, and made it incredibly welcoming. I constantly looked around watching people talking, sharing ideas, coaching one another and intentionally building relationships. The problems and challenges that leaders in this industry face are big, but I believe they’ll be solved when people come together to collectively embrace ideas and sharing than by working in our silos.
My Father shares a similar ethos, which is no surprise why the two of them have worked together for so long and are supporters of each other. Big thank you to Tom, Barry, Kelly and the rest of your incredible team for the privilege of spending time talking about really important issues that I care deeply about!
PPS – Are you a leader looking for someone to work with your team on strategies for retaining talent and upskilling your workforce or a conference planner looking for a keynote speaker or facilitator looking for someone to talk about talent or the future of work? Reach out to me (al at betterworklabs.com or the Contact Me Form) as I’d love to work with you!