I have found that finance employees do not spend enough time focused on external leadership. I think of external leadership as engaging with external customers to showcase business processes and technology, actively participating in the external finance community as well as talking to Press (although you have to be careful with the Press one).

At Microsoft, finance employees spend a majority of their time on business insight as well as business excellence activities.  Some business insight activities include strategy, deals, business analysis, resource allocation, influencing decisions to deliver business results, etc.  Some business excellence activities include accounting, reporting, forecasting, close process, etc.  One area that we do not spend enough time on is around showcasing our products to customers.  For example, we are in process of leveraging Business Scorecard Manager 2005 which is a new full-featured scorecarding server that we recently launched.  In addition, we are very heavy users of some of our more traditional desktop applications such as Excel.  Who else is better to demo some of the improved features in Excel around pivot tables than finance employees?

Another area that I would like to see more finance employees engaging in is showcasing business and finance processes.  For example, MSFT has some best practices around our rhythm of the business, how we plan and budget, forecasting, etc.  We should be sharing some of these best practices with other companies as well as leveraging best practices from other companies.  If there is interest, I am more than happy to share some of these best practices and hope that other community members will do this same.  Finance should also be more frequently representing the company externally in the CFO community and in professional bodies.  There is so much to learn from finance employees at different companies. 

One side benefit of external leadership is around development.  That is, as we focus on developing key finance leaders in our companies it is more and more important for employees to show external leadership qualities.  Talking to customers, interacting with finance employees in other companies is a great way to develop a better understanding of the business as well as people skills.

We have introduced a commitment around external leadership to many people in the finance organization.  I am interested in what other companies have done in this space? 

• Do you reward finance employees for external leadership?
• From a Microsoft perspective, we do not reward finance employees directly from an external leadership standpoint. Although, we do find that the employees who are more external do better on average than those who do not when it comes to their annual performance appraisal
• Are your high potential finance employees exposed to more external leadership opportunities?
• From a Microsoft perspective, we are starting to get some of our high potential finance employees more involved but definitely just starting from a programmatic standpoint.
• How do you effectively train your finance employees to be able to effectively communicate externally?
• From a Microsoft perspective, this is an area of opportunity for us as think we have a ways to go.

Thanks and look forward to your responses.

Byron Rader, Finance Director
Microsoft Corporation