Rebels wanted: The new finance job description

How often have you heard the words “rebel” and “finance” in the same sentence? Probably never. Finance organizations traditionally attract people with the exact opposite disposition. They are controllers, risk managers and rule followers. But considering the pace of business today, an infusion of “rebel talent” is just what Finance needs.

Francesca Gino, a Harvard Business School professor and behavioral scientist, has studied and written extensively about rebel talent¹. As she discussed at the 2021 Virtual Summit Series with Harvard Faculty and Accenture, rebels get a bad rap. So bad that it’s hard to imagine why organizations would want to hire them—particularly finance organizations.

But as Gino argues—and her research bears out—rebels are not who we think they are. They are not the outcasts, rabble rousers and lone wolves who negatively impact organizations. Instead, they are the curious and innovative people whose unconventional thinking, perspectives and penchant for novelty can transform performance for the better. Put simply, rebels are more like Willy Wonka than they are like Darth Vader.

Many CFOs found their inner rebels out of necessity during the pandemic. A full 79% of those in our latest global survey say that while their role has become more strategic in recent years, COVID-19 was a flashpoint to speed up this transformation². It’s no wonder. CFOs faced intense pressure with no playbook to follow. They had to adapt. They had to improvise. And they had to move beyond their own experience to lean into the new.

All of this is the essence of rebel talent, which we have seen manifest in different ways across industries. Consider the beverage industry, for example. Soda and beer brands lost the volume and margins that come from sales to restaurants, bars and stadiums when these places were shuttered for months. CFOs had to pursue creative ways to work with bottlers and retailers to unlock profitability in this “never normal” situation.

Delivery company CFOs also made pandemic-related shifts for the business. While residential shipping skyrocketed with the boom in e-commerce in 2020, the more profitable business deliveries dropped with business closures. These CFOs had to remake their networks. They had to find strategic advantages in new areas like delivering healthcare supplies and weigh investing in cold-chain transportation to ship vaccines.

What makes these CFOs rebels? They have an ability to work with the hand they have been dealt—to move quickly past the orthodoxies that say “this is how it should be done” to fresh thinking that says “this is how it could be done.” It’s about self-disruption and breaking the mold. As Jorge Gomez, Executive Vice President and CFO of Dentsply Sirona, told us in our research, “Circumstances are forcing us as finance professionals to embrace the need to keep learning, to understand that what was useful yesterday may not be useful tomorrow. We need to be our own self-disruptors.”

The CFO is not the only rebel who is needed in today’s finance organization. We see a clear need for a rebel revolution in Finance. This revolution has been spurred by the pandemic, but it will be needed long after the virus is under control.

Finance leaders have been (re)aligning the skills mix with the digital transformation of finance in recent years. Of course, Finance will always need core finance and accounting skills. Even so, these skills are leaders’ lowest priority, according to our survey. Instead, finance leaders want to reskill and recruit people who excel in data exploration and analysis, scenario planning and horizon scanning, innovation and storytelling.

These skills are a departure from the MBA skills that typically crowd finance job descriptions. What’s fascinating is how these newly-coveted finance skills embody rebel-like characteristics and behaviors. Once again, it’s all about people who look at issues from different perspectives, bring a sense of curiosity, a desire to learn, and a confidence to challenge the status quo in a positive way. Think of it as being “productively disruptive.”

The finance executives who attended Gino’s virtual session with us plan to bring her thinking into their organizations to pursue their leadership opportunities (see below) and generate new value and purposeful growth. Their responses to our poll reveals that driving innovation through “failing forward” resonated well. These leaders are interested in evolving finance culture to create an environment of “safe failure” where “You take the risk, and I take the blame.” Attendees also report their intention to listen more, set employee learning goals, encourage curiosity and inquisitiveness systematically, and inject novelty into their teams’ day-to-day work.

² Accenture, “CFO Now: Breakthrough Speed for Breakout Value,” 2021