This 2025 compilation episode looks back on key takeaways from CGMA credential holders and other experts featured on the FM podcast in the past year. The discussions focus on AI, skills gaps, leadership, and other topics.
What you’ll learn from this episode:
- The potential of AI tools and the value of learning them early.
- Technology’s impact on communication skills.
- One solution for creating more cohesive teams.
- Advice for navigating uncertainty and difficult colleagues.
- The link between leadership and imposter syndrome.
Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:
— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Steph Brown at
Stephanie.Brown@aicpa-cima.com.
Transcript
Steph Brown: Hi, listeners. Thank you for taking the time to tune in to the FM podcast this year. We hope you found and continue to find these conversations valuable and informative. As we approach 2026, we’re going back to reflect on some of this year’s key takeaways. On this episode, we’ll be highlighting some of our guests’ views across technology, leadership, wellbeing, and other topics featured in 2025.
To start, here is part of a conversation with Olcay Yilmaz, FCMA, CGMA, finance director of Rail Infrastructure at Siemens at UK & Ireland ENGAGE in October. I asked where he sees the most potential in AI and the impact of learning about technology early on in his career.
Olcay Yilmaz: I think the key around the new technologies emerging around AI, is all about supporting the decision-making instantly and not with a huge delay. In the past, we always had to go back into our offices, do a further piece of analysis, go back into our boardroom, and present those. Now we have a situation that with new information coming up, and we can see it already with the Power BIs and Tableaus of this world. That you are able to support decision-making of key stakeholders imminently.
This transition will be accelerating even faster, I think, in the next few years. It’s important that we as a finance function continue to engage around data architecture; how to make sure that the right data is available at the right time for decision-making.
When I was a student, I had to implement, believe it or not, Excel in the company which I worked in. When you have that exposure early on, you’re associated with a new technology which then helps you really to create a certain value add which others can’t do.
What is also great to know is with all those years we had tried to automate, digitalise, and it was a huge effort with the existing systems. However, now with AI in particular kicking in, you can see that it will be all getting a little bit easier. In order to support the business with decision-making, we will have instant information available rather than going backwards, retrospectively, to understand, and that makes really a difference.
Brown: But while technology offers organisations and finance professionals a competitive advantage, organisational psychology specialist and leadership coach Clare Haynes had this to say when I asked her about knowledge gap trends she has observed across teams.
Clare Haynes: I think, increasingly, teams are becoming more alienated, and junior members of teams or people with least experience are not learning from the people that have more experience. People are not as confident to speak to each other, literally. We have a culture now where we send an email or we send a meeting invitation in order to have a phone call. Whereas we used to pick up a phone to make a phone call. It’s the informality, and it’s all of the little bits of information within that informality that seems to be skipping.
I think it’s part of us being so digital. We have a better relationship with our phone than we do with other people. Our attention is constantly on a screen, and so we’re losing the informal, spontaneous interactions and the skills that go with it: the natural building [of] rapport. People will say, “How do I start a conversation with someone? How do I go into a conversation without planning it?” To them now, it’s a risk rather than just having the confidence of let’s go into conversation and see what happens.
I think that’s why people are scared to say what they might feel because they’re trying to get it right. I don’t think it’s about formality. I think it’s just, in a lot of cases, we’re losing normal communication skills.
Brown: AI is expected to accelerate innovation for the profession, providing professionals with systems to optimise efficiency, decision-making, and value-creation, according to Yilmaz.
But, as Haynes explained, increased digitalisation could, in some cases, widen skills gaps in organisations.
Adding his perspective on this challenge, Bayport Financial Services’ CEO Alfred Ramosedi, FCMA, CGMA, proposed that return-to-office mandates, when implemented with clear purpose, could improve communication and idea sharing in companies.
Alfred Ramosedi: We can communicate better, and people can be on the same page with everybody else as to what’s required, what we need, and what the norms are. I think the team dynamics will work better. Teams can actually talk to each other. Instead of me trying to get hold of another team member, I can’t get hold of the team member. I can now just walk across because some of the issues can be resolved without setting up meetings. Because work-from-home policies normally work on structure. Having a meeting? I must find you and set up an appointment. I can’t just rock up into your space.
Team dynamics will work better and, also, with being back, we are now falling back to the old comfort zone, if you like, for other companies, which is being able to measure productivity in the old way.
Team dynamics seems to be falling away. Normally teams are physical things, warm bodies, where people work together. Team dynamics, where teams are just virtual teams, become a bit difficult because sometimes you need conflict. You need being in a room to be able to build teams to the next level.
Brown: As workplace dynamics continue to shift, this era of constant change can bring pervasive effects on health and wellbeing, according to Swaran Singh, professor of social and community psychiatry at the University of Warwick. I asked what advice he would give professionals’ grappling with change and uncertainty.
Swaran Singh: Uncertainty is what causes the most worry, most anxiety within any change. How do we deal with it? First, we have to acknowledge what we are feeling. Remaining silent, avoiding it, thinking it’ll go away does not help. Acknowledging honestly what we are feeling is the first step.
A second very useful thing is to articulate it. Put the problem into words. Once you do that, you can hold it in your hand and eyeball it. When you see it in words, having stated what it is, surprisingly sometimes it looks smaller and more manageable than it was imagined inside your head.
Then you look at the change itself. What is the nature of the change? What is the change? Who needs to change? In what way? Is it temporary or permanent? Will it really matter in the long term? Then you come back to: What is my part in that change? What can I do? Let me focus on the bits of the change that are within my control and see what I can do about it.
It is very easy to let yourself go when you’re demoralised. “I don’t care what happens to me. Life is bad, anyway.” It is precisely at that time that you need to most look after yourself. It’s very easy to escape into alcohol or unhealthy behaviours. It is much better to pay attention to your sleep, to your eating, to your rest, to your recovery.
And finally, talk to someone. Talk to someone who you trust, who is your friend or a loved one. They will help you get things into perspective. Things are always worse in the imagination than they are in reality.
Brown: How people intuitively respond to the stresses and strains of modern working life can sometimes make them difficult to work with, executive coach and author Nick Robinson explained. So, when we’re dealing with a difficult colleague, he said, it’s important to lead with compassion.
Nick Robinson: When you ask a difficult person why they’re doing what they do, they don’t think they’re difficult. From their point of view, they’re just someone trying to make the most of what for them is a very challenging situation and just do what they think is the right thing in that situation from their perspective.
Self-doubts, imposter syndrome … They can really add to people’s stress responses and keep them stuck in a cycle of negative behaviour.
One of the principles in my book is a thing I call fierce kindness, and it’s about being really compassionate, but also not tolerating things that you shouldn’t tolerate. Over the years, I’ve seen the best leaders have this really dynamic combination. Almost second-by-second, they’re switching between being really compassionate, really understanding, having loads of empathy. And they’re saying, “But this thing can’t be tolerated.”
I always like to start from the compassion point: How do I relate to this person? How can I soothe their fears? What’s my communication style like? Is that landing with them? I would say this: “I’m not difficult.” And if I’m not difficult, that means I can change the way I’m doing things. I’ve got flexibility and choice about how I go about things, so I can just keep trying how to relate to that person until I find a way that works.
Brown: Imposter syndrome — from CIMA-qualified leadership coach and DEI specialist Sophie Turner’s experience — can intensify when leaders fail to provide valuable feedback.
Sophie Turner: When we are thinking objectively, when we are writing down what we are good at and what we’ve achieved, it’s very easy to demonstrate and to prove. Well, of course, I belong here. Of course, I’m good enough to do this role. Unfortunately, our negative self-talk and the training our brain has been placed under overrides that.
I had some fantastic managers in my career both within finance and within leadership, but I didn’t ever really receive very good feedback. That’s a key element in terms of allowing, creating that objectivity for us.
Yes, we need to own it ourselves, and we need to create a space where I don’t allow my negative self-talk to creep in. However, if I’ve got an external person who I respect, who essentially is in control of my career to an extent, I need good feedback from them because that will help me believe that I belong here as well.
Brown: Continuing the discussion on leadership, Wassia Kamon, CPA, a member of the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants’ Women’s Initiatives Executive Committee (WIEC), emphasised the importance of representation for women experiencing imposter syndrome.
Wassia Kamon: Whenever women are in a room and they are outnumbered by men, they tend to shrink and not necessarily speak up. When you are in a male-dominated world and/or profession or room, wherever you go, you have to be more intentional about owning your space and your seat at that table. Unfortunately, a lot of those tables were not necessarily made to fit us, but we still have a voice.
The first CFO I worked for when I joined corporate finance, the corporate accounting industry, as we like to say, was a woman. Her name was Toula Argentis, and, to me, she was such a great model because she really showed that it was possible. Because in a lot of organisations, it’s usually a male CFO. Again, that representation really helped.
I was able to also have her as a mentor and [ask] questions [for] anything accounting, finance. But, also, “How do you balance life and kids?” Because while I was there, I got married, I had two young children. How do you balance all that: maternity leave, kids getting sick, but also pursuing education? She was very supportive. But it was also inspiring to see that it was possible. That’s really how I was able to find my voice is being surrounded by people who genuinely want to hear your voice. That environment is really key.”
Brown: Thanks for joining me to look back on some of our 2025 highlights. For more insights and advice from any of the speakers included in those segments, please click on the embedded links in the transcript to access the full episodes.
On behalf of the entire FM team, we wish you all the best in 2026. And we hope you will join us again next year for more discussions with CGMA credential holders and other experts. I’m Steph Brown. Thanks for listening to the FM podcast.
