CFO THOUGHT LEADER

How do you make a great hire?

Buthman: You know, I had somebody ask me what my leadership philosophy was at one time, and it boils down to working hard and being nice. And so, I have a sign in my office that says, "Work Hard and Be Nice." And it doesn't mean, necessarily, hours in the day. But I think the two elements are, you got to put forward your very best effort, your very best business performance, no matter what projects you're faced with. And it means your best effort in developing yourself and trying to improve the impact that you have on an organization in the people around you. So that's when I say "work hard" I mean bringing your very best effort and being nice is about doing the right thing.  I have many examples of that it's easy when you're accelerating someone's career through an organization, but you can be nice and tell someone that they no longer have a role to play in your organization. And bring in a perspective that you're doing things that is in the organization's best interest and always coming at things with a genuine desire to make an organization or to make people better and to bring out their best. I think the combination of those two things are things that I've always tried to live by and try to live up to over my career.

When you entered the CFO office for the first time at Unity Technologies, what’s the one piece of advice you wish someone had given you?  

Foley: We started this conversation talking about the organization that I inherited and how I've had to change that. I would've put much more emphasis earlier on systems capabilities of the company. Being a first time CFO, I came in with an observation. We need a planning team. We need a controller. We need to build that team. A year and a half into doing that, the constraint wasn't the capabilities of the team. It doesn't matter how good they are. If you don't have the systems to support them, they can't do their job. And so, I would've parallel tracked that. I would have, maybe not hired a CIO straight off the bat, but I would've hired a great director of IT and systems that understands, you know, as I said before, a great modern architecture should be, and driven that really hard and early while building the finance capabilities, so that we'd be at a point today where all of that's on place, and it's not. So, you know, look hard at systems early, get advice, get expertise on where you really are. It took me too long to understand the hole we were digging ourselves at off in a systems perspective, and it does take a long time to get out of that hole. So, look at that early, look at that day one while you're looking at all the other functions, it's just as important.

A distinguished finance leader answers our question: When you entered the CFO office for the first time, what’s the one piece of advice you wish someone had given you?

Dickerson: As far as leadership goes, I keep coming back to self-awareness. Where are you going to add value in the organization and where are you not? Build around those to balance out the competencies you need in your group to be successful. The thought here is that weaknesses are not necessarily a bad thing, and the biggest strength is understanding what they are and building the right competencies and the right attributes around yourself so that you have the right balance around your team to be successful overall.

I also think that patience is very important. Patience to learn and develop. Put the time and energy into developing your skillset so that when you do become a CFO, you’re ready for it. Too often today, I think, people want to jump that learning curve a little bit, and they are very focused on taking on as much responsibility as possible. I’ve seen too many examples of people who have moved up the learning curve too quickly, and they didn’t appreciate the time required to develop and learn.”