How the best CFOs carry unpopular opinion

Before you get good, you get humbled. You may not surf (in which case, thanks for staying with me the last 2 weeks!), but you are 'doing life'. And it's likely you've been humbled at some point, whether that be personally or professionally. When you're learning something like surfing, you're humbled publicly and repeatedly. But the surfers who progress are not the ones who are naturally talented – they're the ones who are okay being a beginner in front of other people.

This is the first thing you need to get comfortable with as a CFO.

As a surfer, I've learned that surfing is not simply riding waves. It's eating right, stretching my hips regularly, paddle strength work, time in the water and educating myself to read the ocean. None of this looks like surfing, but cumulatively it compounds to make surfing possible! Similarly, being a CFO is not just the presentations and meetings, it's the reading, the analysis and diagnostic work and the preparation that happens before the boardroom.

The real work for a CFO is the work that no one sees.

But it's not just the training that's made me a surfer. You'd have heard of the common phrase 'we're human beings, not human doings'. The same goes with any identity whether that be surfer or CFO. I didn't just 'do' the work, I spent time at the beach, around surfers from 10 years old to 80, and continue to expose myself to people I wouldn't otherwise meet. Identity isn't just what you do, it's who you're around and where you place yourself. The CFO who wants to lead at this level needs to inhabit that identity not just do the things.

This is where it gets real. Sometimes the role of a CFO means carrying unpopular opinion: seeing what others aren't ready or willing to see and saying it anyway. I often say half the challenge for a CFO is knowing what's going to happen, and having the patience to take people along the ride until they realise what the CFO has known all along. That takes conviction more than competence, and courage over comfort.

CFOs who understand that leading means not just treating symptoms, but diagnosing cracked architecture, know conviction and courage are non-negotiable attributes.

When I paddle out to the ocean, I know the waves don't care about all the work I've done. But I do – and that's why I continue falling.

Love to hear your thoughts....