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CFOs Wanted: Controllers Need Not Apply

Executive summary Marie Leone - CFO.com | US

Why companies often won’t consider controllers when choosing their next finance chiefs.

Rounding out the survey of external CFO hires, 17 percent of big company finance chiefs were chief executive officers and general managers immediately before being named to the CFO slot, 9 percent were senior financial generalists, 3 percent were treasurers, 4 percent were involved in strategy and corporate development, and 5 percent came from “other” disciplines.

Outside controllers aren’t prime candidates for finance-chief spots because they lack leadership experience, says Korn Ferry managing director Charles Eldridge. Thirty-three percent of the insiders were controllers, demonstrating strong succession planning in those companies, says Eldridge.

The study revealed that among the insiders promoted at Fortune 500 companies, 19 percent were former treasurers and 14 percent were one-time senior financial generalists. The change was necessary and crucial to a public company’s survival, but their “super controller” status shoved such executives off the path to the CFO office, observes Eldridge.

Further, says Lorraine Hack, a partner at Heidrick & Struggles, a search firm: “Companies don’t want to replicate in a CFO what they already have in a controller.” Korn Ferry has already begun to address that problem by acquiring two executive coaching companies. Controllers still have a leg up on treasurers in competition for the CFO seat, Boyle suggests.

Memo to CFOs: Don’t Trust HR

A professor says most human resources professionals are ill-equipped to carry out value-added workforce planning and transformation.

Executive summary David McCann - CFO.com | US

Most companies today spend too little effort on attracting and retaining top strategic talent and too much on satisfying the rest of the employee base, asserted Rutgers University’s Richard Beatty, who spoke at a general session during the CFO Rising conference in Orlando. “HR people try to perpetuate the idea that job satisfaction is critical,” Beatty said. “But there is no evidence that engaging employees impacts financial returns.”

Beatty based this conclusion on employee surveys done at IBM and other companies that found little relationship between job satisfaction and performance ratings. To buttress his argument, Beatty presented data from a Gallup survey on the performance of about 4,500 customer service employees at an unnamed major financial firm.

The next two quartiles registered 40 percent and 27 percent positive responses, respectively, but there were enough neutral responses that the employees’ net performance was positive. The lowest quartile, however, scored a net 2 percent negative impact.

“You’d be better off had you paid these people not to come to work,” Beatty said. Human resources is also behind what Beatty called the “silly” idea that a company should try to be the “employer of choice.”

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