Leading change: The CFO agenda, International Women’s Day

The AICPA & CIMA CFO Conference begins April 23 in La Quinta, Calif. The co-chairs of the conference planning committee joined the Journal of Accountancy podcast to discuss top-of-mind issues for finance leaders and to preview the agenda for the in-person event.

Ted Delgado, CPA, CGMA, and Summer Redmon, CPA, finance executives themselves, shared what they learn from attending the conference each year and explained the ways that the pace of change has affected the CFO role.

Also, Lisa Simpson, CPA, CGMA, AICPA & CIMA’s vice president–Firm Services, joined the show to discuss International Women’s Day, which this year is on Saturday.

Resources:

• CFO Conference registration information and agenda.
• Podcast conversations in September and January with not-for-profit CFO Janice Stucke, CPA.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• The value of self-awareness and servant leadership for CFOs.
• Redmon’s explanation of a former boss referring to herself as “CFO-plus.”
• Delgado’s summary of a session on navigating business slowdowns.
• Highlights of other topics and panel discussions at the conference.
• The importance of International Women’s Day to one AICPA & CIMA leader.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Neil Amato: Welcome to the Journal of Accountancy podcast. This is Neil Amato with the JofA. I’m talking today with the two co-chairs of the CFO Conference planning committee. That event is in late April in La Quinta, Calif., near Palm Springs. There’s an early-bird signup deadline fast approaching [Monday]. We’ll include a link to the conference’s homepage with registration info and the agenda in the show notes for this episode.

Now, on to the conversation with Summer Redmon, CFO at Ascend Healthcare, and Ted Delgado, finance vice president and controller at McLane Company. Summer and Ted, thanks for being on the podcast. We’re glad to have you today.

Ted Delgado: Yes. Thank you.

Summer Redmon: Thank you so much, Neil. Excited to be here.

Amato: The keynote address that kicks off the conference has, as part of its title, “the inner game of leadership.” First, what does that phrase mean to you? Or I guess asking it a different way, what role does internal development play in making a great finance leader? For either one of you.

Redmon: I can kick us off. I think that inner game, a lot of that has to do with just a lot of self-awareness, really understanding who you are and what your values are and understanding how that translates into your leadership style. Because I think ultimately that’s how you’re going to navigate the financial decisions that you need to make and working with your team to make sure that you can lead them through a lot of uncertainty and change. We have plenty of that going on in our world right now. I think really working on that piece is important.

Delgado: Also, from the point of view of how leaders behave today. If we think of ourselves as servant leaders, then it’s a question of how we serve others and really show them by example the way forward. In many times, that means the way we act and speak under very difficult circumstances. Our demeanor, our attitude has an impact on others, and so that’s why it’s so important that we think about what we’re projecting ourselves and, with that, being able to lead ourselves personally before we lead others.

Amato: Following up on that, the finance function and finance leaders are being asked to do more — more, all the time. Clearly, they have teams to manage, benchmarks to hit, and it seems like it could be easy to neglect any personal development when you’re in such a role. How do you find time for yourselves to stay on your game?

Redmon: Yeah. I used to have a boss who called herself CFO-plus because I think even 10, 12 years ago, the role of CFO was really changing pretty dramatically. I know that the AICPA likes to say that we went from a CFO-no, to a CFO-know. I think that, ultimately, if you’re not working on how to develop yourself, then you’re going to really miss out on a lot of growth opportunities that are going to help you as you grow into this new role, really.

I do things like, I work on the planning committee for the CFO Conference. I also work with groups here in the Seattle area, where I live. In those instances, I really work to make connections with other folks that are in similar industries or similar roles to work with them, to try and figure out how I can learn things from them. How they can learn things from me. And sometimes also just have some fun and connect as people, too, because I think, if you don’t have that time away from your job, it can really lead to some pretty quick burnout.

I think that creating those relationships is really important. Then I think also just really understanding how to make sure that you’re present and what it is that you’re doing. I think we like to use the term “mindfulness” a lot, but I think that back in the day, mindfulness was just allowing yourself to be bored sometimes, and then that’s where the creativity came from. I think that for us to be able to try and just give ourselves that space is important.

Amato: Yeah. I don’t think we spend much time “being bored” these days. Ted, do you have anything to add to that?

Delgado: Yeah. Now, I was thinking about how for years, we have said the pace of change is accelerating, and it happens all the time. It seems like more, especially because of how technology is changing the way businesses operate and is most likely to even change in a big way how finance and accounting operates within the business. Obviously, data is the foundation of everything and understanding it, making value-added insights out of it. For that, right now, many cases, it’s beyond just the financial data.

What has happened in the past is that because finance has always dealt with data in one way or another, then we’re asked to do more with data that may not be financial at all, but it’s all connected, and, therefore, those connections require us to develop our skills constantly. We can say teaching ourselves or also being aware and having connections, like through the AICPA, these conferences, and basically having great people like Summer and others throughout our network to learn what’s happening and tell us things that we’re not aware of, we can really miss out on opportunities for the business or start preparing for things.

For that reason, I see that self-development as almost foundational. Think of it as, you got to eat every day, so it’s not a choice. It’s the same as business. You got to develop yourself. If you don’t, you will not be a really good business person. You will not be a good finance person in any position if you don’t continue your own development.

Amato: This conference is one of the ways, of course, that development happens. One of those sessions, Ted, you’re talking about how to successfully navigate business slowdowns. Can you preview that session just a bit? I’m sure there’s going to be some relevance to the attendees, given just the overall state of the economy, for them to learn from that session.

Delgado: Yeah. Absolutely. It’s interesting that when I proposed this theme, many people were saying, “Do you really need to talk about that? I think the economy is doing pretty well. It’s very resilient. Why are we talking about a slowdown?” I said, “No. People were talking about recession two years ago, didn’t happen, so that seems like not something we want to talk about.”

Well, the reality is that with the modern economy that we have been dealing with in which we have not really experienced a major recession since 2008. What has occurred is that we have experienced actual slowdowns in different industries at different times depending on the circumstances.

Delgado: Obviously, we know that we are over COVID, and COVID had its own impacts. But what is more important is how this economy post-COVID is developing in such a way that there are businesses that are doing incredibly well versus others that are struggling. If you think about luxury businesses, they’re doing incredibly well.

I was reading something about Ferrari having the best time in their history. That tells you something about those consumers that can buy a Ferrari. Now, what is happening with other businesses that depend more on middle- or lower-class consumers, they have been experiencing a slowdown now for some time. Obviously, as an overall economy, if you think of it in GDP terms, you would say … the economy is doing well. But if you start peeling the onion, then you start understanding what is happening in different industry, in different businesses.

That’s really what this session is about. It’s understanding how different businesses are impacted by economic conditions, by consumer behavior, and what has been impacting basically businesses that are dealing with consumers that are being challenged from the point of view of disposable income. Then how businesses that have been proactive or managing those circumstances are succeeding versus those that may be in a very difficult position.

In fact, when you look in recent history, there have been some businesses that have even gone into bankruptcy because of those conditions. We’re talking just in the last few months. Then the question is what is how businesses can do, manage those slowdowns? What is the role of finance under these conditions? Then not only short term and how we can say navigate through these difficult circumstances, but also thinking long term on how you make sure that you have the right pipeline of innovation and diversification to manage difficult circumstances.

Ultimately, the goal of the session is to make sure that we have a good discussion. There will be some actually prompt questions for the audience to make sure that we all of us have a good point of view on how to deal with the business slowdowns, which is not happening to your business today, at some point in time in the future, you may deal with it and you want to know how to manage that and learn from each other on that topic.

Amato: That’s great. Thank you for that summary. I also see on the agenda a roundtable discussion that focuses on breaking barriers in finance and includes, I would say definite friend of the program, Janice Stucke. She’s a not-for-profit CFO in Maryland. Of course, I’m going to link to the previous conversations with Janice in the show notes about her journey, but there anything either of you really would like to say about that discussion. I note, at least in talking to Janice, this is important to her: We are planning to publish this episode in early March, and Saturday, March 8 is International Women’s Day.

Redmon: Yeah, I think when you look at International Women’s Day, the intent of it is really to bring attention to the contributions of women to our world, to our economy, to our everyday lives, but also to bring attention to some of the disparities that really still exist. When you’re looking at finance, women make up 52% of the entry-level finance roles. But when you get to senior management, they only make up 30%. Then once you get to the very top and the C-suite, it drops even further. When you look at the Fortune 500s, 18.5% of Fortune 500 CFOs were women in 2023. Now, that’s nearly double what it was in 2013, so we’re definitely making progress. But I think, really working to see that there are things that we can do to help women throw into these leadership roles that maybe they haven’t been given the opportunity. Maybe they just didn’t know that they could do it.

I think that it’s really important, especially at conferences like this, to have those opportunities to learn from other women who have made that move into these leadership roles. Janice and I both had very unconventional ways of getting into our CFO roles. I think that there’s no one right way, but I think that a lot of it has to do with the support that women have as they grow. I think it has to do with the mentorship that they’re able to find. I’ve had business coaches in my life that have helped me recognize when I needed to go for something versus play it safe. I think that in finance, a lot of us have a tendency to be relatively risk-averse, just due to the nature of the job. But I think sometimes you have to have those big risks to really move forward.

Delgado: Yeah, my thought on this is for any man in the audience to also attend these sessions. It’s a good thing because sometimes we may not simply understand the perspective of women in our profession, and that lack of understanding may lead to poor decisions from the point of view of basically making sure that the best candidate, for example, is promoted to the right roles and also understanding some of the challenges that men may not have faced as they go through their careers.

Always empathy is important and always full understanding helps businesses to make the right decisions for everyone.

Amato: In my view of the agenda, so many other topics we could discuss: a playbook for IPOs and M&A, the art of leadership, digital transformation lessons. Are there some topics in particular you’re looking forward to as well?

Redmon: There’s always a lot of topics at these conferences that I really love, and I’m not going to pat ourselves on the back here since we’re the ones that come up with it.

Amato: That’s OK. You can do it.

Redmon: But I think, every year we have AI sessions for the past several years because it is such a popular and timely topic. And every year, I think I’m not going to learn something new, and every year I learn something new. It’s really just fascinating how pervasive AI has become in our everyday lives. ChatGPT is my friend. I use it almost every day. My employees laugh at me because I just say, “Hey, I’m going to ask my friend ChatGPT, and then I’ll have an answer for you.”

But I think that really understanding how we can make that work in our businesses and in a way where we are making sure that we’re mitigating any potential risks because, of course, there are still plenty of risks when it comes to AI, whether it’s bias or whether it’s hallucinations. I think it’s really critical the whole “trust but verify” concept. But I think that that’s really an amazing topic to talk about and I think that our preconference workshop on it is going to be really fascinating.

One of our folks here on the planning committee, Chris [Ortega], is going to be working that one, and I’m really excited about it. I know that he actually had that same workshop at ENGAGE last year, and it was really popular. It should be a lot of fun. But I always think, too, talking about the art of leadership and also when you’re looking as a CFO when you’re coming into some exit, are you going to be doing an M&A? Are you going to be doing an IPO? How do you prepare for those things?

For the IPO piece we’ve got Charlie [Jemley] coming from Dutch Brothers, and he actually spoke to one of our local groups here in Seattle, and it was really fascinating just hearing about his process going through that prep time to get his business ready to go IPO, and some of his lessons learned were very well taken in our group. So, yeah, there’s a lot to look forward to.

Delgado: I fully agree. It seems like every year we’ve been doing this for a few years together, also with Summer, and at the end of that, we say, “Man, this looks like the best conference ever, good sessions, good energy.” One of the things we always try to do is to make sure that the next one is better. I have that feeling that is even better than what we have experienced before.

I agree with you. I’m really looking forward to this gen AI learning lab. It’s going to be very interactive in the pre-conference. Already got my flights, make sure that I’m there to take advantage of that opportunity.

Then from the other side, the sessions are very balanced in the sense that [they] give you an opportunity to look at technical aspects of our jobs, but also the leadership aspects and talent development. There is a session on the economic outlook, on taxes, and also FASB. But then all of a sudden, you have also these opportunities to really understand, for example, what happens if somebody wants to go beyond being a CFO or a controller at a company and wants to start his or her own practice. What does that take? There will be a workshop on that.

Also, from the point of view of talent, what is the future of talent, understanding the trends and how we develop our own businesses to be successful in the current conditions. Ultimately, when I look at this, it really prepares us to be good at our jobs in different aspects. I tell you, the opportunity to meet new people and learn from each other is just outstanding.

Amato: Again, that was Ted Delgado and Summer Redmon. Thanks to them for their time and also for leading the planning for the CFO Conference. That event starts April 23 in La Quinta, Calif. We will have a link in the show notes with information on the agenda and conference registration. Again, the early signup deadline for the CFO Conference is Monday, March 10.

We mentioned International Women’s Day, on Saturday, March 8. That’s also the topic of this next segment. Here’s the discussion with Lisa Simpson, AICPA & CIMA’s vice president–Firm Services. I started the interview with this question: What does International Women’s Day mean to you?

Lisa Simpson: Thank you, Neil. It’s a topic I’m happy to talk about, and I appreciate you inviting me in. For me, International Women’s Day is about recognizing the unique contributions — socially, economically, from a cultural perspective, and, of course, a political perspective. I really view it as a day to celebrate the unique perspectives and skills that women bring to the table, and it can be whether it’s running their families, whether it’s in business, government, nonprofits, or simply volunteering, and just celebrating those unique skills.

Amato: Thank you. We’ve had coverage over the past few months from both the Crist Kolder Associates Volatility report, also a Russell Reynolds report last year. The numbers are increasing. In fact, last year, according to Russell Reynolds, 20 of the 82 CFOs appointed globally across public companies were women. What do you think about that trend in the leadership pipeline?

Simpson: Oh, I love it. I think organizations are learning that having women in leadership positions brings numerous benefits. As I was thinking about it, one of the benefits is enhanced collaboration and teamwork. Women generally — I’ll use generalizations. There are men that excel at all of these things, and there are women that maybe don’t excel. Generally, women leaders excel in fostering collaboration and teamwork. An inclusive leadership style can create maybe a more cohesive or more productive team. There have been several studies over the past decades that show that companies that have higher gender diversity in their leadership roles perform better financially. So, higher profitability, better overall performance — those are pretty good reasons to bring women into leadership positions.

I think women also bring a unique way at looking at problem-solving because we just have a different perspective that we can bring into any conversation, and so that may lead to an out-of-the-box solution and maybe some better decision-making because we are bringing a different set of perspectives and experiences.

Then I think one other one that I hate to miss is simply the benefit of having positive role models throughout an organization at all levels. When you’re elevating women to a leadership position, they can serve as mentors for others in the organization. It can be more inspirational and encouraging to see someone who can advance through their career within the organization, and that sends a pretty good message.

Amato: Summer Redmon, who we just heard from in this episode, she brought up a stat that basically half of finance employees are women. In fact, more than half, but only about 18% are CFOs. While it’s gone up, that’s still a big gap. I guess that leads into the next question. Do you have any moments in this profession, which has been predominantly male-led, that have helped you find your voice as a leader?

Simpson: It’s funny, Neil. I’ve been in this profession almost 40 years. It’ll be 40 years next year, and when I thought about this question, I realized that I couldn’t pinpoint one particular moment because I always thought I was supposed to be here. I didn’t ever come into a room and think, “What am I doing here?” I’ve just always tried to walk into a room and say, “I’m here, I’m bringing value, and this is where I’m supposed to be.” Probably because I love accounting and finance so much that I just felt so at home in it, and I didn’t question whether or not I was supposed to be in it.

Having said that, I’ve gotten to where I am by getting the support from men and women who have given me encouragement and mentored me and given me suggestions and maybe pushed me to take a step that I wouldn’t otherwise take.

Most recent example is the AICPA Town Hall that we launched almost five years ago, and that was a big step. It was putting myself out there in front of huge audiences and using my authentic voice, which has really turned out to resonate within our Town Hall community and with others because I bring my authenticity to it.

Just having the support throughout my career of bringing my authentic self and bringing my voice and my different sense of humor and my “all y’alls” and “hey” and my casual approach to work because we’re all humans and we all want to have some fun. I think those have been supported along the way.

Amato: I think that’s great. In the profession, what reasons or trends do you see that are leading to opportunities opening up for women?

Simpson: I’m so encouraged, Neil about what’s going on throughout the entire accounting profession, and leaders of organizations are seeing the benefit of workplace flexibility. A lot of that came around through COVID where many people were working remotely, but that has opened up so many opportunities for women and men to say, “I can balance my career, and I can balance my family, and be successful.” With this increased flexibility that allows me to maybe work after the kids have gone to bed or get to the soccer practice and then come home and log in for a little while. Everyone within the organization is enjoying the benefit of that flexibility. Again, this is not just a gender role. I’m really excited to see these opportunities around flexibility.

Another thing that I’ve seen consistently in this profession is women who are starting their own firms or starting their own businesses, and they’re taking the opportunity to use their entrepreneurial skill sets to create the business that they want to run, and they grow at the pace they want to grow. They create the cultures that they want to create, and I think accounting is such a great profession in which you have that capability because there’s so much need for the skills that we can provide and you can start your own business and create the one that you want to work in.

Amato: A closing thought to the listeners out there, either advice or about International Women’s Day?

Simpson: Again, I think it’s such a great opportunity to just sit back and get perspective about how important women are to the economy. We control a lot of the purse strings, we control a lot of the decision making and how money gets spent. I think it’s important that if you’re thinking about, “Well, who’s my customer?” — that women can be your customer in a lot of different ways, and how are their perspectives being brought to the decision making table? Again, societal successes, economic successes, the cultural successes that we bring to the workforce, and it’s always a great day to celebrate what women are capable of and what we’ve been able to achieve.

Amato: Lisa Simpson, thank you very much.

Simpson: Thank you.