Changing skills
and behaviours

Changing skills
and behavioursThe increased focus of finance professionals on sustainability issues is changing the skills and behaviours required to make a difference. This is because sustainability factors are imbued with complexity and exhibit the characteristics of wicked problems. These factors can be difficult to formulate and often have multiple interdependent causes. It is also rarely clear when a solution has been reached.¹⁰For individuals working with shareholder perspective organisations and being driven by regulatory compliance these skills gaps fall primarily within technical and business skills. There was a common call in interviews and roundtables for guidance dealing with data sets, new analytical approaches, and the visualisation of sustainable information. A roundtable discussion in Malaysia highlighted the need for enhanced skills for dealing with non-financial data and in verifying the reliability of sustainability data. We label these as ‘hard skills’. These are skills connected to role-related knowledge and abilities that the finance professional needs to perform the task at hand.

Figure 4. The 2019 CGMA Competency Framework and perspective skills focus

On the other hand, individuals with organisations moving from the stakeholder to a system value perspective are looking to boost their people and leaderships skills. We label these as ‘soft skills’. These are skills connected to personal qualities and habits that help finance professionals work on their own and collaborate in the work environment.A business controller, working for a construction and engineering organisation in Poland, told us that sustainability was ‘being able to be curious, challenge, and ask the right questions’. Others talked about having more holistic discussions and sharing sustainability knowledge to influence organisational decision-making.A director from a retail and shared services company in the UK talked about how the need to focus on the planet and people as well as profits changes a finance professional’s behaviour:‘They require a broader thought process and the broader mindset than just the outcome from the business point of view. I am thinking of self-awareness, resilience, and ability to change on the hop because we know that things are going to change all the time’.The finance professional requires a greater number of soft skills to aid collaboration with multiple stakeholders as an organisation moves closer to a system value perspective.Overall, it is a balance between regulatory compliance skills and skills that help build organisational resilience. In a roundtable in Malaysia, a Finance Business Partner explained that regulatory guidelines in the sustainability space would help but that professional judgement will play a role as well, especially when understanding materiality.Hard skillsIn our interviews and roundtables, we noted that the hard skills discussed were uniform across business, culture, and industry. They are based on explicit knowledge. These include:

Sustainability entry-level knowledge skills
There were calls for entry-level knowledge on sustainability and its implications on business as usual. A senior leader from a Canadian agricultural company told us, ‘I think the management accountant should be at the forefront of driving the sustainability agenda. Maybe not from a subject matter expert perspective — this could be a geologist, it could be anybody — but having that knowledge of what the implications of each report, each result, are from a disclosure and regulatory perspective. That would be a vital skill for any finance professional to have’.

At a London roundtable, the need for basic sustainability training was articulated. A Risk Advisory Manager working in business consulting and services in the UK said, ‘If you’re a finance person being asked to lead on sustainability, you are faced with so much information, you just wouldn’t know where to start. You could benchmark and look at what your competitors are doing. But there definitely needs to be more training on it and more awareness of the issues’.

Data management skills
Participants working on metric and target compliance behind sustainability-related financial disclosures highlighted the struggle with applied data management skills. These included data collection, analysis, and visualisation. Sustainability data is often not owned by the finance department, often external to the organisation, and intangible in nature.

Materiality skills
Another hot topic within skills development related to sustainability is definitions around materiality. Emerging global standards differ, some with a primary focus on financial materiality to an organisation, and others leading with the concept of double materiality. Materiality is a dynamic concept. Issues are not always easily identified, relevant stakeholders may be undefined, and long-term significance may not be fully understood. It is also an area that is very subjective.

In a roundtable in Ireland, a CFO summed up the conundrum many finance professionals are experiencing:

‘Traditionally, the finance professional needed to understand materiality from a financial perspective. But the environmental [sustainability] is a different skill set, and there’s an element of training needed. Companies start in terms of setting a target and a strategy. To do that, it’s understanding what our most material risks and opportunities from an ESG perspective are’.
_{CFO, Business Consulting & Services, Ireland}

Soft/enabling skillsAs mentioned above, the closer an organisation is to embracing a system value perspective, the higher the demand for soft skills. These are tacit know-how skills. We have already established that collaboration and partnering skills will play an important role. Other skills needed to succeed in the sustainability space according to our interviewees and roundtable participants include:

Conviction & convincing skills

‘I think conviction and convincing power is required from finance people, persuading the top management that sustainability will pay dividends in the future. We must build a strong case for why something needs to be spent today for the survival of tomorrow. Bean counting may not work’.
_{Associate Professor, Education & Professional Training, Pakistan}

Communication & collaboration skills

‘Critical because someone may have very good technical skills and be very tech savvy, but, if they’re not able to communicate or have a discussion on technical topics, it can be very tough — not just about being able to translate that tech information’.
_{Auditor, Professional Services, US}
‘The ability to translate and simplify’
_{Integrated Operations Lead, Manufacturing sector, Poland}

Learning from failure and a willingness to fail fast

‘Perfectionism is the enemy of progress’.
‘Finance professionals should not fear to take accountability and be proactive in the sustainability space’.
_{Chief Internal Auditor, Government & Public Sector, Ghana}

Storytelling skills

‘It’s not enough having good presentation skills as an executive person. You should be able to tell a story, because only by telling stories do you move people and influence your stakeholders’.
_{Director Treasury & Financial Planning, Utilities, US}

Mediating & negotiation skills

‘My experience sitting on a sustainability board is that I kind of almost act as a bit of a mediator. We have everyone pushing for sustainability, to invest in carbon, reducing materials, and machinery. Then the answer is that finance might put it in the budget, and you try to mediate that’.
_{Finance Manager, Engineering & Consultancy Services, UK}

Our interview and roundtable participants also noted that sustainability skills and behaviours must be understood in the context of an organisation’s internal dynamics. This requires a combination of explicit knowledge and tacit know-how grounded in an understanding of the organisation’s ecosystem and culture.When discussing the skills required, an interviewee from a multinational food and drink processing corporation, stressed the organisational context:‘Instead of spending hours in front of your Excel spreadsheet working on
your own, you should go and talk to your colleagues — not just in finance, but your colleagues elsewhere in the business. Have a look at what’s going on in the warehouse. Have a look at what’s going on in marketing. What are the challenges with the truck drivers or the supply chain guys? How do we operate today? What are the constraints?’
_{Digital Finance Transformation Lead, Food & Drink Processing, Switzerland}