Like many of you, I have spent significant time thinking about 1) What does FP&A do and 2) What should FP&A do?  My team and I landed on this very “packed” vision statement for our finance business partnering group.

Does a career purely in finance hinder your ability to be a senior finance leader? Making sideways movements such as becoming a project manager which still has a massive link back into finance, or moving to a strategy department which requires an understanding of the financial implications of company’s strategy can be beneficial.

What are the fundamental attributes of somebody in a finance manager role and what makes a good finance manager, and for that matter a good finance team?

There is hardly any book on human relationships and influence that is as revered as Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’. A great many leaders across the world have sworn by and largely benefited from this masterpiece.  

There is no lack of discussion about the skill sets that FP&A professionals need throughout their careers to be successful; even a cursory search on the Internet would provide a wealth of resources.  Broadly speaking, those articles focus on four areas of skills:

FP&A teams have been growing in popularity because they have always known about one big thing that drove and accelerated value better than anything else, which other functions and teams sometimes forget. This is why organisations then, and even those today, need a FP&A team. So what is this one big thing?