My three interesting things this month…
1. Moving from execution to strategy: Influence
Last month, I introduced the five areas I use to help people move from execution-first to strategy-first as a senior finance leader.
The first is influence.
As you get more senior, you get more access to decision-makers and more opportunity to shape what happens across the business.
But having a seat at the table doesn’t mean people will agree with you.
For me, good influence starts with one simple idea:
Stop thinking about what you want to say and start thinking about the problem the other person wants to solve.
Before an important conversation, I normally work through four questions.
1. What problem do they have?
Start with their world, not yours.
What are they worried about? What’s making their life harder? What are they being measured on? What pressure are they under?
If you’re proposing a new forecasting system, for example, you might be excited about better controls, cleaner data and improved accuracy.
Your commercial leader might care much more about getting a forecast they can actually use without waiting three weeks for finance to produce it.
It’s the same idea addressing a different problem.
2. What outcome do they want?
Once you understand the problem, work out what ‘better’ looks like for them.
Maybe they want to grow faster, reduce risk, save time, hit their bonus, make their team’s life easier or simply avoid looking bad in front of the CEO.
This part is really important because people generally say yes to their outcome, not your idea.
Your job is to connect the two.
3. How does your idea help them get there?
This is where finance people can sometimes get stuck. We’ve done loads of analysis, so naturally we want to explain it. But the stakeholder is probably thinking:
“So what does this do for me?”
Make that connection really obvious.
Instead of:
“We need to invest £200k in a new forecasting platform.”
Try:
“This will cut three days out of the forecasting cycle, give your team numbers they can use earlier and reduce the amount of time they spend going backwards and forwards with finance.”
Only the framing has changed.
4. What do they care about emotionally?
We like to think business decisions are completely rational but in reality they aren’t.
People care about things like status, risk, recognition, control, workload and whether something is going to make them look good or bad.
So think about the emotion behind the decision too.
Are they nervous about taking a risk? Frustrated with the current process? Excited by growth? Worried about creating more work for their team?
You’re not trying to manipulate anyone. You’re trying to understand what genuinely matters to them and communicate in a way that connects with it.
I often think of influence as:
Their problem → their desired outcome → how your idea helps → why they should care
It’s simple but it completely changes how you approach a conversation.
Instead of asking, “How do I persuade them that my idea is right?”
Ask: “What do they need, and how can I help them see that this gets them there?”
2. Stop asking “why?” in difficult conversations
When somebody in your team makes a decision you don’t understand, it’s completely natural to ask: “Why did you do that?”
The person hearing it might take the question differently from the way you intended.
You mean, “Help me understand how you got there.” They hear, “Explain why you got this wrong.”
You can end up with a defence of what happened when you really want a useful conversation about what to do differently next time.
Luckily, this is pretty easy to change.
In workshops, I use an idea I call naughty words and magic words. It’s about noticing where small changes in language can make it easier for people to think openly.
Replace “why” with “what” or “how”
Instead of: “Why did you use that assumption?”
You could ask: “What led you to that assumption?”
Or instead of: “Why wasn’t this raised earlier?”
Try: “What would have helped us spot this earlier?”
You can still challenge the thinking and understand what happened. The question just gives the other person more room to examine the decision without feeling they have to defend it.
There are plenty of good uses of “why”, especially when you’re exploring someone’s motivation or goals. I’d be more careful when it’s attached to something they’ve already done and could sound like judgement.
Replace “yes, but…” with “yes, and”
“Yes, but” can close down an idea very quickly.
Someone suggests an idea, you say “yes, but…” and everything before the “but” is basically forgotten and the person feels like their idea has been thrown out.
If there’s a genuine constraint, you still need to raise it. Switching to “yes, and” reframes what you’re saying, without changing the meaning.
For example:
- “Yes, but we don’t have the budget.”
- “Yes, and we’d need to work out how to do it within the current budget.”
The difference is obvious. Instead of coming across as critical, you keep the conversation collaborative and focused on the best next step.
Replace “should/must” with “could”
“Should” and “must” are useful when something genuinely isn’t optional. In leadership conversations, though, we often use them when we’re offering advice.
“You should speak to the commercial director.”
The advice is sensible, but there isn’t much room for the other person to think through their options.
Try using could instead: “You could speak to the commercial director. How do you think they’d respond?”
You’re still offering a route forward while giving them more ownership of the decision.
The magic question: “How could we…?”
Of all of these changes, one of my favourites is “How could we…?”
If somebody brings you a project with a weak return, you could tell them the numbers don’t work.
Or you could ask: “How could we change this in a way that improves the ROI?”
You’ve kept the required outcome clear while leaving room to work out the route together. The same question works in plenty of situations:
- “How could we hit the target without adding more headcount?”
- “How could we make this work within the budget?”
- “How could we spot this issue earlier next time?”
As you become more senior, a lot of your impact comes from helping other people think without automatically giving them the answer. The language you use can make that easier.
3. Use AI to improve the question before you ask for the answer
I’ve talked before about the difference between “what” problems and “how” problems when using AI in finance.
“What” problems ask AI to do the work for you. “How” problems use AI to improve the way you approach work. You might use it to redesign a process, prepare for a conversation or challenge the way you’re currently working.
There’s another useful step within that: get AI to challenge the question before you start asking for solutions.
Ask AI what you might be missing
Imagine you’re trying to improve forecasting and your starting question is: “How could we make our forecasting process faster?”
It’s a useful “how” question, but it already assumes that speed is the main problem. Before looking for solutions, you could give AI some context and ask:
“We want to improve our forecasting process and currently think speed is the main issue. Before suggesting solutions, what questions would you ask to understand the problem properly? Challenge that assumption and tell me what else we should consider.”
It might ask about forecast accuracy, where delays happen, whether people trust the output, how much time finance spends collecting inputs or how the business actually uses the forecast.
The first question you type into AI doesn’t need to be perfect. You can use the conversation to make it better.
Get AI to question you
One prompt I recommend in my AI workshops is: “What other questions would you ask in order to improve the answer?”
For more complicated problems, go further and ask AI to interview you before suggesting solutions. Explain what you’re trying to improve and let it ask questions until it understands the problem properly.
This forces you to make some of the context in your head explicit. You might realise you haven’t agreed what success looks like, or that the problem sits somewhere different from where you first assumed.
It can also challenge assumptions you’ve stopped questioning because you work with them every day.
You still need to decide which questions are useful. AI doesn’t know your business as well as you do, so some suggestions won’t be relevant.
Try it on the next “how” problem you’re working through and let me know what questions it surfaces.
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