GrowCFO has created a CFO Competency Framework that covers the key skills required to become an effective finance leader.  This is rapidly becoming the global toolkit to help finance leaders benchmark their skills and competencies against their peer group.  It also acts as a CFO Readiness Toolkit to help the next generation of aspiring CFOs.

During this podcast episode, Dan Wells and Kevin Appleby discuss the purpose of the CFO Competency Framework.  In addition, we discuss how it is helping so many finance leaders to accelerate their learning and development.

CFO Competency Framework's purpose

GrowCFO noticed that there was a huge gap in the finance leader ecosystem.  Nobody had previously produced a global competency framework to help finance leaders benchmark their existing skills against those required to become a CFO.

Senior finance professionals were struggling to identify their skills gaps and to prioritise their most important learning and development objectives.  As many people say, “You don’t know what you don’t know!”

Our CFO Competency Framework is designed to deliver many important purposes.

Identify the skills gaps to be addressed by the next generation of finance leaders.Assist CFO job applicants to become self-aware candidates with a proper development plan.Help first-time CFOs to become more impactful within your role.Highlight opportunities for the CFO to create value and achieve your company’s vision.Determine the difference between the CFO role and versus Finance Director or Head of Finance.Filter GrowCFO’s activities to help experienced CFOs to fulfil your annual CPD requirements.Map your competency assessment ratings into online courses, lessons and workshops.Benchmark your competency levels against your most relevant finance leader peer group.

It is no surprise that many finance leaders are already using the GrowCFO Competency Framework to accelerate your career progression.

How did we build the CFO Competency Framework?

GrowCFO has a huge network of aspiring finance leaders, first-time CFOs, experienced CFOs, CEOs, Chairs, NEDs, other C-Suite members, advisors, investors and recruiters.  We held focus groups with representatives from these communities to determine the required competencies for the modern-day CFO.

GrowCFO also consulted with a huge number of GrowCFO members to obtain people’s views and feedback.  We worked with technology experts, graphic designers and programme developers to build a market-leading digital CFO Competency Framework that operates on a self-serve basis.

Following this, we engaged inspirational CFOs to create a huge number of competency lessons that are located within our world-class learning management system.  We have mapped each of our CFO competencies into online training courses and regular workshops.  This allows finance leaders to efficiently generate your tailored learning and development plan to further develop their skills and address their biggest challenges.

https://youtu.be/6Kk9Yz2ax5s

How is the CFO Competency Framework structured?

Our CFO Competency Framework contains three categories: Foundation, Implementation and Impact.  These help you to preserve value, create value and maximise value throughout your role.

Each category comprises three competencies, giving a total of nine competencies across the framework.  These competencies are inter-connected and you will often be using many of these concurrently.

Each competency contains five different skills.  Therefore, the GrowCFO Competency Framework contains a total of 45 skills that are relevant to a typical modern-day CFO.

There is a lot for finance leaders to master and our framework will constantly evolve over time, in line with the ongoing evolution of the CFO role.

Foundation category

The Foundation category contains three competencies: Governance and Control, Operational driver and Financial Planning & Analysis.