Are we
human—

The art and rigour of
a CFO’s first season

—or
are we
dancer?

The art and rigour of
a CFO’s first season

The evening after we concluded the last of our interviews with seasoned CFOs, we went to the ballet. We had debated where in the auditorium to sit. High up in the circle, the full ethereal beauty of a piece unfolds: the dancers glide and leap apparently effortlessly. The precise synchronisation of movements among and between dancers creates loops and whorls of colour and light across the stage, merging with the music into a singular experience.

It’s mesmerising

On this particular evening, however, our seats were up front in the stalls, chins tilted slightly upwards to the stage. From here, the view is all muscle and sinew and sweat. When the dancers leap, you can feel in your chest the soft thud as they land. You can see the effort. Best of all, you can see the dancers’ faces, watch their eyes, and feel the connection they have with themselves, with the music, with one another, and with the audience.

The Killers famously ask, in their 2008 hit Human, ‘Are we human, or are we dancer?’; evoking, perhaps, the dilemma many of us face in our working lives around balancing performance and vulnerability, effort and ease, technical excellence and personal connection. Are we human, or are we dancer? The answer, for aspiring and new CFOs, is unequivocally both. We spoke with more than twenty Group CFOs in leading global companies across a variety of sectors, and every one of them spoke about how their roles require them to navigate complex stakeholder environments, weigh and reconcile often competing demands, respond in the moment to changing circumstances and operate simultaneously across the short and much longer term. Much like the ballet; close-up, it’s all technical expertise, incredible effort and profound connection; step back and it’s an exquisitely colourful, complex and choreographed performance.

For those at the top of their game, it's precisely this colour and dynamism that makes the CFO role so very rewarding – as if, after years of perfecting incredible technical skills in the studio, you finally have the opportunity to take to the stage:

The CFO role is wonderful – a better role than the CEO. You are part of making performance happen.

It’s a 360 degree perspective on the business… with the right to roam and the licence to get involved.

You can influence the whole organisation, shape strategy and shape the future. As CFO you see everything and get great data and so the diagnosis becomes powerful; you can see things others can’t and shape the debate.

And yet, of course, it is also true that the very same factors – complexity, movement, nuance – make the CFO role incredibly challenging.

So what is it that determines whether a new CFO will succeed in fully grasping the rich opportunities, the full breadth of the stage, that the role offers? We asked our group of leading CFOs to cast their minds back to the beginning and tell us what it was like to take on the role for the first time. What do they wish they had known at the outset that might help those taking the stage for the first time?

What we learned from our group overwhelmingly clearly, is that success depends on two things:

  • First – human – on a number of vital relationships and how effectively a new CFO develops, maintains and cherishes these; and

  • Second – dancer – on the accelerated development of some elevated skillsets.

Are we human or
are we dancer?

HUMAN:

Vital Relationships

A CFO does not dance alone – they are in a series of vital and interconnected relationships.

How effectively a new CFO develops, maintains and cherishes these relationships will itself be a critical factor in determining their success in their role. If we reflect on where we have seen new CFOs flounder, whatever the presenting issue in terms of business performance or functional challenge, there is inevitably an underlying fissure or fragility in a key relationship.

We can think of these vital relationships in four categories:

You & your role

The business

Your CEO & the Board

Investors & the Market

Vital relationships

You & Your Role

The first vital relationship is with yourself – as a human, as a leader, and as a CFO. Think again of a dancer, perhaps dancing alone for now. Particularly if you’re in a stalls seat and can see their eyes, the first thing you’ll notice is the intense inward focus that a great dancer has: their self-mastery, their mind-body-connection, their capacity to completely own their role and their space and to project themselves exactly as they wish to be seen.

The new CFOs who succeed are those who contend with the scale and influence of their role. They invest time and effort in the self-reflection and self-development required to enable them to fully inhabit the role. This relationship with yourself is essentially grounded in the core skillset around presence discussed below. You can’t be fully present in your role unless and until you are fully present to yourself.

Take the time and space to get really clear on who you are, what you are here to do, and why you are doing it. What is your personal purpose in taking on this role? What is yours to give? And what do you hope the role will give you? This will then translate to your leadership brand – what you stand for; values, purpose, identity, priorities.

Most first time CFOs are focused on task, on “what needs doing” to the exclusion of almost everything else. In so doing, they miss the opportunity to land in the role with clear intent. More than one of our CFO group harbours a degree of regret about some combination of perfectionism, micromanagement and overwhelm in their first season.

It is vitally important to ask oneself regularly – what does this all look like from the stalls, or the back of the grand circle? What matters most from this wider perspective?

Figure out what you and only you can do in service of your purpose. Do those things. Prioritise fiercely, and then let the rest go.

Remember your own humanity in all of this. And don’t overlook everyone else’s. Think about what you need in terms of being in good relationship with colleagues, the business, your wider network. Think about what you have to offer, too, as a person as much as a CFO. How can you show your true self, be vulnerable, and build deeply trusting relationships?

Vital relationships

The Business (and the Business Unit Leaders)

The second vital relationship is with your business, and the context within which it, and you, are operating. Think of how a great dancer interacts with the music – neither ahead nor behind, but as if they’re an entirely integral part of what is unfolding – both leading and following. Great dancers are truly immersed in the music, and in the story being told.

So, too, as a CFO it is vital that you deeply know, attend to, and respond to, your particular business in its particular context in this particular season. This is the music, the whole essence of what’s going on. You must be in close relationship with those tasked with the day to day operational leadership of the constituent parts of the business, because the numbers will never tell the whole story –

You’ve got to understand the culture. Spend time out in the business and really feel it.

The aim is not definitive knowledge of all the detail, but a posture of interest, openness and curiosity:

When I first arrived, I did a piece of work looking at the company from the outside in – strengths and weaknesses, etc.. And I spent time with shareholders and employees to understand their perspectives, opportunities etc. When you first join you can’t be expected to answer questions… but you can and most definitely should ask them.

Striking the right balance in relationships with business unit leaders is critical and can be tricky – too friendly and you may struggle to hold a line you need to hold later;

too harsh or remote and you may find that information is withheld from you and/or miss the opportunity to participate in conversations and thinking where you could add value –

It can’t be warfare, but nor can you be a walkover.

Again, our group were clear that treating people as individuals and investing in personal relationships matters:

You’ve got to really understand them as people – what is their psychology, do they overpromise and slightly under-deliver, do they sandbag? And why are they doing what they are doing?

as does a degree of reciprocity:

What do they need from you? How can you help? And how do you get insights from them so you really know what is going on in the business?

The aim is clarity and alignment on goals and priorities, and then an approach to working together that is collaborative and drives performance:

You’ll know it’s working when they are calling you to share their challenges and issues. And when you don’t get surprises, and are looped into issues before they become problems.

"It can't be warfare, but nor can you be a walkover."

Vital relationships

Your CEO & the Board

The third vital relationship, or set of relationships, is with your fellow dancers – those who are on stage with you and an integral part of the performance. Some of these will be principal dancers – your CEO, your Board – and others will be in the corps de ballet – your team, business unit leaders, the wider business. How you interact, connect and stay in relationship with these other dancers – when you lead and when you follow, the quality of your attention, the strength of your connection – determines the outcome of the dance. A solo dancer is incredible to watch, but the opportunity for true transcendence, comes when two people dance together, or when a whole body of dancers, a whole company, moves as one.

“they are an audience – to whom you can perform better…”

Your CEO

The chemistry with the CEO is so important. Work on it actively and early.

The most significant other dancer in the CFO’s dance is the CEO. They are the CFO’s line manager, key stakeholder, key client, and key sparring partner. Nothing else on the stage matches this relationship for nuance, complexity and potential.

The reality is that most CEOs are by definition challenging to work with, and yet unlocking that relationship is key.

What does good look like? Think about a couple dancing together in a truly breathtaking duet. The key ingredients are, first, alignment:

…you always have to be aligned in public and with the Board…

Second, complete mutual trust (which often must be actively built by a new CFO)–

My CEO is great… I trust her… and there is a lot of trust from her for me to do this work… [and] share with her as I draw conclusions…

And, third, true equality coupled with utter clarity about their respective roles –

I needed to elevate the relationship with the CEO… to become an equal with them.

This will likely require the investment of a lot of time, hard work and candour.

The hardest thing was building the relationship with my CEO. The role has many facets and you have to work out how to adapt your behaviour to best work with your particular CEO.

The prize is elevation – a performance beyond anything either could deliver alone; a true partnership of equals. Each brings the full power of their expertise and insight to bear, to create something that is more than the sum of its parts.

Your Board

Beyond the CEO, almost everyone we spoke to mentioned Board dynamics as one of the key things they would wish to have been better sighted on as they embarked on their role.

Understand the dynamic of the Board and focus on this so as to be better equipped to deal with it. It was new to me.

I’d want to be better prepared in terms of knowing how to interact with the Board.

Getting to know the Board and working with them.

A good relationship with the Board can be transformational to a CFO's capacity to perform:

Boards are generally supportive, they want you to succeed, they have lots of knowledge and experience and they really appreciate being asked for their advice. Use them!

Of course, a Board is simply a collection of individual human beings each with their own perspective, and so to counsel building a relationship ‘with The Board’ is 

really to counsel building one to one relationships with each Board member.

It can be helpful to think about what it looks like to interact as a colleague with a Board member – which is the case the majority of the time – versus what it takes to impress ‘The Board’ collectively as an audience when delivering a set piece presentation. Both modes matter, and each requires a slightly different approach.

A natural inclination is to try to impress the Board. Treat them individually as colleagues. Be humble, ask questions and learn from them. While always remembering that in the collective meeting they are an audience – to whom you can perform better if you’ve got their insights as individuals and understand their agendas, personalities and perspectives.

There is of course nuance here. While it is well placed to be a huge help and support to you, it is also true that the Board is looking to you for confidence and assurance that you have your arms around the full gamut of the key issues. There is a posture of confident curiosity that can work well here – not pretending to know all the answers all the time, but instilling a calm certainty that you do know all the answers that need to be known for this moment. And if you don’t know those answers, having the confidence to take the question away and revert when you’ve explored it.

Finally, it is worth noting that very often, perhaps especially on a PLC Board, there are likely to be other serving or recently retired CFOs. A couple of our group mentioned specifically the value of cultivating relationships with these fellow travellers and treating them as trusted advisors. 

“Long-term shareholders can have a good perspective…”

Vital relationships

Your CEO & the Board

The fourth vital relationship is with your external audience – with your investors, debt holders, and the broader market (media, government, regulators etc). This is subtle. The best dancers never break the fourth wall – they are exquisitely attuned to their audience’s presence and energy, but their focus remains within the integrity of the performance. They project clarity, control, and expression, rather than seeking applause in real time. The CFO’s relationship with the market demands a similar discipline.

This relationship with the external market is one that is almost always entirely new for first-time CFOs and striking the right balance here between confidence of execution and responsiveness is a delicate and critical art. In the case of a publicly listed company, this brings with it all the high-octane paraphernalia of the City –

Whatever role you have done previously, you are going to feel exposed on the public markets side.

but even in a PE or private context a CFO can expect

to encounter complexity and nuance amongst their investor group.

Beyond compliance with regulatory frameworks, the ability to move with poise under scrutiny, to repeat

choreography with consistency, and to know when to improvise and when to hold the line – these are the hallmarks of a CFO who commands investor trust.

The market feels, in the first year or two, like the defining context of the new CFO's role but over time this acuteness will ease. It is vital for a new CFO to actively understand what is required of them, to engage deeply with experienced advisers and to build relationships with investors, so as to understand their perspectives and win their respect and learn how to navigate this unfamiliar eco-system.

Investors want to know what you will do, very early, and will latch onto your words and then play them back over time. Be mindful of this. Long-term shareholders can have a good perspective and can give useful advice as to how to deal with other shorter term investors

Cultivating this relationship requires a careful balance between performance and dialogue. Be transparent, but not reactive. Listen actively, but maintain your frame. Develop a cadence of communication that feels authentic and grounded – not over-choreographed, but not loose either. Good investor relationships are not just about reporting – they’re about rhythm, resonance, and trust built over time.

Dancer:

Elevated Skillsets

When we think about the skills of a CFO, we might immediately think of technical skills. Much as we might imagine a dancer, alone in a studio, practicing a particular turn or leap over and over again in front of a mirror until it is predictably and replicably flawless, there is a certain mystique and rigour associated with the CFO role that means we have a tendency to elevate technical expertise.

But in the vast majority of CFO appointments, technical competence is taken as a given and is rarely an issue. Most first time CFOs have trained and trained to make the hard stuff look easy and there are advisers and mentors on hand.

Rather, the skillsets that determine success are more relational and creative than technical. The CFOs we spoke to described four groups of skills that they focused on developing early in their new role; skills which perhaps had been less necessary, and certainly were less explicitly sought-after, in previous roles. These are:

Presence

Rhythm

Curiosity

Scaffolding

Elevated Skillset

Presence

A surprise for me was being always on and always watched.

The first group of skills speak to presence – that is, looking and sounding like a CFO; assuming the power of the office and communicating with confidence. Cultivating this skillset provides critical underpinning for the vital relationships we've just explored.

The business is reading you all the time and taking its bearings from what you communicate and how you communicate it. You need to be ready to be outside your comfort zone. A lot.

You are working from a base of imperfect information and yet you have to bring the fluency, nuance and deftness that PLCs require from day one.

In dance terms, this is called ‘face’ – the capacity to walk onto the stage, command attention and own your space, to convince in the role you are playing while letting your real self shine through. It is a performance, and yet it is also deeply authentic. You are both human and dancer.

No first time CFO is used to this.

New CFOs need to work out how to be seen and heard, build followership, convey coherence and clarity across a complex brief, prioritise, and pick their battles wisely.

All of this requires intention and discernment. The temptation is just to jump in and get busy doing, but time and again we have seen new CFOs flounder that way – they become too reactive, and too focused on execution, relying on muscle memory from earlier roles that no longer serves them well in this one.

Presence is essentially the outworking of your relationship with yourself; rooted in who you are, what matters to you and what your purpose for this season is.

Once ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘purpose’ are clear, take the time to develop a really compelling and clear narrative, and think about your brand and presence in a way that is tailored to your specific role as CFO but also transcends it. Beyond leading a function, you are an

enterprise leader with a point of view. The Board and your colleagues throughout the business will expect a distinct contribution, a clear story and impact across a wide spectrum of business decisions.

Define your brand, be authentic and act thoughtfully.

Being really discerning about all of this upfront will imbue your actions and relationships with impact and coherence, instil confidence in others and enable you then to distil a number of key priorities and make things happen in a thoughtful and impactful way.

As you build your presence, make it your practice to ask for feedback. You may be unlikely to receive standing ovations and thrown flowers, but make it a discipline to ask for specific input and use it to calibrate your own performance and others’ expectations.

“A surprise for me was being always on and always watched.”

Elevated Skillset

Rhythm

The second group of skills is around rhythm and pacing. For a dancer, this is musicality. For a new CFO it is about deliberate and deft management of your season, the rhythm of communication and the rhythm of delivery.

Our CFOs spoke about rhythm as if there is a natural one that guides a CFO’s first years – a particular time to do particular things, forge particular relationships, draw particular boundaries, make particular decisions:

You don’t have to know everything on day one.

No one is expecting you to make bold promises in the first 6 months.

Once you’ve done a year and you’re into your second set of results you need to have moved things on, but you still have a bit of room for manoeuvre.

By the time you are 18 months in you need to know it cold

It is important to be mindful about pacing for the moment that you are in and to manage that in a way that is defined and intentional. And to communicate it with simplicity to your various stakeholders, either as part of a contracting conversation (with your CEO for example), or as crisp, clear comms for broadcast across the wider business – i.e. “this is my moment for learning the business”, “this is my season for 

establishing priorities”, “this is the year in which we’re going to grip finance transformation” etc.

We can also think about rhythm in the sense of reps. It’s about being able to set and maintain the drumbeat of a cycle that the CFO must own and execute. It’s completing a cycle, and then actively reflecting on what needs to change ahead of the next iteration. And of course each rep makes you stronger and more confident. This will play out for a year or two until the cycle simply becomes a natural part of the rhythm of the role; a dance that begins to happen naturally, burning calories, but not straining every sinew to stay on point.

Notice, too, your interaction with the natural rhythm of the organisation – is it faster or slower than you are naturally inclined to be? How do you wish to influence that rhythm? When should you push on and when should you pause? Where might it serve you to align yourself with the organisational speed, and where might it serve you to be a counterpoint to it? The learning here is to pay attention. There will be a moment in time to lean into key relationships, to build trust, to make the tough call, or to draw a line.

Be intentional about where you need to be and by when, and pay attention to the drumbeat marking the time from here to there.

Elevated Skillset

Curiosity

The third group of skills is about curiosity – open-mindedness, a genuine interest in learning and engaging and the confidence and humility to change one’s mind or approach when the circumstances require it.

It’s likely that for your whole career to date, you have been expected to know the answer, and have been rewarded for the quickest, most accurate and most detailed responses. The challenge now is that this sort of snappy linear approach no longer serves you or the organisation. Jumping straight in with answers risks making you look like a twenty-years-ago version of yourself – super keen, hand in the air, eager to please. You risk being too quick to move from diagnostic to cure, overlooking nuance or ambiguity. You risk coming off as arrogant, overly confident or conversely under-confident and overly diligent. And you certainly limit your own capacity to carry your Board, your ExCo, your team with you.

Dwell a moment longer in uncertainty. Take a beat. Your technical expertise and capacity to execute is a 

given – you don’t need to showcase it to the exclusion of everything else. The counsel here is to ask lots of questions… and then to listen very well to the answers:

Listen 80% of the time and talk 20% of the time, absorb what is going on in the organisation, talk to as many people as possible… get to understand stakeholders, investors, banks…

Your role changes the moment you become CFO. It’s often about asking the right questions, not having the right answers.

The obvious reason for this is that there is information you need that you don’t have yet – but beyond that you will also glean insights on the perspectives and opinions of the person you’re listening to and important clues about the broader organisational culture, what is valued and how decisions are made. You will build trust and goodwill with the person you’re asking questions of. You will look confident, wise and considered – and will actually be more confident in your decisions having obtained more information and reflected more fully. All of this builds trust and credibility.

“Listen 80% of the time and talk 20% of the time, absorb what is going on…”

Elevated Skillset

Scaffolding

And finally, the fourth group of skills is around a CFO’s capacity to build a support system and to use that system well. A CFO cannot dance alone.

Turning first to a CFO’s own team, every single CFO we spoke to as part of this research project (and, by our reckoning, every single new CFO we have ever worked with), has contended early on with the need to reshape their own team. Nearly all have struggled with this. The first part comes relatively easily to most – they can sketch out an organisational design and identify the skills they are seeking in each role and across the team as a whole. But when it comes to then taking action and shaping a new team, almost always, CFOs prevaricate.

It’s easy to understand why. There will be technical experts amongst your senior team. There will be people of many years’ standing who have institutional memory, who “know where the bodies are buried”. If you’re new to the organisation, this feels incredibly valuable. And if you’re not new to the organisation, some of the senior team will likely have been your colleagues for many years.

But… not all of these people will be the leaders you need for the new chapter you’re embarking on. Not all of them will embrace and promote the changes you want to make. Some of them may even seek to actively block them. Not all of them will be suited to the new roles you create in a new structure. Not all of them will represent the ethos and values you want from your leadership team.

Err on the side of action. If you are not sure someone is right for the role, they’re wrong. No one is irreplaceable. If you’re wondering how soon you can act, it’s now. Your carefully phased choreography is in fact just a delay and a drag on your capacity to move forward. It’s vanishingly rare for any CFO to say with hindsight that they wished that had been more considered or taken more time to make decisions about key team members.

Hire on values and potential. Take thoughtful risks. Prioritise getting the right people in ASAP and then trust them and empower them to do their jobs so that you can do yours:

Don’t be afraid of good people, even if they’re hard to manage. If they’re sparky and full of ideas, that’s a good thing.

Beyond your own team, the sources of support and help in an organisation are wide and deep, and a new CFO is wise to use them. A new CFO has almost certainly never been on a Board before, and may well never have sat on an ExCo either. It’s a huge leap to suddenly arrive at these tables, and understandably disorienting. For some, specific training around Board membership and presence might be helpful. For almost everyone, coaching support will help.

“Don’t be afraid of good people, even if they’re hard to manage…”

And for absolutely everyone, seeking some informal mentorship and guidance will prove worthwhile. As a new CFO, you have a grace period at the outset, and you are well-advised to use it to seek counsel and perspectives. Who are the half dozen people you can pick the phone up to for advice? What breadth of experience do you need in that group? Most of our CFOs had a couple of more experienced peers, one or two CEOs, market experts (brokers, bankers), a coach and a mentor. Plus of course their NEDs and in particular their Audit Chair.

It’s perhaps worth spelling out here, and it will come as no surprise, that the first year is brutal. It is unfamiliar, multi-faceted in a way that no prior role has been, and extremely hard work. All of our CFOs described it as the steepest learning curve of their careers. No one described that first year as fun. This is normal, and it’s okay. It will ease. And in the meantime, you will need to take care of your physical, mental and emotional health. You will need guardrails, clear firebreaks for holidays and time out, boundaries to protect parts of your weekends, friends who will fix you with a hard stare when you’re off track, and patience, tolerance and robust grounding from your partner and family.

Keep
Moving

The lessons above are powerful, foundational and some might even appear obvious. But, from our work with CEOs, Chairs and executive teams we know how hard they can be for a new CFO to implement in practice.

At Altair, we work with senior leaders in incredibly challenging roles, supporting them to build

coherence, confidence and continuity, and to deliver an exquisite performance.

We’d love to have a conversation about how we can help you dance.

Continue the conversation –

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