If junior finance staff are to progress into top public sector jobs then they need the opportunities and support to help them develop the necessary skills early in their career.
Throughout local government and the public sector there are some incredibly ambitious, aspiring and talented chief finance officers. These are people at the top of their game and in positions of great responsibility. Although they come from very diverse backgrounds they nearly all share similar early career experiences of taking responsibility, of involvement in challenging work and of being coached or mentored by some senior figure.
The five to ten years that they put in post-qualification, before their first senior position, gave them the practical experience and wisdom they needed in order to move from the relatively simple, black and white of junior leadership jobs to the complex greys that they have to navigate today.
Increasingly, as finance staff progress and climb the career ladder on their path to becoming CFOs, the level where certainties start to fade and complexity takes over is coming earlier. Now, relatively junior managers are expected to work in areas where things change fast, where there are few certainties and where the decisions that they have to make are never straightforward. Even if the size of the traditional public sector shrinks, the demand for this type of leader will increase.
In the current system of training professionals, the potential pool of available leadership talent is fed by qualifying people early on in their careers and then offering them regular technical skills top ups. Some through determination, ability and fortune swim to the top, but many good people miss out on the early exposure to complexity that they need to progress.
There are lots of ways this situation could be addressed and two seem to stand out. One is the size of the potential pool from which future leaders come and the other is increasing the efficiency of locating future leaders from within this pool.
CIPFA has adopted a model of promoting its finance qualifications across the public sector in a variety of ways. These include joint programmes where a number of smaller employers group together and sponsor trainees and fast-track courses for financially unqualified senior managers. This is aimed at increasing, or at least maintaining, the size of the potential pool of finance professionals available for the top jobs of the future.
The other helpful approach is to give more people in the pool experience of managing complexity early on in their careers. This is already happening to some extent due to organisations delayering and increasing cross-organisational working which forces more junior managers to do things that might have been the preserve of senior managers a few years ago.
But just giving people responsibility for something complex does not mean that they will be successful; in fact it could be counter-productive. Forcing people to do too much, too early could lead more of them to fail.
To make this approach work well there needs to be a structure that ensures that people get the challenging work they need as well as the knowledge and support necessary to succeed.
Acquiring the confidence to take on ever more challenging and complex work has three main parts.
First is the acquisition of basic knowledge and skills like how to develop a project plan, essential political awareness and ways to think critically. While many people acquire this sort of information through trial and error there are some tried and tested techniques that should be taught.
The second part is applying knowledge through doing. Development projects are needed that allow people to take risks, succeed more often than fail and learn lessons from the experience.
The third part is improving the relationship between future leaders and the people who can help them develop. If you look into any top leader’s career history you will find that professional and other networks have played a significant role in their development. Mentors and coaches need to be there to offer support and challenge.
Effective leaders can be defined as those people who take actions that influence others to do the right things in the right way. This definition captures the idea that leaders need other people to allow them to achieve their aims. The three-part approach outlined here can help future leaders to think through the complex problems that they will increasingly encounter, enabling them to act in the right ways and to get other people to do the right things.
Brendan McCarron is a senior associate with CIPFA and leader of the Chief Financial Officer Leadership Academy. More information on CIPFA’s Future Leader’s Academy can be found here: www.cipfa.org/Events/F/Future-Leaders-Academy
