The organizational context and objectives of the coaching process: a newly promoted financial manager who took over the role of CFO in the organization board, a very skilled technical person who knows all of the core business information flows becomes a board member and has the challenge of being a good partner for the business, both he and the entire department he is leading.
The coaching project sponsor (the President) specifically asked the CFO to be more than “the one who knows all the numbers in the organization, to be a good consultant for the board but also for the entire organization that needed more efficiency”; in his new role he had the goal of raising the team and orienting it to serve better, more carefully the needs of the internal client and with more availability.
The biggest concern the CFO had was “how to get enough time to coordinate everything that’s happening and how it was happening in the team?” He entered a big team with a lot of “troubles” going on for a long time, with many demands from the business… a complex activity! And he put on work, working 12-14 hours/day, including on weekends. After two months he was exhausted … His goals were still not touched. In the coaching process, he realized he was doing all the activities on his own: he made the decisions he was implementing, supervising and correcting everything that came out of the team, pushing everyone… A question that made him think about the change was “Why does a team of 30 specialists need more if he does it all alone? These people are extra … it would save a lot of budget if it was him alone! “The CFO realized his strategy of “everything or nothing” in which he controlled everything or he was either absent (absorbed by operational problems). In the coaching process, the client learned to delegate and create a well-organized team that responded in a timely manner to the requirements and had repositioned himself and some very good people in his department as good business consultants in the financial area; he managed to change his image of “very good financier” with the image of a “manager with valuable input in the board team”.
