Many of my fellow small business CFOs and Controllers mistake my singling out a BOSS as one of the main frustration triggers for an ardent enmity towards business owners. The truth is quite opposite. As the matter of fact, most of the time I find myself on the same side as my boss; shoulder to shoulder, fighting the daily war of commercial survival.
Yes, it's tough to deal with their complex of unlimited powers. At the same time, I always say that business owners create our jobs and that alone merits respect. I also never imply that all CFOs and Controllers are made equal. I've met plenty of inadequate, limited, lazy and dangerously indifferent financial execs who damaged the companies they were supposed to guard. In due time I'll write about them as well.
But we interact with out bosses more than anybody else and that's why they are prominently featured in my posts. Being a CFO or a Controller makes it inevitable that everything a CEO does or doesn't do becomes a concern and frequently a touchy subject.
And one of the touchiest subjects is the Scope of Responsibility. I cannot even count how many CFOs and Controllers have complained to me over the years about perceived imbalance between their scope of responsibility and that of their bosses.
This disconcert derives from two sources. First of all, it's the much-discussed here overwhelming multitasking of the senior financial management.
Secondly, it's the confusion about what exactly the Scope of Responsibility is. Even though the position's breadth of influence on the business is important, it is not just the number of tasks and duties you perform. The key factor is the depth of the impact executive decisions make on the company's future.
The way I always looked at it is as follows. If you are fortunate to work for a brilliant entrepreneur who, given sufficient time and support, is capable of generating ideas that will ensure your company's prosperity and growth, that should be his ONLY task. I consider it my job then to take away from him all functions I can handle myself in order to free him for what he does best. I don't let bankers or vendors bother him; I don't allow him to fiddle with numbers; I don't ask him to learn the operational system. As the matter of fact, I prefer them not even know Excel. All I want them to do is to create business strategies, network, establish new commercial relationships.
Let me leave you with this simile of sorts. Radiohead's frontman Thom Yorke cannot read sheet music (neither does Sir Paul McCartney, by the way). His musically educated multi-instrumentalist band-mate Johnny Greenwood have been deliberately resisting for 25 years now to teach Thom any musical grammar out of fear that it may diminish Yorke's creativity. That's a great executive support strategy.