Seek first to understand: How a finance leader manages global teams

Jennifer Reilly, CPA, CGMA, values listening. She enjoys the collaboration with fellow finance leaders as part of the Future of Finance Leadership Advisory Group, and she has made a habit of emphasizing listening in guiding teams from around the world.

Reilly, scheduled to be part of two sessions at AICPA & CIMA ENGAGE 25, explains the importance of listening, developing through broad and niche roles, and more in this Journal of Accountancy podcast episode.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• The value of collaboration with finance peers.
• How finance’s expanded role changes the way finance professionals are evaluated.
• A summary of Reilly’s “broad” and “niche” roles.
• Strategies for better engagement with a globally dispersed team.
• The benefits of a wide-ranging listening tour for Reilly in her current role.
• One pillar of corporate culture that stood out to her from a Future of Finance Summit presentation.

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 back to the Journal of Accountancy podcast. This is Neil Amato with the JofA, recording in late 2024 at the Future of Finance Summit in San Diego. I’m here with Jen Reilly. She is senior VP and head of strategic finance at MassMutual. I would call her a friend of the program, even though we haven’t actually had her on the podcast before. We’ve talked for articles, we’ve had some videos we did a long time ago now. It’s great to have Jen on the podcast and here at the Future of Finance Summit. Jen, thanks for being here.

Jen Reilly: Thanks, Neil. It’s great to be here in San Diego and among like-minded professionals. There’s a lot of great informationsharing happening across the board.

Amato: Yeah, I’ll get right into that information sharing first. You’re part of the Future Finance Leadership Advisory Group. What is it like for you? What’s the value for you to have and hear the knowledge of this crowd, this group of fellow finance leaders?

Reilly: The value is certainly collaboration among like-minded professionals, and to drive cross-collaboration around emerging trends that we’re all experiencing in the day in the life, and also similar challenges that we’re all facing, and how people are addressing them creatively. It’s always great to get outside of the office and take a step back and gather intel across multiple experiences, and then bring that intel back to the organization.

Amato: Yes. One of the themes that’s emerging from this event and really at others, has been, for a while, is just the expanded role of finance. It’s being asked to do more. Maybe we could get into how that changes the measurement of an effective finance professional, and also the development of those finance professionals.

Reilly: That’s a great question, Neil, and very relevant to your point. We talked a lot about this actually in a session this morning. The measurement framework that really resonates with me is the T concept. The most valuable leaders have bounced between broad and niche roles throughout their career across multiple organizations within the company.

I happen to have more than two decades of chief financial officer and chief operating officer experience in three industries: real estate, financial services, and manufacturing, large publics, and large and small privates. I’ve been in nearly every corporate function, distribution, or business area, and I’ve had very broad and niche roles, including the CFO for the largest U.S. 403(b) retirement business, which was a broad role. I ran retirement plan pricing, which was a niche role. I’ve been the chief operating officer for technology and operations a couple of times, which was also a very broad role.

Then I’ll just throw one more in there, I’ve been responsible for SEC-traded investment funds, which was a niche role. I found that the broad experience enables a much deeper strategic impact, and the niche enables you to be able to call BS, which is an important role as a senior finance leader or a CFO. I think that well-rounded experience really is enabling the profession to have that deeper strategic impact. What specifically was highlighted from a measurement perspective, from a broad vantage point, was do leaders have business skills? Do they have people skills? Do they have digital skills, agile and transformation skills, and leadership skills? Then from a niche perspective, the deep technical expertise, including CPA license, CGMA, maybe actuarial or analytical skills, or deeper product knowledge, depending on the role.

This is a framework that I’ve leveraged in the past, or something similar to this in the past, for business CFO or the strategic side of finance measurement. This is something I’ll be implementing within my organization, within my leadership team, and then cascading from there so that we can not only measure our talent, our most important asset within the organization, but so that we can understand where we need to develop our most important asset within the organization.

Amato: Your organization is MassMutual. That “Mass” is for Massachusetts, but it’s not a company that’s just in Springfield, Mass., or New England. It’s global, so your team is global. What are your challenges and maybe some strategies to overcome those challenges to managing a global, dispersed team?

Reilly: It’s definitely both a blessing and sometimes a challenge at the same time. If you commingle that with four generations in the workforce, there’s a lot of work that needs to go into understanding both preferences and motivations, of a global team and of a multigenerational workforce at the same time, which is critically important to not only attract talent, but also to retain top talent. I’ve managed teams in India: Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad. I’ve also managed teams in Mexico and in the Czech Republic across multiple companies.

I’ve found to get the most out of global teams and to drive retention, you have to deeply engage, and understand and respect the cultural practices, while also incorporating your organization’s cultural values. As an example, don’t set up a town hall or a critical meeting at midnight local time. You’re not going to get the best engagement when you do that.

Amato: You are not.

Reilly: Then also regular site visits to deeply engage with the team and to understand their perspectives, to get their input, but also to understand their challenges in a more tangible way, I found, goes a long way to keep the team engaged, and then having local leadership. Having a CEO and a CFO that sits locally geographically where the team resides, I found, to be a common best practice to both attract and retain top talent.

Amato: Yes, and it goes beyond just, hey, time zone differences don’t have a meeting at midnight. Those site visits are important because you do get to know that person on another level. But I guess what I’d want to know is, before you do get to meet that person or that team in person, how do you learn about those cultural differences or expectations?

Reilly: I think it comes with experience, but it also is along the lines of the age-old adage “seek first to understand, and then be understood.” I typically when I take on a new role, I go on a listening tour, and I ask a lot of the same questions, and then I line up some of the consistencies so I know where to focus and I’m learning the cultural norms through that process, whether the cultural norms are specific to the company, or the geography of the team.

Amato: I think another aspect of remote work, remote teams, is you’re not in the business all the time because you may just be in a different location. How do you go about just getting that insight and getting your team to understand the need for those insights?

Reilly: That’s a great question, Neil, and something that’s near and dear to my heart. I talked a little bit earlier about seeking first to understand, and one of the ways that I continually seek to understand is to get really engaged with our sales teams, our operations, and our technology teams in the day in the life and what’s happening there. As an example of this, when I first joined MassMutual, I went on a broad listening tour. I had 150 one-on-ones with my organization, and key stakeholders and business partners, and then I spent a number of days living the day in the life.

We have a B2B2C distribution model for our core products and our balanced financial practice, and I spent a day in the life with three of our B2B locations, understanding from all aspects of their staff, from financial adviser to chief operating officer, what it’s like to be a B2B distribution partner for our organization; what’s working well and what’s not working well. I also spent time with our operations teams, understanding how the processing of transactions is working, and again, what’s working well for our team internally, but also what’s not working well and from the customer vantage point as well.

I have found if finance professionals can become more tangibly engaged with the field, whatever the industry, they can add so much more value strategically, and they can also help connect dots and cause and effect, for information that’s maybe not naturally connected, but when you connect it, it provides some powerful insights to help improve the business trajectory moving forward.

Amato: Getting back to this event, the Future of Finance Summit, what are some of the comments and themes that have stood out?

Reilly: Well, in the spirit of culture, we learned yesterday about the seven pillars of corporate culture, and two of the pillars that stand out to me the most were No. 1, transparency. Being more transparent with all employees around financial results, and what I’ve also found to be helpful is being transparent around both managed and unmanaged trajectories for the company, and what it means for the company overall, what it means for maybe a particular sales team or organization. That usually helps deepen financial acumen, and therefore, people can contribute in a more specific way to the bottom line of the company.

Amato: That’s great. Chris Dyer, I was able to get him as a guest on the show, and he had a great session, and then we had a really great conversation, too. That was good stuff. Anything else you’d like to add in closing? I think this has been great.

Reilly: The other thing that Chris mentioned was starting with yes, with both the context and the expectation for how you get to a yes. I think that’s very relevant with team members, colleagues, and also children. I happen to have two teen, tween girls, and I think starting with yes is a great concept and philosophy from saying no, and then it pivots someone in a completely different direction. Whereas if you start with yes, you can set clear expectations of yes, and this is what it will take to get whatever the desired outcome is that’s being addressed. That was another takeaway for me.

Amato: Who knew we were going to come to this event and get some great parenting advice? But it was. It was a really good example of how to make something work when maybe we have a teenager who says, “Can I drive the car?” “Yes, once you do this first.” That was good.

Reilly: Absolutely. Another thing I’ll just throw in in my closing remarks: Emerging technology is not going away.

Amato: I’m going to interrupt you and say yeah. How could I even record a podcast in this day and age without mentioning Gen AI? Sorry for the interruption, but I had to say that. Yes, I guess we have to talk about it.

Reilly: Yes, very relevant, Neil. As I think about emerging technology and what we’ve all been hearing and learning about generative AI, the big takeaway is start somewhere. Just start. I’ve been consistently an early adopter in emerging technology throughout my career, starting with VBA code and writing macros, evolving to robotics and automation, standing up data lakes, and now generative AI.

I happened to implement a top-down generative AI strategy for my prior organization, including the specs for digital financial analyst, that we branded as Visionary Val. I’m currently partnering with my IT team at MassMutual to develop a similar capability.

The specific finance use cases that Gartner covered yesterday was very insightful, in particular the analytics, and operational assistance use cases. Scenario in capital deployment planning, customer behavior prediction, forecasting, pricing automation, and intelligent dashboards were among the top use cases. I predict that the finance profession will continue to move up the strategic pendulum as deeper analytical capabilities are strengthened by these AI capabilities, and human talent is going to have to spend more time fact-checking and interpreting insights from digital talent.

Amato: Jen, this has been great. Thank you very much for the time and the insights and for being on the JofA podcast.

Reilly: Thank you, Neil. It’s great to be part of the future of finance, and I look forward to contributing as we move forward.