Interviewing for a role in FP&A?
These are the soft skills and leadership skills employers are looking for
FP&A Soft Skills
In addition to well-rounded technical skills, FP&A Analysts need to have the soft skills necessary to succeed in a fast-changing environment that requires not just strong analytical but also well-honed communication skills. In particular, we need to continuously develop the following:
Attention to detail - the ability to produce accurate reports and spot inconsistencies
The ability to take a step back and look at the bigger picture - getting stuck in the details and not seeing the forest for the trees can happen easily. We need to be able to connect the big picture with the details to be able to make strategy recommendations and challenge the status quo.
Accountability - we need to have a strong sense of ownership for what we do since without it we cannot hold others accountable.
Presentation skills - we regularly need to present complex data and deep insights to senior stakeholders including executives.
Effective business writing - given the broad scope of most FP&A roles, to be effective we cannot solve every issue by having a meeting. We need to be able to concisely communicate insights and requests in written form as well.
Tailoring communication and decks to different audiences - we gather data and insights from team members who are directly addressing issues on the ground and need to communicate those to various levels in the organizational hierarchy. Each one requires the message to be tailored differently, according to which insights and level of detail matter most to them.
Separate noise from signal - our job is to find the insights in a haystack of information that is constantly reaching us via dashboards, reports, slide decks, and conversations. We add value by separating what matters.
Asking Questions - FP&A has to hold other teams accountable to plans and goals and understand why business performance is different from expectations. We do that by asking the right questions at the right time to surface root causes.
Storytelling through data - in the end, FP&A teams are storytellers. Rather than sharing tables and tables worth of data we need to make it clear what the story is. What does it mean that this metric is unfavorable by 10 percentage points while this other metric is favorable by 5? Based on that what should we do next to learn more about the issue, mitigate the risk of it occurring again, or capitalizing on the opportunity?
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FP&A Leadership skills
In FP&A, we all have to be leaders, no matter if you are just starting out as an individual contributor or if you manage a large team. That’s because we have to lead across functional boundaries and successfully manage our own agenda to navigate ambiguous and fast-changing environments. In particular:
We need to know how to prioritize - Many FP&A teams partner with multiple business teams. Each of them has its own agenda, goals, and requests. We need to have a framework on how to prioritize those demands against each other, against requests from within the Finance team, and against making progress towards our own long-term goals.
How to delegate - Everyone in FP&A needs to know how to delegate, no matter their level on the hierarchy. That’s because if we don’t delegate to other functions, it can happen too easily that we get buried in administrative, data-hunting work without the ability to make progress against our long term goals. A good example is reporting. We can either spend time every week assembling a report manually, or we can ask IT or Data Science to create an automated dashboard.
How to build professional relationships and create trust - Our ability to have influence when it comes to improving profitability and growing responsibly comes down to our relationships with our stakeholders. In the long term, we cannot influence our business partners by applying pressure through escalation. If we attempt that, other teams naturally stop sharing information with us and we lose our ability to make detailed recommendations. What we need to do instead is build trust and use every encounter, meeting, and email to build the relationship with our business partners and demonstrate that we are all on the same team, rowing in the same direction.
Bias for Action - The best analytical and communication skills don’t get us far if we aren’t ready to take swift action when the time is right. Bias for action is a leadership skill that works inwards instead of outwards. It’s leading ourselves and taking the first step instead of waiting for someone else to move first.
Influencing across departments - Once we establish strong professional relationships and an environment of trust, we are ready to nudge our business partners towards improving profitability and growth. FP&A leaders need to know the different influencing skills available and determine which one fits best with their own style, their individual business partners, and the issue at hand.
Holding business partners accountable - Finally, we have to find the right balance between constantly building relationships and not letting our business partners off the hook when performance deviates from expectations. We do that not by finger-pointing and calling people out, but by working with our partners, guiding them along the path of surfacing root causes, and helping them with creating action plans to move the business in the right direction.
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