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Managing change and finding return on AI investments are popular themes that we keep talking about with CFOs. A few comments struck us from what CFOs recently told us about their main leadership challenges.
Intuit’s CFO Sandeep Aujla said one of the main leadership challenges he is facing is trying to manage a workforce that constantly must change to compete.
“The leadership challenges in this era continue to be around turbocharging the challenges from before, how to continue to make sure that you have a workforce that is energized and looking around the corners and reinventing itself,” he said in an interview with the WSJ Leadership Institute, during our WSJ CFO Council Summit. He further noted:
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“Folks who are embracing the new technology, rethinking how they work and just have deep intellectual curiosity continue to be at a premium.”
Second, he said having employees “who have deep domain expertise and who help folks invest in that domain expertise and grow that domain expertise is key.”
And third, “just rethinking how do you build teams. The old way of doing things is not going to be how we will do things in the future, whether we're thinking about how you are constantly reshuffling work, and finding efficiencies because AI is making people more efficient,” he said. “So those continue to be the areas we're leaning in. It was always there. AI had just amplified the need to move with deeper velocity in those areas.”
And how does ServiceNow think about leadership? What should leaders prioritize?
Their CFO Gina Mastantuono said emotional intelligence is rising in importance.
“Enterprise leadership is all about not just having the strong IQ that is needed for the functional expertise but the EQ to understand that you've got to bring people along,” she said during an interview at our summit.
“You have to empower folks to learn, and to understand how you're thinking so that they, when you're not in the room, can do it and drive it, and that takes a lot of EQ skills, softer skills like empathy, listening. I call them the power skills of today and tomorrow,” she said.
And what are those skills?
“It's empathy, it's communication. It’s storytelling. It's about truly understanding what it takes to motivate people and motivate teams and understand that what motivates you is probably very different than what motivates someone else, and how to get the best out of both of those employees regardless of what their motivations are,” she said.
✏️ Join the conversation. CFOs, what skills would you prioritize in the modern workforce? Hit Reply to this newsletter to share your thoughts.
—Walden Siew and Mark Maurer
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