Don't expect FDs to conform to stereotypes

Finance directors come in all shapes and sizes. They can be tall, or short. Overweight, or super-fit. They might wear pinstripe suits, or high heels – or both. They are generally sticklers for routine. Many like a broad-brush approach. They are, in short, not easy to categorise.

But alone among members of a corporate board, there is often a temptation to categorise them and pin down the ideal, identikit, cardboard cutout of what an FD should be.

People will argue about what skills and qualities a chief executive (CEO) should have, and they do the same for other members of a board. But no one else is expected to identify so specifically with what they should be like than finance directors.

This is the curse of the accountancy profession that has been laid upon them. Raymond Chandler, writer of hard-boiled detective fiction and himself a former accountant, portrayed accountants as mild-mannered people in a difficult world, invariably with a row of pens and the odd pencil protruding from their top pocket. In his portrayals, accountants had been trampled on by the rough old world of gangsters, but he also described them as having dogged and tenacious integrity.

It is these two extreme views which finance directors need to sort out for themselves. They have to be the conscience of the board of directors. They have to produce financial data that is reliable and understandable. But they also need to take a line on the choices available when strategic options for the future are being discussed. And they need to take the difficult line. They need to take the line that asks where the funding will come from, which ensures that corporate governance issues and anything the audit committee will be worried about are considered and the implications understood.

Corporate governance is the pivotal point between the two extremes. They and their team can produce the financial data, but they also have to deal with the reputational risk of what is done off the back of that financial data. And the pressures on them are increasing all the time. Life has become too short.