4 Tips for leading an adaptable team

Being a successful CFO requires being involved and understanding all areas of the business, serving as a visionary that helps prepare the company for varying competitive environments.

Dynshaw Italia is CFO at Soldo, an organization that believes businesses deserve better than painful, slow, and costly spending. The company is providing a solution that is smarter, faster, and more connected, to build an entirely new financial architecture to pay for advertising, software, travel expenses, online procurement, and more. When Dynshaw joined Soldo, he brought with him years of experience working in various disciplines and companies of all sizes. He is using that experience as an asset to help drive financial stability and success for the company.

Dynshaw joined us on the latest episode of The CFO Playbook podcast, where he shares that trust and accountability are the most important mindsets to start with when developing a cohesive, supportive, and successful culture.

1. Success requires flexibility

From yourself, to your leadership, to your support team, you want people around you that are able to accept continuous change and not shy away from responsibilities.

Since there is always constant change in business, having an adaptable mindset provides a better chance to succeed.

“In a fast-growing business, change is a constant because it’s just happening on a daily basis. I use this term, ‘you adapt or you die.’ It’s as simple as that. You have to have the mindset that you can adapt to change. If you can accept change, you can work in a fast-growing environment. Because you’re working in a fast-paced environment, you continuously learn, getting experience.”

It’s important for a team to be open to new ideas and have collective buy-in to make collaboration work; understanding risks and still being willing to take that next step.

2. Trust, culture, and accountability are key

Building trust with your leadership and your colleagues helps bind everyone together towards a shared vision to build a company.

Dynshaw believes that trust helps everything fall into place. Being able to communicate, no matter if it’s when things are going well or going badly, is a core element to gaining trust.

“It comes to mindset and culture. Everything that you do is about how you set up the culture within your teams or within your organization. So you want self-starters. You want people to take responsibility. You want people to accept continuous change. So it starts with the recruitment process. You’re looking for people with the right attitude. You’re looking for people who will take on responsibility and not shy away from it.”

You also need to understand that time is a resource to be respected and provided to others when brainstorming and guiding the strategic direction of a company.

3. Lead by example

Success starts with how you lead. Being successful as a CFO means being educated and prepared to tackle whatever challenges your company may face.

Part of that requires you to be open to and supportive of all ideas, solutions, and tools to achieve success, no matter if you always agree with the final decisions or not.

“I keep saying we should be an enabler, not an obstacle. It’s very, very important. You can never stand still. You have to adapt. You have to change to survive. You have to change to grow. You’ve got to change to be successful. That’s important. And then the culture piece is driven from leadership. So you set the tone as a leader, you set the example, you create the environment and people will follow what you do if you lead by example.”

Being educated yourself, and ensuring everyone is fully informed of all possibilities will eventually set up your team to be rewarded for their efforts.

4. Don’t call it a mistake, call it an experience

Dynshaw thinks, “if you fail, fail fast and move on.” It is okay to try multiple things, just make sure you define what success is.

If something is too complicated, shut it down and try the next thing. In an effort to become more efficient, be open to learning from missteps and see them as teaching moments and experiences.

“A lot is driven by leaders themselves. So what you do is really important, how you operate is really important. You set the example, you set the benchmarks, you show that it’s okay to do something wrong, as long as you don’t do it again. You know, all those sort of things you create. And a lot of it is creating structure. So people know what is expected of them. They know what good looks like, what bad looks like.”

Allow yourself to try new things and integrate ideas from others and new technologies to garner improvement.

Create options in everything you do

A CFO needs to have a desire to improve and a willingness to adapt to whatever situations come about. A key to that is pushing for more efficiency and encouraging a mindset of betterment towards profitability within the organization.

Dynshaw emphasizes that flexibility and openness to financial transformations and being open to adopting new tools is inherent to improving oneself and the company as a whole.