‘My chief executive relies on me to supply him with very brief overviews of complex situations. Recently, I prepared a spreadsheet with 40 tabs and crunched 20 complex KPIs – and he wanted it all summarised on one side of A4. Am I right to think he’s being lazy?’
Accountants love spreadsheets. They are one of our most used and useful tools. It is immensely satisfying to convert a mass of data into a rational structure and reveal the underlying relationships.
But spreadsheets are merely a tool to covert data into knowledge, and it sounds like you haven’t quite completed that process. You can roam through your spreadsheet, highlighting trends and patterns, spotting which issues need attention and identifying risks or weaknesses, but your chief executive doesn’t want to take that journey. He’s not being lazy.
In fact, as you point out, he relies on you. He wants only the tip of the information iceberg, accompanied by a lot of analysis. Think of this not as omitting information, but as adding value to it.
Management accountants combine technical expertise, soft skills and understanding their businesses. It sounds like you’ve got good technical skills as far as spreadsheets and KPIs go. But you also need to use your analytical ability – not only on the data, but to anticipate your chief executive’s information needs. And you need to use your soft skills to find out his perspective, concerns and ambitions for your organisation, and to present with conviction your analysis. What gives you confidence in your analysis? A good instinctive understanding of how your organisation behaves – the cause and effect relationships; the factors that drive costs; where and how revenue is created.
With the exception of poker players and chess grandmasters, our capacity to pay attention to multiple issues is limited. Interviewers make up their mind about candidates within seconds. Witness statements are notoriously unreliable. Management theory suggests that we can’t effectively supervise more than eight people. And, when making a presentation or writing an article, we can probably get only three main points across. With that in mind, here’s my advice:
• Employ all your management accounting talents – technical expertise, soft skills and understanding of the business. • Have confidence in your ability to highlight what is important. • Imagine you can give only your chief executive eight indicators. Which ones would you choose?
Louise Ross is a technical specialist at CIMA
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Lazy? In a word: no. If someone just handed me a load of raw data I’d throw it in the bin. I don’t want a load of numbers. Frankly, an intelligent monkey can crunch the numbers; that is not what a management accountant is paid to do.
What your boss wants is for you to take that data and analyse it. You need to identify trends and patterns and work out which ones are the relevant ones. You ought to know what information your boss is going to find interesting – and it won’t always be the same. Chief executives go through periods of focusing on certain things. When you’ve worked out what the important headline trends are, you need to convert those numbers into a story. Don’t just hand over figures. A picture can speak a thousand words. Use graphs that demonstrate a truth at a glance.
Chief executives often have short attention spans. They are impatient. Pictures can communicate information rapidly. Personally, I have a visual bias. I prefer images to numbers. A great graph will tell me in a few seconds precisely what I need to know.
So how do you improve your performance? I think it starts by understanding both your boss and the business you work in. You need to find out what is keeping him awake at night. As your relationship develops you’ll get a better idea. But take the initiative. Become an expert on your company. Learn where the numbers come from; what the challenges are. Hone your entrepreneurial instincts by reading the financial and trade press. Then you’ll spot areas of concern before your boss is aware of them. He’ll come to rely on you. You’ll become a strategic asset. And you’ll get a real thrill from adding value, not just playing with numbers.
Ben White is a serial entrepreneur. With brother Jos, he founded Star Internet, MessageLabs and Notion Capital.
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