By Andy Burrows

I wonder if this is you?

• You feel like you’re one of the people who works the hardest in the Finance department;
• You feel like you’re very busy all that time, and you hardly ever have time to take breaks or holidays;
• And yet people don’t seem to appreciate your work, they don’t talk about you as a high performer;
• But they’re pretty quick to point out your errors and mistakes;
• No-one is mentioning promotion opportunities to you, but other people seem to get the fast track;
• You’re either stressed and at risk of burnout, or you’ve given up trying to impress people.

Well, have no fear! I am here to put a few ideas in front of you that may just hold the answers you’ve been looking for!

No guarantees! You may indeed be in a situation where you’ve been asked to do the impossible, and you genuinely have too much work on your plate.

But, from what I’ve seen in my 25-year+ career in Finance, there are a few thoughts...

By Andy Burrows

One of the first things I teach my coaching clients is personal effectiveness.

Personal effectiveness – if you want a rough informal definition – is the ability to get important things done.

A big part of that is what has been called “time management”. I’ll come back to why I think that terminology is unhelpful in a minute.

But first, the reason I teach this first is because of the number of people who would drop out of coaching groups because they “weren’t getting time to make use of the learning and coaching opportunities”. In order to help people get the career benefits, and to help them to improve their impact in their workplace, I had to first enable them to open up time to learn and change.

And on top of that I would hear people saying they didn’t have time to join  my coaching group to get the CFO skills, the business-focused Finance skills, to level up their impact in their business and...

By Andy Burrows

One of the common questions I get asked relates to meeting resistance in the business.

For instance, I was explaining in a webinar recently that Finance and the CFO are like coaches to the business. We provide the performance management framework.

And someone said, “what if colleagues in the business don’t want to be coached?”

It’s a really good point.

And it’s worth knowing how to address the issue, because if you think about it, great CFOs don’t seem to have this problem.

So, if you want to progress in your career you need to develop those kind of CFO skills that will give you influence within the business.

It also affects your job satisfaction as a Finance professional. Because it’s disheartening when you can see that you really can make a difference and add value, but no-one seems interested in what you have to say.

Here's a little video clip of my answer to that question.

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By Andy Burrows

Do you feel like a failure sometimes?

Do you get embarrassed or demotivated because of things that haven’t gone right for you?

Do you look at other people and get jealous because they’re successful and you’re not?

Well, if so, I hope that my personal reflections will help you.

My biggest failure

When Talita Ferreira was interviewing me for her Leadership Hypothesis video series, she tripped me up unintentionally by asking me a question. She asked me, “could you say there’s a failure in your career somewhere that someone could learn from?”

For some reason, the question I heard (and which sticks in my mind) was: What is your biggest failure?

My heart started pounding at that point, and I had to quickly compose myself. I was being recorded! The show must go on!

I didn’t duck the question. But I don’t think my answer was entirely coherent either! And you can check out the interview and 26 others like it in Talita’s ...

By Andy Burrows

Influence is something that Finance people in business really want, it seems to me.

I hear it a lot:

“How can I get more influence in the business?”

“How can I increase my visibility in the business?”

“How can I get included in strategic discussions, instead of being kept out?”

And that’s thinking in the right kind of way, fundamentally. We don’t want to just provide information, or even merely insight based on information. We don’t want to turn our work over to the non-Finance areas of the business in a “take-it-or-leave-it” kind of way.

We want our work to make a difference. And it can only make a difference if people listen to us, understand us, take note and act on what we tell them.

Our information should deliver insight. But for our insight to have impact we need to have influence!

So, this article gives you five ways to do that. It’s not the whole story, but it will give you a lot to think...

By Andy Burrows

I want to give some helpful thoughts today about developing the behavioural skills needed for Finance business partnering.

I’ve written in the past about how essential it is for Finance business partners, CFOs, and indeed Finance professionals in general, to develop behavioural skills. And I know that other Finance writers are talking about this too.

And people are hearing the message, and I get asked about it. One question I received during a Finance careers event went something like this:

“I’ve worked in technical accounting and as a financial accountant, but my ambition is to do the best I can in my career. So, I really want to move to a Finance Business Partner role, as I feel there is more career growth potential in that area. My challenge is that my behavioural skills need a serious boost. What can I do to help improve my communication skills and my ability to influence or persuade my stakeholders, or even to simply be convincing enough at...