Communicating Financials to Executives

Chapter ElevenHow Finance Professionals Become Excellent Communicators

We have covered how finance professionals can communicate financials to executives and showed a specific example of how the perfect management report could look. However, the principles for communication that we have laid out have many more uses for finance professionals to achieve excellence in all their communication.

The management report is likely the most structured communication we frequently share. However, we also prepare and present business cases, conduct ad hoc analyses and communicate extensively inside and outside the Finance department. Most of this communication is inefficient, and while this is not unique to finance professionals, our technical nature usually magnifies the issue. That is why it will benefit us to expand our newfound way of communicating financials to executives in other areas.

To do this we should start with the SCQA framework, the most fundamental principle behind the five-step communication principles.

• Situation: The widely accepted facts about the current situation that we can all agree on.
• Complication: The problem or opportunity that we must address to change the current situation. If we do not address it, the current situation will become worse, or we will lose the opportunity.
• Question: The key question we should explore to solve the complication. This question should usually be formulated in a way that makes it unambiguous. We can leverage the SMART principle (Doran, ...