80% of Teams Aren’t Meeting Goals. Finance Can Help

As finance chiefs deal with this year’s headline issues, from the talent shortage to recession concerns, their role within the organization has broadened. Not only do they need to more carefully manage finances now, but in many cases, they’re tasked with weighing in on other departments’ strategic decisions more than ever before.

Stepping up to this expanded CFO can let you use economic uncertainty to your business’s advantage. To gauge exactly how this should be done, we polled 500 executives and managers at companies with under $250 million in annual revenue, asking them how they perceive business challenges, their leadership’s response to challenges and their company’s prospects in the current economy.

Key Findings From the Survey:

• 80% of mid-level managers say their teams are struggling to meet goals, and 40% say leadership doesn’t understand how supply and staffing shortages affect their ability to meet goals.
• 45% of larger organizations and 32% of smaller ones say inflation has positively affected their businesses.
• Nearly all executives foresee a recession within the next year and half. In response, 51% of finance executives are evaluating the recession sensitivity of products and services. 

CFOs have their work cut out for them: Overall, managers in our survey expressed ambivalence about the support they’re getting from execs to deal with issues like the staffing shortages:

Compounding their lukewarm attitude about exec support, 80% of managers said their teams aren’t able to meet the operational goals they and leadership have set. Reasons for this varied:

• 23% percent cited outdated tools and processes.  
• 21% cited the labor shortage.
• 19% cited materials shortages.
• 17% said demand is booming beyond their ability to meet it.

As CFO, your team is now tasked with helping to address these barriers. It’s always been finance’s job to vet expenditures; now, the team must lean in and help supply chain and other managers find ways to meet their goals. Other leaders want help from finance in identifying where and how to invest in the business, making it finance’s job to get in and help.

Our survey also polled executives and managers about inflation’s impact on their businesses, their take on recession postulations and their top business concerns.