Howard Wilson, CFO of PagerDuty operates in the realm of digital operations and incident response, where efficiency and resilience are paramount. A company that serves as a vital “safety net” for over half of the Fortune 500, especially as they explore new technologies like generative AI, PagerDuty focuses on anticipating disruptions and safeguarding against costly incidents. Wilson spoke with host Jack McCullough to share PagerDuty’s mission and his personal story—from growing up in South Africa and his early career in software engineering to his unconventional path to the CFO role. Listen by clicking below. The Q&A, lightly trimmed and edited for clarity, follows.
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We have a great episode. Thanks again to everybody for joining us. My guest is Howard Wilson. Howard is the CFO of one of the hot companies in Silicon Valley, PagerDuty. A little about PagerDuty, it’s an incident response company managing digital operations for more than half of the Fortune 500. It offers a safety net so organizations can experiment with new tech like generative AI. Howard, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I’m glad to be here.
I’m glad to have you. When we started talking, I was excited because I’d admired PagerDuty from afar. If I have a curse in life, it’s my tendency to oversimplify complicated things. Maybe you can give a more robust description of PagerDuty and what’s going on.
PagerDuty is the global leader in digital operations. What we endeavor to do for our customers is to help them anticipate the unexpected changes in the environment that could cause disruptions. If you think about the world we live in, it’s a digital-driven world. Whether you are using an application on your phone or using the web to search for information, behind that technology is a very complex technology stack.
As that technology stack has become more complicated, there are more opportunities for failure to take place. We help customers keep an eye on their infrastructure so that they’re able to respond before it creates a customer-facing incident. What that means is we help companies protect their reputation, manage compliance and help them reduce their costs, because an incident can be very costly and run into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Also, we help improve the productivity of their employees. We’ve got 30,000 customers on our platform, both paying and free customers. We continue to see how we can advance companies’ journey towards operational resilience.
That sounds like a good mission. How old is the company?
The company is 15 going on 16 years. We were founded originally by three engineers who had their early start with Amazon. They were trying to solve a problem that was a typical problem, where when something went wrong within a system, you needed to orchestrate the right people and get them to solve the problem quickly. We started in that mode of incident response many years ago. We’ve become what we would call an Operations Cloud Platform, which helps companies go all the way from detecting an issue to resolving an issue and then learning from it so they can prevent it from happening again.
What a world we live in. Cool. I want to get back to that, but I want to get a little on your own personal background before we do. Why don’t you share where you grew up?
I was born in South Africa. I grew up there, went to school there, and started my career in South Africa in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Johannesburg.
Did you grow up with a large family in South Africa?
Yeah. I have a family of four kids. We grew up as a fairly ordinary family, in many respects. My father was an engineer. My mom was largely a stay-at-home mom who looked after the family. She also felt very strongly about human rights, and that shaped a lot of my own thinking. Back then, South Africa in the ‘70s was a country that was fairly isolated from the rest of the world. We almost lived in a parallel universe to what was going on a lot of the time, so I appreciated my mother’s own level of activism in terms of helping us feel very strongly about things like social justice.
That’s fantastic. Before we went on the air, I noticed you had the rainbow behind you. You’re a supporter of causes?
That’s right. I’ve been an ally of the LGBTQ+ community for many years. I also have always felt very strongly from a principles basis around things like equality, whether it’s around race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, all of those things. I believe very strongly in human connection and in ensuring that we are treating people fairly and with good intent all the time.
It’s amazing that we even live in a world where that has to be said. In 50 years, it’s like, “What are you talking about?” It’s common-sensical. We’re going through our changes.
I also appreciate that I have a family where there’s a strong values culture. I’ve always had folks in my life, both personally and professionally, who have always placed a high value on how you treat and respond to others. It has become an important part of who I am.
It’s good for you because it’s easy for people like us to get caught up in our corporate world and not think about those things. I’m not judging people who don’t, but I respect that you clearly have made it a priority in your life. I want to get back to your childhood in South Africa. What was the first job you ever held?
My first job that I ever held, and this is going to sound strange, was working in a hardware store demonstrating magnetic window cleaners, which was a thing at one point in time. That was the first thing that I did, and then I did a number of other jobs that you would expect within the service industry. I worked in retail stores. I worked in a number of departmental stores. I did administrative work in companies. From early on, I felt the need to be able to make my own money, make my own way, and look for opportunities. I didn’t have high levels of discrimination in terms of what I was choosing. If it were work and I could do it, I would put my hand up.
Jobs that pay the bills, right?
That’s right.
That is a first. I often ask people what their first job was. That is the first time someone has given me that particular answer, and I’m going to go out on a limb to say the last time.
Those were all part-time jobs through high school and the early stages of my college education. I then moved into a role as a software engineer. I started out my career writing code and working in a product team, building product.
That’s interesting. I’m of a generation more than you. When I first became a CFO, 90 percent of the CFOs I knew had my resume, Big Eight accounting firm and controllership to CFO. There are so many ways to get there, including engineering or the sciences. We’ll explore that. You attended the University of South Africa. Did you study engineering there?
Yeah. I studied information systems, which was largely around software engineering at the time, and psychology. Those were my two majors. I studied part-time because I enrolled in a program through an academy to be able to accelerate the development of coders and developers, because there was such a shortage. The Computer Users Council in South Africa was set up as standards around how folks could get trained to be able to enter the workforce. It was almost a bit like an internship. I did that and studied part-time, and then got my first job, and continued my studies part-time.
You worked at a little niche software company called Oracle right out of college, is that correct?
I first worked for a company called SBL, which is where I did most of my engineering. That set me up for my work at Oracle. I was at Oracle for a long time, 13 or 14 years, and had a great opportunity to cover many different roles in that time, from consulting to various management roles, particularly those with a sales and operations focus.
It’s interesting. You’ve worked for some great companies. One hundred percent of my readers would certainly know Oracle. Along the path, who are some of the critical mentors that you had along the way, and maybe some of the most important lessons you learned that helped prepare you for the CFO role?
My first professional job as a software engineer or a coder was I had a woman who I worked with, Emmy Watt, who took the time to help me be good at coding. She used to sit with me and always had this mantra around how any problem can be solved. That left me with the strong impression that it doesn’t matter what you’re looking at. There’s got to be some path through. That’s something that’s stuck with me. When I think about myself and have to describe myself to people, I’d say my essence is around being a problem solver. That has set me up for all my roles through my career, which is that if there’s a problem that needs to be fixed, I’m the person who can solve it.
Another person who had a big influence on me was one of the directors of our division, who had shared this piece with us. I was early with the company. I hadn’t been there for a long time. We were having a design session. I remember I made this comment to him whilst I was looking at his design session. This is someone who’s new as a developer. I made a comment about, “If I could put in my two cents worth, I would say the following about this design.”
They listened to my comment, although I was new, young, and green. After the discussion, John came up to me and he said to me, “I appreciated you contributing to that, but I don’t ever want you to say, ‘My two cents worth.’” I was like, “What have I done wrong?” He said, “That undermines your contribution. Like everyone else in this room, you have a chance to make a contribution.” That has always stayed with me.
One of the defining moments for me is being aware that anyone on a team can make a contribution. You can make a contribution from your first day in a role. We should always encourage people to approach things with that mindset. You don’t have to wait. You don’t have to ramp up. You don’t have to wait 90 days. Think about what you can do to make a difference from the very first day.
That’s good advice. I do that a lot myself, what you did. I minimized my own point before making it by saying, “I know I know less than anyone else in the room.” You’re not selling your point, right?
That’s right. It’s a good reminder. You’re wanting to show that you’re not full of yourself, but sometimes, you need to state plainly what it is, and particularly if you’ve got a good audience.
I’m fascinated by PagerDuty. We’ll get into that, but how did you come into the role? One thing that I find particularly interesting is that you weren’t promoted from chief accounting officer to CFO. You went from chief commercial officer to CFO. I’d love to understand how that happened.
I joined PagerDuty when we were a much smaller company. We were less than $50 million in revenue. Now, we’re approaching $500 million. I’ve been with the company through a fairly large growth period. When it’s a small company with a small number of employees, you have to be fairly versatile. I might have been called the chief commercial officer, but it meant that I inherited a lot of functions that didn’t have a home.
For a period of time, because we were small, I had finance reporting to me. As we started to grow, then myself and our CEO realized we needed to make sure that we professionalized our finance organization and that we had someone sitting in the CFO seat. I had finance report to me on a temporary basis in other roles, but this was then the first time that I had it reporting to me on a full-time basis.
Jennifer then said to me, “Would you be happy to step into the CFO role?” I thought about it and realized a couple of things. One is that I don’t have to know everything. If I can build a team that has all the knowledge and know-how to make sure that we can operate effectively, that’s important. The second is that I’ve always taken the approach in my life that you don’t have to stay in your lane. You can bring value from your prior experience to any role.
I’ve also noted that the CFO role has increasingly become a business-oriented role as opposed to an accounting and finance role. I did have enough confidence because of my years in many operations functions and good training at Oracle, because at Oracle, if you were some type of leader, you had training in finance. I had roles where I had a very close intersection with finance as the operations leader for Asia Pacific. That then gave me the confidence to be able to take that on.
I sometimes say I’m the accidental CFO because I didn’t start out my career as a software engineer thinking, “I’d like to be a public company CFO one day.” I’ve allowed my career to take me to the next problem that needs to be fixed. At PagerDuty, there was this opportunity for me to step into this role. I find it rewarding. I love building great teams. I love being able to have influence across the company. I believe very strongly in having a strong company mindset. I enjoy the external nature of the role, meeting with investors, customers, partners, and other stakeholders, too.
It’s fascinating to me. Through this show, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to some of the very best CFOs in the game. What’s apparent, if it wasn’t before I started this process, is that the main role of a CFO is problem solving. They have to be able to do a host of other skills. I’m not diminishing finance and accounting because it is the chief financial officer, but the best CFOs are problem solvers. Who is better at solving problems than an engineer, right?
I like to think so. That point you make is something that has always resonated with me within the finance role, because so much around the finance role is about the benefit of the company or the organization. You’re not operating in isolation. You’re not there to support the business. You’re there to partner and drive the business.
The lens through which you have to look at it, whether you’re in an accounting function or an FP&A function, strategy, corp dev, investor relations, any of those, you have to think, “How do I benefit the company in what I’m doing? How do I increase the value of the company through this activity?” That does make you think about opportunities for optimization. It makes you think about improving your positioning. It makes you think about where the problems that need to be solved are. There’s a good correlation between that capability around problem solving and the role of a CFO.
That’s great. You mentioned partnering. In my day job, I am the CEO of a professional association for CFOs. The question that I get asked from CFOs a lot is, “How do you build a relationship with the CEO of a company?” You are fortunate. You’re working with someone who, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say she has become iconic in Silicon Valley, Jen Tejada. How do you build that true partnership between the two of you?
Jen and I do have the advantage that we’ve worked together across three companies over a period of sixteen years.
I didn’t know that.
We have a long history of working together. The strength of our relationship is around transparency and being open with one another. Having worked together for an extended period of time, you build up that trust on the basis that you have a high level of confidence in each other. To me, one of the characteristics that I always think of that is an indicator of the health of a relationship is your willingness to share not only the good news, but the bad news. I’m never a person who can keep bad news. If there’s something that I feel falls into that category of bad news, I would reach out to her immediately because I feel that the nature of our relationship, which is built on trust, means that there needs to be that level of transparency.
The partnership evolves through the experience of doing what you say you’re going to do and building that trust, but also through developing an openness, an understanding of each other, and also understanding what each of us would be dealing with in terms of our family lives. You’re the complete package. You’re not just a person at work. You have a whole life. It’s being prepared to integrate your life with your work in such a way that the other folks who work with you are able to understand that and see it.
That’s great. I wasn’t aware that you’d worked together three times. That’s fantastic. It’s a great relationship. As an observer, one thing that I’ve noticed is that CFOs, for years, have been saying, “The CEO true partnership is my most important partner.” I wouldn’t say that the CEO always necessarily reciprocated it, but in the last few years, maybe since COVID, more CEOs are saying the same thing. It’s not, “CFO is one of my partners.” It’s, “The CFO is my most important partner.” It sounds like you two probably are in that category.
Definitely. The other piece that is important there is particularly when you’re a public company, investors do expect that the CEO and the CFO can speak with one voice. That strong alignment is critical. I sometimes say that from an investor perspective, Jen and I have to be like hot-swappable. It doesn’t matter which one of us is speaking. We both need to be able to make sure that we are sharing a consistent message.
That consistent message means that the only way you can achieve that is if you’re aligned with the company’s goals and the decisions that we make. It also means that there’s got to be a healthy debate. We don’t agree on everything. We’ll have the discussion, and we can have it, frankly. Once a decision is made, we move forward, and any kind of debate that we had in the past is over because this is the way that you move forward. That alignment is something that I value and appreciate.
It makes sense. I remember from my first CFO job the advice I got from the board of directors and the CEO. Many years later, it’s probably still relevant. It’s like, “I want you to fight me tooth and nail behind closed doors. When we’re in front of people, you need to support me. If you can’t, let’s amicably find a way to figure that out. If you think I’m wrong and you don’t share my vision, that’s okay. If you can’t publicly support me, get on with me, and inspire confidence in the people that we need to inspire confidence in, we may not be the right team.” It sounds like you don’t have that.
That’s good advice. Certainly, for myself and Jen, that’s how we’ve always approached it. You often have to have a healthy debate, which means that you’re not always going to agree. Even if you disagree, you have to reach a point where you say, “We committed to this because this is good for the company, our employees, and our investors.” You achieve a high level of consistency as a result.
That makes a lot of sense. Getting back to PagerDuty, it is a fascinating company that has a great growth story. What are some of the biggest challenges and maybe some of the biggest opportunities that the company faces in the next few years?
This is probably going to sound like most companies when we talk about some of the greatest opportunities. For us, it is centered around how work is changing. PagerDuty has, for all of our existence, been a company that focuses on improving the efficiency of work, initially of developers and IT operations folks, but increasingly folks across the business.
When we have a look at the trends that are happening from an AI perspective, we see this as a mechanism in which work is changing. We believe that we play an important role in helping to create a new environment for work. In our context, we think about work that can be done by humans, and there’s work that can be done by agents. We’ve already done work on an agentic AI platform, which we’ve spoken about publicly, which will be released within the first half of 2025. That is focused on ensuring that we are able to get together the right mix of both human interaction and agent interaction.
With the whole AI explosion onto the scene within the last couple of years, particularly with people’s focus on the Large Language Models, people started developing a concept almost like an AI that can do anything and do everything. Increasingly, as we’ve done more research in this area, AI has specialized areas. I would almost think about it like you don’t go to your doctor for legal advice.
In the same way, when we think about the ecosystem around PagerDuty and the operations that we serve, we could have an agent that manages shifts, an agent that deals with delivering business insights, or an agent that is a service reliability engineer. Our opportunity to create this great interaction between agentic AI and between humans, so that we can manage work more effectively within an operations environment, is our great opportunity. That also ends up representing our challenge because there’s a lot of activity in that space. Being able to clearly differentiate yourself is important.
We have a particular obligation to our customers who rely on us for being a high-fidelity, enterprise-grade, scalable platform. Companies rely on us. We need to be available when they’re having issues with their own environment or infrastructure. We have to ensure that we can always deliver high-fidelity information to our customers. Our context has a higher bar in some respects than what someone else might be doing.
That’s a great answer. I want to share with you, too, because we are talking a little about strategy. Though you don’t have the traditional finance background of a CFO, you’re running the financial operations of the company and the financial strategy. How do you make sure that the overall corporate strategy and the financial realities are talking to each other? It wasn’t that long ago that those two things were separate. That was when accountants were CFOs exclusively.
As more of the CFO role has become business-oriented, a lot more of my peers have things like corporate strategy reporting to them. I have corporate strategy and corporate development as one of the functions that report to me. That does ensure that I keep myself with that small strategy team and keep myself abreast of what’s happening in the market, what’s happening in terms of competition, and what the landscape looks like in terms of technology trends.
We have a fairly robust process that we go through each year in terms of evaluating our strategy and contemplating what has changed and how we need to rethink things. We have a tightly integrated process to then take our strategy and break it down into 3 to 5 years, and then build very specific plans around the first year of that strategy each year, which becomes the basis for our annual plan. That linkage has meant that we are always able to check back on anything that we have on our business plan for each year. We are able to validate that against whether this is helping us advance this element of our strategy.
That’s fantastic. One thing that leads me to, and this is right up there with the top 3 or 4 questions that I get asked, is building a resilient culture. I’m not talking about risk management and insurance programs to help you after, although certainly, that’s part of it. How do you think of a resilient company? How does it bounce back from catastrophes? It seems like every few months, the world changes yet again. As a leader of the company, how do you build that resiliency into how you live your life on a daily basis?
When I think about this in terms of both for myself and my team, it’s about creating a culture where you are open to a level of risk. That might sound strange for somebody in the finance organization because you’re always thinking that finance needs to be risk-averse. In our day-to-day activities, we need to be able to expose ourselves to change. This could be even small changes in terms of how we do things.
I always encourage my team where they’re regulatory things, then things have to be completely buttoned down, but if you’re thinking about a process around order management, why not think about a different way of doing that? If you’re thinking about applying automation to how you approach treasury management, give yourself the space to experiment, try that, and see the results.
You only learn by trying things. Some of the time, you’re going to get it right, and some of the time, you’re going to get it wrong. Creating a safe environment where people can experiment with change helps build resilience, because when you get another change coming along, you’re not as rigid. You’re able to flex yourself to be able to move forward.
With my team, we live with this constant mantra that change is the only constant. As we’ve grown as a company, each stage has brought along a new set of challenges. With each new set of challenges, whether they are related to us scaling as a company or becoming increasingly distributed, building teams outside of the US, and moving from a single product to a multi-product to then a platform, all of that brought about a fair amount of change.
As we’ve had to deal with the fact that we were a private company to a public company and all the economic ups and downs we’ve seen over the last few years, all of that gives us the opportunity to then make sure that we learn from the change and harness it. It needs to be on a personal level. We need people to feel comfortable with change at a personal level.
We live in an environment where the rate of change is high. If you think about even what you have on your mobile device, the applications that you have access to are different from a year ago or five years ago. You didn’t have ChatGPT to answer a question for you. Now, we routinely book our travel, check in for flights, and order meals. We all do that with the comfort of our device. The rate of change there has been high, so our own ability to adopt or adjust to change needs to be high.
That’s fantastic. I was thinking about this. What is it that you do? You help businesses respond to critical incidents in real time. As the CFO and leader of your company, it’s probably imperative that you be able to do that yourselves.
That’s right. In our values as a company, we have a number of values that are centered around being able to take the lead on things and show that you have that leadership, or to ensure that you can bring your authentic self to work. That means that you should be able to try, change, and learn. We focus a lot on the value side of things within the company.
I’d love to talk about technology because it’s increasingly critical for CFOs. You are highly qualified to discuss technology from the CFO’s perspective. AI is the big game-changer. The biggest concerns that I hear from CFOs are around cybersecurity, data privacy, and fraud prevention. Any advice you can give people? You’ve got to embrace this. You’re going to be left behind if you don’t, but we are cautious by nature. We don’t want to make that mistake that’s going to end up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal tomorrow.
It boils down to doing your homework. I make an effort to ensure that I stay abreast with the technological developments, not to understand the details of the technological developments, but more to understand what the technology is able to deliver. If you have a good understanding of it, then you are not as afraid of it. If you know the kind of work it can do, the data models that would be used, and the sources of information, then it starts helping you create a context. I’d always say to make sure you stay current with what’s happening in terms of AI.
As you research this, you’ll find that there is already a lot of work that has been on by companies around ensuring that you have safe environments. For us, for example, as a company, we have a number of LLM models available to all employees, but we deliver them through a safe environment where our data is protected. It’s all about asking the right questions.
A CFO asks the question, and we want to release this to all employees, like, “What data is used by the model? What happens to the data that our team puts in? Does it stay within our environment? What’s the likelihood of errors? How would we train folks to put the right prompts in in terms of building a prompt?” Don’t let it be thrust upon you. Rather, see how you can run towards using AI.
That makes a lot of sense. Let’s chat about AI. It’s a game-changing tool. Workforce transformation and cost management, how do you see AI impacting those?
If I step back for a moment, if you look back since the industrial revolution, we’ve had waves of change that have brought different types of automation. In those types of automation, there has always been this fear that the automation is going to put people out of their jobs. There’s always some shifting of jobs that happens with each major innovation, but typically, what it does is it means that there are certain types of roles that you can let machines do at the most fundamental level, which allows humans to do other things.
What AI will enable is a shift in the workforce to, in many respects, hire orders of work that need a different kind of insight. I think about work in terms of having three buckets. You’ve got work that ends up being highly predictable and highly routine, which is a great target for automation and AI. If you are able to have AI agents that are able to deal with that work, that’s great because it’s going to remove work that is work that people probably don’t enjoy doing, particularly much. It might be dealing with level one service requests. It might be responding to queries from customers about their invoices. It might be about being able to answer a query from a vendor about an outstanding payment. This is work that’s highly predictable. We can rely on AI to help us get that work done.
You’ve got parts of work where it is partially understood. Some of it is highly repeatable, but someone needs to provide some of the incremental context. This is where you have humans operating together with AI. That’s where it might be a case of humans creating the context. They’re leveraging AI as part of that experience. This may be something where it’s not as well understood, but parts of it can be automated.
You have other areas where you have the human lead, the topic, because it’s new, it’s novel, and it’s got some aspects of it that are not highly predictable. In that case, the humans then invoke AI as they need it as part of that. I can see how different functions within an enterprise would use AI collaboratively based on roughly those three models.
There is one question I’m curious about. I know you’re on the board of a company called CalmWave. I’m wondering if you want to tell us a little about that. What fascinates me is, how does your role on the board of a company impact your day job of being a CFO for a company?
I’m a board advisor to CalmWave. I’m not on their board full-time. I act as an advisor. I have regular interactions with the CEO in terms of helping them frame what an early-stage company is. CalmWave has only been founded in the last few years to solve a very important problem, which is dealing with the fatigue that occurs within intensive care units and hypercare units, where nursing staff practitioners are often overwhelmed by alarms that are going off within an environment.
The CalmWave technology is able to take all of those signals in, ferret out the noise, and reduce the noise that’s happening within an intensive care unit. Why that’s important is because so much of the time of practitioners within those environments could be spent going up to an alarm that’s beeping at a patient’s bed. They go in, look at it, everything’s okay, and they silence it. That’s created a distraction for the nursing staff. It also increases the level of anxiety within what’s already an anxiety-filled environment when alarms keep going off. This is about bringing calm to those hypercare environments.
For me, the balance is interesting because I stay closely connected to the company, understanding the direction, and providing input. I do that in conjunction with the work that I do at PagerDuty. I find that I can often take the insights that I’ve developed from running a much bigger company and apply those within the context of how to think about go-to-market or how to think about if you are trying to speak to new investors or help facilitate introductions to investors. It ends up being complimentary.
It makes sense. More companies are not only allowing their executives to be on boards. They are actively not only encouraging, but helping them to find jobs that make sense for the reasons you mentioned. It develops a broader skillset. We only have a few minutes left. I want to get your perspective on the future of the CFO. It’s changed a lot since I was one. I was a great accountant and became a CFO, deservedly so, back in that era. It’s a little different now. It has changed a lot since COVID. Crystal ball time, where do you see the nature of the CFO going in the next few years? We won’t hold you to this.
My crystal ball is that the CFO role is going to increase in importance for organizations. It’s already a strategic role. The concept of business partnering is well understood. When I see even the trends of the number of CFOs who have stepped into CEO roles, it has increased. That is a strong indicator to me that the role of the CFO has developed a much broader business orientation. If I go back several years, it happened infrequently that a CFO would move into a CEO type role.
I also think that the CFO has already become an agent of change in companies. That trend will continue. If you understand the underpinnings of a business, the capital structure, and the financial profile, you are in the best position to be the agent for change in terms of how the company can better deploy the capital, or what are the opportunities for the company to be more efficient, or what is the growth potential growth opportunity. We’re already on a path that sees this business-centered nature increasing, but the change agent and the strategic elements will only be emphasized.
That makes a ton of sense to me. I want to ask. You mentioned earlier that your relationship with Jen that you’re not just two workers, but you’re full, complete people. Do you have any advice for people? It’s a stressful job. How do you maintain that work-life balance?
It’s interesting. I don’t think about work-life balance because I don’t think that you can compartmentalize work on the one side and life on the other. I do think about how you integrate your work into your life. Particularly when you’re an executive or you’re aspiring to be an executive, you can’t hide your personal or private life. It needs to be integrated into your life that you have when you’re at work. That means that it builds high empathy with your team members because they understand you have a child who’s in college and living in another country. They understand that that’s a space that you’re coming from.
It means that you also need to be able to feel comfortable saying, “I’m not going to be available tomorrow afternoon because my son has an important basketball game. I’m going to take a couple of hours out to do that.” It’s about managing those things in an integrated way that brings balance. It also means that when you are with, for example, your family, try to be present. Try to make sure that you can make those moments last.
That’s great that you are making the commitment to doing that. I always like to conclude with what your advice is for the next generation. I’m thinking of those who are on the cusp of getting a CFO job, and even maybe those who are in their first one, and they’re coming across a lot of challenges that they didn’t anticipate. What should they be focusing on to have a fun and rewarding career?
I would say always try to understand your essence. What is your unique skill and capability that you bring? Cherish that and be proud of it. That might be a case of saying, “My essence is I’m a consultant,” or, “My essence is a problem solver,” or, “My essence is around keeping people on the straight and narrow,” or whatever it is. Find the essence or the piece that you see as being your superpower and use that to the full. Make sure you bring that to the forefront.
The second is don’t be afraid to change or try things you haven’t done before. I have never stayed in my lane in my career. I’ve always put my hands up to take on new things. Even if you stepped into a CFO role, don’t think, “My domain is this organization that I now manage.” Think bigger, like, “My domain is the company,” or, “My domain is the market. How do I continue to extend myself?” I learn every day. I make mistakes every day, too. You have to be able to put yourself out there in terms of being able to take on new information. Don’t think that you have to know everything. No one expects you to know everything. A curious question is often a question that can expose you to a new set of learning. That would be my advice.
