Leaders of Modern Finance Ep. 22 – Fostering Healthy Team Dynamics, Hosted by Ben Murray ft. Sarah Wilson
On this episode of the Leaders of Modern Finance podcast, host Ben Murray, Founder of The SaaS CFO, interviews Sarah Wilson, VP of Global Finance and Strategy at Tradeshift.
Finance for People, Not Systems
Though Sarah is a financial leader, her training and experience came largely through the lens of human resources. While many CFOs begin as accountants or financial analysts, Sarah began with a team at Time Warner whose work partnered closely with the HR department. The planning and analysis she did were centered around retirement plans, employee compensation, and health and welfare plans. This work continued when she started at LendingClub. The company had just gone public and was looking to grow rapidly. Part of that growth entailed hiring around 800 new employees that same year. Sarah’s role in this explosive growth was to forecast and plan for the acquisition of so many employees in conjunction with the chief people officer. She was to ration financial assets to account for new compensation packages, employee benefits, and recruitment strategies.
All the metrics and analytics Sarah was using to accomplish this task were centered around her organization’s employee base. Every analysis she ran would focus on how her use of financial tools was creating benefits and incentives for her team. This people-centric mindset was something that would settle as a core part of Sarah’s financial approach. As she transitioned to work at Tradeshift, she continued to view all her work through the filter of its effect on her employees. In every decision she was a part of, even those about company vision and direction, Sarah would always ask the question, “How will this come to bear on our people?”
A Human Compensation Philosophy
One of the chief financial responsibilities that Sarah has is the development of compensation structures. It would be easy to look at this task from purely a numbers standpoint. How can she structure compensation to be an appropriate percentage of company revenue? What’s an appropriate ratio of executive to associate compensation?
Sarah of course still seeks to answer such questions in her analytical models, but her background in human resources causes her to filter these numbers through other metrics and considerations. An important consideration she often makes is in regards to talent recruitment and retention. She portions out compensation assets to areas of the business where it’s most important to be competitive in the marketplace.
As an example, call center operations are certainly important, but having an exceptional call center is not necessarily going to be an important asset in creating more business. An organization can continue to be competitive if its call center operations are no different than other businesses in the industry. On the other hand, technology development, especially in a software-based company, has massive potential to create more lucrative revenue streams if that department consistently outperforms competing businesses. So, when creating a compensation structure, Sarah put more resources into the tech engineering and development compensation packages than the call center packages. This gives talent recruitment more tools to work with in attracting exceptional candidates and allows her organization to retain those candidates once they are recruited with compelling benefits packages.
Besides this strong business sense, Sarah also has humanitarian reasons for her compensation decisions. A value that Sarah has carried with her through her whole professional career and that she tries to instill in every business she works for, is the mantra, “Do the right thing.” At Tradeshift, this value manifests most clearly in her approach to compensation structure.
Sarah places a distinct focus on compensation equity. When looking at the diverse demographics of her workplace, she is intentional about distributing financial assets in a way that is fair and beneficial to the whole team. While modern business structures have been built in such a way that they often unconsciously promote differences in pay based on gender or race, Sarah is intentional about noticing these inequalities and rectifying them through her compensation philosophy. To Sarah, to “do the right thing” means to actively combat historical structures that have created inequity in the professional world. Sarah marries this humanitarian focus with a compelling business case for compensation structures to create a holistic philosophy that both strengthens her organization and the people that make up that organization.
Healthy People Create Healthy Teams
While Sarah certainly has a passion for caring about people, her approach to equity and healthy compensation packages is not purely altruistic. There’s a meaningful business case to be made for prioritizing the well-being of her team when she portions out financial assets.
First, a more well-cared-for team tends to be more invested in the overall company vision. A vision that includes employee health as a core value is even more effective in getting people to buy into an organization’s mission. This creates more efficient and hard-working employees across all departments. Since human resources, and especially compensation, touches everyone within any given business, this philosophy produces a healthier overall organization, not just a thriving HR or finance department.
Second, an intentional effort to promote equity reduces friction between employees and creates more synergistic teams. When each employee feels as though their unique needs are being met, there’s stronger cooperation between team members and departments. Catering to the needs of the individual is to cater to the needs of the whole team.
Bring a Human Approach
The emphasis on the human element of her organization is not something that Sarah thinks should be unique to her approach. In the wake of Covid-19 especially, Sarah sees a greater need than ever to remember the people behind the numbers.
It’s advice she wishes to pass on to future financial leaders: don’t forget the human element. It’s a kind and caring philosophy but also one that creates a healthier business in the long term. Organizations that take care of their people are able to retain talent at a greater rate, cutting down on onboarding and training costs, and producing more efficient teams because of the stability that comes from maintaining a long-term team structure.
Businesses that focus only on numbers and not on people will, in fact, fail on both fronts. People produce profits, and to accommodate the former will necessarily affect the latter.
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