Leading by the Numbers

Finance professionals sometimes have difficulty making the transition to broader leadership roles. There are five critical changes they need to navigate to succeed.

By Byron Hanson

Spring 2016

A few years ago, the chief financial officer of a large company told me that he estimated that his organization had only about a 30% success rate when promoting finance people to leadership roles in or across business units. The CFO wasn’t happy with that rate; he wanted a better pipeline of executives with a finance background, because the company’s business model and strategic choices required leaders to be well versed in finance.

That conversation prompted me to explore — through a combination of interviews, a survey of 35 finance ...