Budget Fluency Can Further Your Career
Women in Business Need to Talk About Budgets
by Suzanne Doyle-Morris (Read about her here.)
(Listen to it here.)
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Today, we’re going to talk about one of the most important skills a professional woman can have—the ability to read budgets and be fluent in figures—to take her career to the next level. As we all know, in organizations money talks. Knowing how to show the amounts you save or generate for your organization is a fantastic way to raise your profile.
When I wrote Beyond the Boys’ Club, initially some of the women I interviewed said they hadn’t always seen the political value of presenting these figures in the best light, and sometimes had to learn through trial and error. Angela Mohtashemi, a director at PwC, learned that presenting her budget figures in the right way determined how much she was given to spend on an ongoing basis. It also established her credibility. She learned through developing a strong and much-needed relationship with the finance manager. She explained to me, “The first year I was here, I didn’t understand how focused they would be on the numbers and I didn’t take it seriously enough. I thought if we performed well, the numbers would take care of themselves. My team consistently achieved, but the numbers were not representative of all we had accomplished. The finance manager began to explain to me some of the basics—like why it was better to have a larger number appear in a certain box than in another box, for example—and how important it was for a department to bill small pieces of internal work as well.”
Angela continued, “Or even making simple changes as to which day we billed a client, so that the credit showed for one month and not the next. Small changes made our numbers—the same output we already had—suddenly appear much stronger. What I didn’t realize was that many of my peers were getting that type of support; I just hadn’t known to ask for it.”
The informal training also worked well for the finance team, as they had received criticism that they didn’t communicate their services well enough internally. This gave them valuable practice and helped make others aware of what they could do for specific departments. Similarly, another woman I interviewed, Mary Hensher, head of IT at Deloitte, found the need to move out of always being in the IT department, an area in which she could have become marginalized because of its distinction from the main fee-earning areas of the global firm. She knew she needed to spread her wings and build relationships in other areas. Similarly to Angela, she got the wider-ranging contacts she needed initially by presenting budgets—one of the most important things she could learn to do in an accountancy firm. She said, “If you spend all your time in the IT data centre, you are not going to get to talk to the people who are your customers. You have to put a real effort into being recognizable. I don’t walk around with a screwdriver or a spanner, because there are others who can do that, others who are fundamental to the organization. You shouldn’t have the head of IT doing that.”
Learning to present your best numbers is especially important for women who are not in direct profit-and-loss roles. Most board memberships are given to executives with direct profit-and-loss experience in operational roles. This is problematic for many women who may want to progress to board level positions but work in marketing, HR, or even finance, which are less likely to have many directors visible and reporting to the board. Many women do not know that this type of experience is a virtually unspoken prerequisite to board membership. Some women may unwittingly hinder their careers by eschewing these types of responsibilities or not directly requesting this type of experience early on in their careers.
So, make sure you get comfortable with the language of budgets and spreadsheets so you can use them to your team’s advantage.
Listen to today’s podcast here.
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