Leaders of Modern Finance – Developing Effective Teams, Hosted by Ben Murray ft. Chad Wonderling
On this episode of the Leaders of Modern Finance podcast, host Ben Murray, Founder of The SaaS CFO, is joined by Chad Wonderling, SVP and Chief Accounting Officer at Salesloft.
The Public Accounting Training Ground
Despite Chad’s success with Salesloft, his role as an in-house financial manager is a relatively new career path for him. He spent much of his professional life as a public accountant, working for clients across a host of industries and with varying organizational structures and practices. For Chad, the totality of this experience prepared him well to not only be a financial asset to Salesloft but to contribute to other departments as well, like operations and HR.
As Chad puts it, public accounting provides a sort of graduate degree for financial professionals. It forced him to not only develop a deep knowledge of financial best practices fairly quickly but also provided an abundance of skills training that was almost impossible to avoid. The spectrum of organizations he worked for allowed him to hone these skills in a set of diverse, real-world applications that taught him the underlying principles of accounting, not just their standard practices. It was like the difference between learning a language through a textbook versus engaging native speakers in conversation.
It wasn’t just the depth of Chad’s knowledge that was enhanced in this way but the breadth as well. The many different clients he served offered opportunities to learn new things, or allowed him to focus on a different element of his work depending on the client’s needs. Rather than simply being a talented accountant, Chad gained experience in customer service, sales, operations, project management, and human resources. This first phase of his career built Chad into a well-rounded leader with an intimate understanding of financial principles and a broader knowledge of general business practices. It would go on to shape his philosophy of leadership while at Salesloft and provide a template for training future leaders within his organization. Moving forward, Chad would try and distill his vast experience into a framework for creating equally knowledgeable team members.
Developing a Passion for People
While Chad was exposed to an array of departments and industries during his public accounting stint, one particular field captured his attention more than others; over his career, Chad developed a passion for hiring and recruiting.
Such a passion is still a product of Chad’s analytical and financial-focused mind, but he’s learned to apply that focus to other business functions. As he was thinking about his organization’s assets and financial projections, he realized that one of the greatest ways to improve ROI was through effective recruiting and hiring. To Chad, one of the most significant investments organizations make in providing a product or service is that of time. Well-structured teams made up of effective team members have the potential to significantly reduce time costs, both decreasing production costs and increasing the potential for future revenue.
To facilitate the construction of these sorts of teams, Chad seeks to develop what he calls “T-shaped leaders.” These kinds of leaders mirror the experience that Chad had early in his career, providing both a depth of knowledge and a breadth of experience, thus the T-shape. This knowledge and experience doesn’t need to come from a decade of practice (like Chad had), but can be refined through an organizational training program. Because of this, rather than look for candidates with an exhaustive resumé, Chad is after humility and a willingness to learn that will allow new hires to be molded into a T-shaped leader.
In searching for these people, Chad’s approach is to look first within his organization before seeking external candidates. To him, the people inside the company have already proven themselves to be a cultural fit. In addition, the development of new leadership skills and a broadening of an already present organizational knowledge is more cost-effective for a business than training these skills from scratch. For Chad, then, the recruiting process is all about future projections. He doesn’t hire for the leaders he needs right now but for the leaders he needs in the future. These future candidates can be brought into the organization to be trained and developed, and the current needs can be met by those candidates who already have years of that development within the organization.
With this broad-strokes model, Chad can create a funnel for producing effective leaders and is then able to organize effective teams around those leaders.
The People That Make a Team
Part of what makes Chad’s recruitment strategy so effective is that it accounts for the humanity of his candidates. It’s not only about their background and experience but about intangible things as well, like their aspirations and their durability through difficult times. These same intangible characteristics allow Chad to organize his hires into teams that share common goals and a similar vision, increasing team cohesion.
Relationships are the backbone of any team, and understanding the relational dynamics between employees is a skill that Chad is always seeking to improve. He pays attention to the kind of relationships that his people are building and tries to create structures that utilize those natural relational tendencies.
It’s a part of a broader team philosophy that Chad has—another carryover from his public accounting days. He wants to see financial professionals utilizing each other more frequently. As he sees it, every coworker, mentor, and professional peer is a potential resource for learning a new skill or strengthening a meaningful professional relationship. This informs his hiring practices, as he seeks not only candidates who are willing to learn but also those who are worth learning from. A group of these ideal hires creates a network of shared knowledge and expertise that strengthens each individual, their team, and the entire organization. It also creates a field ripe for harvest when the time comes to select a new organizational leader. The relationships between team members ensure that each is being slowly molded into the ideal T-shape that Chad seeks to cultivate. They both further develop their own knowledge while gaining experience and skills from their colleagues.
Chad embodies this philosophy of utilizing each other. He entered Salesloft with a wealth of experience from his role as a public accountant. He shared that experience with his team, creating more well-rounded leaders, while also seeking to enrich his own knowledge by recruiting team members offering teachable skills. The new hiring and recruiting strategy of Salesloft is a product of Chad’s professional skill and his relational empathy as he strives to fulfill his employees’ professional aspirations and provide them with meaningful and mutually beneficial professional relationships.
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