Video"People had been in the same positions for a long time," Shassian recalls. "They thought it was risky to move. People should want to volunteer for special projects, but they were trying to be protective and secure."
This problem, he realized, stemmed from an acute lack of the skills necessary to grow within the organization. Most finance staffers didn't understand the basics of the rapidly changing telecommunications industry. They were stunted as leaders and managers. And they were so inwardly focused that they didn't have a clue about how to help other functions solve business problems.
But rather than assembling a catalog of courses or mandating job rotation, Shassian spent several years documenting the skill gaps within finance — and developing a strategy to fill them. "I could have come up with a quick solution," he says, "but I would have missed the mark. I might have made wrong decisions, and the folks participating would not have understood why this is so important."
The centerpiece of Shassian's efforts was a lengthy self-assessment survey given to about 400 finance managers in April 1997. The survey presented 98 finance-related skills covering technical competencies (for example, cash-flow analysis and process mapping), management abilities (promoting diversity, fostering teamwork), and business acumen (basic telephony concepts and "pipeline" products). For each, the employees were asked to rate their own level of expertise from 1 (novice) to 4 (expert).
Some employees were initially concerned that the survey could be used against them in performance appraisals. Shassian reassured them that the data would remain strictly confidential. The eventual response rate was about 80 percent. Each survey was then fed into a specially designed computer program. A regression analysis compared the skill requirements for specific jobs with the skill levels people reported, and the software spit out the largest and most prevalent gaps.
"Other companies have established a curriculum of courses that have no correlation to their needs," notes Fred Heimann, the veteran finance director at SNET whom Shassian tapped to run the new Financial Professional Development Program. He points out that the survey confirmed the obvious — accounting skills were high and accountants' insights into the business were low.
The survey also served up a big surprise: finance people were confused about where all the company financial data was kept and how best to access it. "It sounds simple, but learning this by osmosis was a poor way to learn," Heimann says.
Next month, SNET hopes to correct that deficiency by offering the first of its new courses. Another course on tap is a primer on products and services in the evolving telecommunications industry, with an emphasis on helping finance look beyond accounting issues in evaluating capital investments. Heimann expects a total of eight courses in all, including one on presentation skills. "Finance needs to learn how to sell ideas," he says. SNET managers will teach all the classes.
Although these new classes will not be mandatory, Shassian believes the self-assessment exercise has motivated staffers to fill their skill gaps. They will also be encouraged to pursue new assignments, he reasons, now that they can gauge their abilities against those needed for various finance jobs. And they will be more aware of the importance of being a business partner. If nothing else, people now seem more willing to volunteer for special projects.
Yet Shassian concedes that he's quite far away from the ultimate goal. "Bottom-line success," he says, "will be when folks want to hire my people away."
GPU Generation: Targeting Practice
A few months after he was promoted to the top finance post at GPU Generation Inc. (Genco), the non-nuclear power unit of General Public Utilities Corp., Robert Vodzack was sent to Pennsylvania State University by his bosses. They wanted him to bone up on business issues related to the rapidly deregulating utility industry. So there he was in class one day in November 1996, surrounded mostly by nonfinance executives from throughout GPU, when the idea smacked him in the face: I'm not the only one who needs this stuff.
"I went there for help with my new job," Vodzack says, "but I knew others could use it." So last July, he convinced his bosses to back a three-day program for managers from the generation unit. Developed in conjunction with Penn State, the curriculum zeros in on the financial skills needed to operate in a competitive, deregulated business environment. About 100 people have been through the GPU-customized sessions so far. Only 20 or so, however, have come from finance positions.
"The whole intent was not to have a finance-only program," Vodzack says.
Day One: Finance professor J. Randall Woolridge delves right into what he calls "the fear of finance" — the practice and the people — and he comes back to that theme again and again. "It takes trust to go from a command- and-control finance organization to having finance as part of a competitive team model," he says. At another company, recalls Woolridge, the rift between the financial and nonfinancial participants was so severe that the residue from past clashes quickly bubbled to the surface. The CFO asked the professor to leave the room, and what ensued was 45 minutes of yelling and screaming.
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