How understanding your CFO's leadership style can help your business become more competitive

The last thing a business leader wants is for the company decision-making process to be difficult or ineffective. That’s exactly what happens though when leaders take a one-size-fits-all approach to using business technology like enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions. Why is this? Because business leadership itself is not a one-size-fits-all endeavour. To ensure the best decision-making, business leaders need an ERP solution that complements their specific leadership style.  A survey conducted by Redshift Research Ltd on behalf of Epicor, looked specifically at the working styles of CFOs. The research, which polled 1,500 finance business professionals in 11 countries, unearthed six distinct CFO leadership styles: traditionalists, revolutionaries, politicians, conductors, carers, and visionaries. All of these leadership styles have a different approach to technology, teamwork and decision making, ultimately impacting their business’s profit growth.

With every business leader taking a unique approach towards technology, it is important that CFOs are familiar with the wide range of benefits that ERP solutions can offer them. ERP systems provide companies with detailed and real-time insight into their operations - throughout the entire supply chain. Ultimately, by putting this insight to good use, ERP solutions can help business leaders reduce the time they spend on administration, therefore improving productivity and in turn, profitability.  It is therefore important that business leaders recognise what technology will best suit their leadership style.  

Taking a look at each leadership style more closely, traditionalists are found to be impartial but inflexible. The best ERP solution for this type of leader combines the benefits of cutting-edge technology with user-friendly features. 20 per cent of the survey’s respondents were revolutionaries. These CFOs are risk-takers who are charismatic by nature. They can greatly benefit from social collaboration tools in modern ERP systems to gain access to fellow employees’ insights to improve their decision-making. Politicians were found to be the most popular of all working styles, comprising 27 per cent of the survey respondents. These CFOs are collaborative consensus-builders and cautious decision-makers. They are best suited to an accurate, adaptable and collaborative ERP solution that will help them quickly access the information they need and minimize delays on important team decisions.

Named conductors, the next style of leaders are creative thinkers but may not always examine the finer details, so easy access to detailed and timely data is essential for this style of leader. This can give them the information they need to improve their decision-making and, enhance the performance of their organisation in the long run. The next style, carers, are typically solid planners but can be slow in making decisions. Here too, accurate and highly detailed data will help these CFOs reach decisions more quickly. With an intuitive dashboard system and the ability to share information at the touch of a fingertip, a next generation ERP solution can also help these CFOs build consensus to support their decisions.  Lastly we come to the visionaries, who make up nine per cent of CFOs surveyed. Characterised with grand ideas but with a lack of patience for examining the finer details, visionary CFOs need strong social collaboration tools and access to timely data to successfully share, develop and implement their creative schemes.

There are a wide range of ERP solutions that can address the unique and specific needs of each CFO leadership style. The key is studying which would best suit the company’s long- and short-term strategy and internal dynamics. By doing so, companies can easily streamline their operations and gain stronger competitive advantage.