Growth and Optimization
Build Relationships in Your First 90 Days as Finance Leader
As a new finance leader, you’ll spend your first few months building important relationships throughout the company and setting goals for yourself. As part of that, you’ll also be gaining a true understanding of company culture and politics, while forging new connections with your fellow employees.
Navigating the interpersonal aspects of a company isn’t a clear-cut task. But using a simple framework can help you meaningfully observe, learn, and network to succeed in your new role.
Here’s how to gain a deeper understanding of the people and relationships at your company in your first 90 days as finance leader.
Get the detailed checklist to help build relationships and set career goals in your first 90 days as finance leader.
Build strong relationships to ensure success
In your new finance leader role, you should be ready to manage up and manage down. It helps to have strong working relationships, which you can nurture with frequent, clear, two-way communication.
Manage up effectively to make an impact
In most cases, the manager you report to will be instrumental to your success. Set up a meeting as soon as possible with your manager to discuss priorities and clearly define your new roles and responsibilities.
In your first few meetings, see if you can learn more about business objectives, how things get done, and who the main decision-makers are. Try to gain insights into the team members who will report to you, their roles, and the best ways to communicate with them.
You should also get the basics on—and get access to—the systems and platforms you’ll be using regularly.
Learn more about the finance process and technology and get the checklist for the first 90 days as a finance leader.
Build relationships with direct reports
Early on, set up weekly one-on-one meetings with direct reports, plus a weekly team meeting. This will help you start building a working relationship with each person before dealing with everyone as a group.
Encourage an open and ongoing discussion—with individuals and teams—about what aspects of their job are most important to them, what they love doing, what they dislike doing, what their challenges and wins are, and what it takes for them to do their job. And don’t forget to ask them—regularly—what you can do to help them succeed in their role.
Decode the company culture
Understanding the culture and norms of the company—and where you fit within that space—is key to informing how you do your own job. If you’re new to a company, it can take some time to really get to know its culture.
Start by looking in company documents for details about the company’s vision and mission statements—this should give you a general sense of the intended culture. But you’ll discover even more about the culture in everyday interactions and processes. See opportunities for improvement in culture? Check out tips to help improve it.
When you meet with teams, ask them what their culture is like within the team, and within the company. Engage them on what they value most and how they interact and work together. Listen to what’s being said directly and listen for cues in their stories to learn the history and reasoning behind how they operate and how that might have an impact on company finances.
Navigate the politics of current financial processes
You need to understand the political landscape within a company so you can navigate it efficiently. You usually won’t find this aspect of a business documented in writing, but it’s basically how things get done in the business.
In your first few meetings with team members, find out who runs things and makes key decisions. Not just the CEO, but everyone who influences those decisions.
Find out whose buy-in you’ll need across decision-makers and build those relationships. Their support will help you bring your ideas to fruition and make a bigger impact on the organization.
Explore cross-functional teams’ finance needs
Meeting with department heads, or managers within those departments, could give you valuable information. Before these meetings, review company numbers at the departmental level to get some background and create discussion topics.
When face-to-face, ask them about their pain points and challenges when it comes to finance and accounting, including how they overcame challenges in the past, and what issues they see coming up in the future.
Plan to improve on your role
When you step into a new role, it’s a good time to review what you’d want to do differently from your previous roles. Looking at your previous role, reflect on your successes and failures. Use this opportunity to evaluate areas where you might want to take a different approach that would also benefit the new company.
Read the previous article in our series: Navigating Tech and Best Practices for New Finance Leaders