GrowCFO has created a CFO Competency Framework that covers the key skills required to become an effective finance leader.  This is rapidly becoming the global toolkit to help finance leaders benchmark their skills and competencies against their peer group.  It also acts as a CFO Readiness Toolkit to help the next generation of aspiring CFOs.

During this podcast episode, Dan Wells and Kevin Appleby discuss the purpose of the CFO Competency Framework.  In addition, we discuss how it is helping so many finance leaders to accelerate their learning and development.

GrowCFO noticed that there was a huge gap in the finance leader ecosystem.  Nobody had previously produced a global competency framework to help finance leaders benchmark their existing skills against those required to become a CFO.

Senior finance professionals were struggling to identify their skills gaps and to prioritise their most important learning and development objectives.  As many people say, “You don’t know what you don’t know!”

Our CFO Competency Framework is designed to deliver many important purposes.

It is no surprise that many finance leaders are already using the GrowCFO Competency Framework to accelerate your career progression.

GrowCFO has a huge network of aspiring finance leaders, first-time CFOs, experienced CFOs, CEOs, Chairs, NEDs, other C-Suite members, advisors, investors and recruiters.  We held focus groups with representatives from these communities to determine the required competencies for the modern-day CFO.

GrowCFO also consulted with a huge number of GrowCFO members to obtain people’s views and feedback.  We worked with technology experts, graphic designers and programme developers to build a market-leading digital CFO Competency Framework that operates on a self-serve basis.

Following this, we engaged inspirational CFOs to create a huge number of competency lessons that are located within our world-class learning management system.  We have mapped each of our CFO competencies into online training courses and regular workshops.  This allows finance leaders to efficiently generate your tailored learning and development plan to further develop their skills and address their biggest challenges.

Our CFO Competency Framework contains three categories: Foundation, Implementation and Impact.  These help you to preserve value, create value and maximise value throughout your role.

Each category comprises three competencies, giving a total of nine competencies across the framework.  These competencies are inter-connected and you will often be using many of these concurrently.

Each competency contains five different skills.  Therefore, the GrowCFO Competency Framework contains a total of 45 skills that are relevant to a typical modern-day CFO.

There is a lot for finance leaders to master and our framework will constantly evolve over time, in line with the ongoing evolution of the CFO role.

The Foundation category contains three competencies: Governance and Control, Operational driver and Financial Planning & Analysis.

These three competencies form the foundation for your future success within the role and are critical towards preserving value within your business.

The Implementation category contains three competencies being: Strategic Business Partner, Catalyst for Change, and Fundraising and M&A.

These competencies represent your ability to deliver the company’s business plan and to create value in your role.  You are likely to be combining your hard and soft skills with a powerful effect.

The Impact category contains the following three competencies: Leadership, Commercial mindset and Soft skills.

These contain many of the advanced competencies that really make you stand out as a top-quality finance leader.  These are harder to learn but allow you to maximise the value that you create across your firm.

The following section provides more insights regarding each competency:

There are detailed guidance notes covering each of these competency areas within your CFO Competency Framework.

Your CFO Competency Framework is incredibly easy to complete and takes around ten minutes.  It is a digital toolkit which has received extremely positive feedback from your finance leader community.

The framework contains an overview of the GrowCFO competencies and has dropdown menus for each skills topic.  You will be asked to rank yourself by selecting your current level against each of the 45 skills topics.

Your GrowCFO management team have produced guidance notes to help determine your current rankings.  For each skills topic, you should select either no experience, basic level, intermediate level, advanced level or not relevant to your career.

You then submit your results and start getting excited about reviewing your summary report.

Upon completing the survey, you will receive an email containing a summary of your results.  This summary report helps you to easily identify your skills gaps to include in your career development plan.

The report clearly maps your personal development action plan into GrowCFO’s activities. This helps you to prioritise completing your most relevant online lessons, courses and workshops.

Your CFO Competency Framework summary report also benchmarks your ratings against GrowCFO’s finance leader community.

Many members of the finance leader community are completing your CFO Competency Framework and we are already receiving responses on a daily basis.  This provides us with a huge amount of anonymous data that we can use to benchmark you against your most relevant peer group.

Within the survey, you will be asked to specify the nature of your current role and your level of seniority.  You will also provide your company’s ownership category, size bracket and industry sector.

This information allows us to tailor your benchmarking report according to each of the above.  Therefore, you can feel confident that you are being benchmarked against your most relevant peer group.  This is all done on an anonymous basis to protect your data privacy.

Aspiring and existing finance leaders should log into growcfo.net and then click on Training Programmes to access your CFO Competency Framework.  Please message Dan Wells or Kevin Appleby if you have any questions.