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Team Players: Results of AFP's Women in Finance Survey, Sponsored by Citigroup
September 19, 2005
Elizabeth Johns and Michael Tompkins
The old command and control methods of management are falling by the wayside as companies embrace innovation to stay alive. Many women in finance find this suits them just fine. Turns out they’ve been using creative collaboration all along.
When we went to write the 2005 Women in Finance survey this summer, the London transportation system had just been bombed. Washington, D.C. was on high alert. Oil had just topped $60 a barrel. Bernie Ebbers had been convicted of corporate fraud. The U.S. Supreme Court was about to become two justices short. Reports from Iraq led the headlines.
We weren’t really thinking about career paths. There were bigger issues, such as what kind of company could possibly thrive amidst this chaos.
As usual, business guru Tom Peters had a few answers.
In his new book Re-Imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age, Peters characterizes the New Economy as one shaped by upheaval, explaining that successful companies will be those that can respond effectively to a few key trends. One of these trends, he says, is the emergence of women both as drivers of the New Economy and as effective business managers.
According to Peters, “women’s strengths match the new work imperatives.” The New Economy, he says, runs on principles that women are used to, such as collaboration rather than command and control. The thinking is that businesses of the future will survive only through radical innovation and that innovation isn’t possible under a command and control model. Peters goes so far as to say that even today, good leaders revert to command methods only in extreme circumstances.
At AFP, we know that the treasury-finance function is going through some change. We also know that corporations are attempting to foster innovation in treasury operations, with some of these innovations featured in this magazine. The question remains whether companies are also changing management methods.
For finance departments struggling to prove their relevance to the larger organization, the answer might have implications for the future. If Peters is right, then it stands to reason that many companies would see a need to foster a collaborative environment—or at least a communicative one.
So we decided to ask readers whether they were seeing a shift in management methods. This would give us a reading on their preparedness for the New Economy.
Managing/Motivating
What we found was that new methods have taken root. In AFP’s second annual Women in Finance Survey, sponsored by Citigroup, nearly everyone who responded said interpersonal and managerial skills are significant or very significant in advancing their careers. The most important skill indicated was effectively managing and motivating employees (85%), followed by effective negotiation (73%), communicating one’s values to others in the organization (72%), business ethics (71%) and consensus building (57%). Interestingly, percentages were higher for men than women in both managing/motivating and consensus building.
According to one respondent, communication is more important up the ladder where "technical competence is assumed at levels above assistant treasurer. From this point it becomes more important to hone the strategic and business partner capability."
One respondent said managers need to be able to translate business and finance models into non-finance stories so they can be communicated throughout the company—especially in language that can be understood by non-financial managers in a way that is meaningful to them. Others felt a need to prove to people outside the accounting and treasury function that the job was important at all.
Training
Although 60% of respondents said their companies provide interpersonal and managerial skills training, 2.5 times more women than men reported that they receive this training from mentors. The difference was that men took company-provided training, learned from a direct supervisor, took a class or didn’t take part in training at all. More women seemed to seek out a mentor.
In text comments, many women also said they provided mentoring to others.
Ethics
In comments, some respondents said the need to shine is still important, but the ethical environment is improving, with many respondents describing their companies' ethics policies.
A few had scary stories from the past: "Fourteen years ago in business school, we used to have very heated debates on ethics in a business policy class. We were in a quant school where about 80% to 85% of us were in corporate finance, with an eye toward investment banking. There was no SOX, and ‘Confessions of an Economic Hit Man’ were more speculative than real. In one of those classes, an older student who had worked on Wall Street said that the job of a financial expert is to boost revenue and maximize shareholder value and let others play the ethics game." Times certainly have changed.
In the end, successful financial managers need to have a variety of skills, the survey found.
"For treasury-finance, specifically, you need to have vision, be adept at change, have strong ethics, question processes and proposals, and have a fine balance of diplomacy and authority," one reader said.
Other AFP articles on Women in Finance:
Copyright © 2005 Association for Financial Professionals. All Rights Reserved.
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