Leaders of Modern Finance – Investing in People First, hosted by Ben Murray ft. Steve Emberland
On this episode of the Leaders of Modern Finance podcast, host Ben Murray, Founder of The SaaS CFO, is joined by Steve Emberland, Vice President, Finance, at Delphix.
Learning Through Tech and Teamwork
Steve initially followed a traditional accounting path, earning his CPA license and working at one of the Big Four accounting firms directly out of college. However, it was in the tech and startup world where he gained much of his professional experience.
Steve was born and raised in Silicon Valley, so he grew up in the center of the tech world’s hotbed of activity. It’s no surprise, then, that his first role coming out of public accounting was in a technology company, and he’s been in the industry ever since.
This field offered Steve unique opportunities for professional development. He learned not only the industry-specific knowledge needed to successfully steer a software and technology company but also the soft skills that made him a better member of a team. Many tech startups, some of Steve’s employers included, were started with the goal of scaling and going public. This meant the team often started small and grew as it found success. Thus, while the Silicon Valley startup world could be full of frenetic energy, the frenzy of work often fell on the shoulders of just a few people. Being part of one of these small teams in the midst of organizational expansion provided Steve with tremendous responsibility and forced him to develop strong interpersonal skills.
Steve was able to step into a more executive and managerial role, learning operational oversight and resource management through meaningful experience. That experience would eventually lead him to his current position as Vice President of Finance at Delphix. At the same time, he wasn’t just managing resources, but people. Those people were confronted daily with the same kind of exciting, but often stressful, workplace environment that Steve experienced, and so he was able to develop a strong sense of empathy. As Steve tells it, that empathy and his other relationship-building skills would become one of his greatest assets as a financial leader.
Taking Time To Check In
Steve, more so than some of his industry peers, places great value on checking in on his finance team’s well-being. While he doesn’t think this concept is novel in itself, he does think that many financial leaders don’t take this idea far enough.
To Steve, connecting with his people should extend beyond workplace relationships. Rather than simply asking someone how they’re doing and being satisfied with a simple “good,” Steve wants to understand the specifics of his staff’s situation. By asking how someone’s home life is going or how they feel about the work they’re doing and if it’s burning them out, Steve is able to connect on a more human level.
Being able to make those connections, however, means paying attention. Steve practices authentic listening when his colleagues and staff voice their anxieties, worries or joys about their work and their personal lives. He brings these up in future check-ins, asking if there are any updates and if there’s anything he can do to make things easier. It helps to forge genuine relationships with the people he manages, and the whole team becomes better bonded with each other and with their leadership. This approach also promotes trust between staff and leadership and improves employee retention.
Steve’s method is very time-consuming. Consistent, weekly conversations that provoke meaningful feedback can’t be casually undertaken without adjustments to a typical workflow. Checking in is thus an involved process and it becomes a workplace task of its own. For Steve, that’s not a problem because he doesn’t view the time spent on employee relationships as time wasted. Rather, he views it as an investment that he’s making in his team that has the potential to create a significant ROI.
In that sense, Steve manages his time the same way he manages more tangible resources. He invests it wisely in his people with the confidence it will produce returns in the way of efficiency, employee retention and workplace morale.
Individual Differentiation
Steve likes to quote a Forbes statistic that claims that 96% of employees cite empathy as an overlooked employee retention tool. While it’s an unfortunate stat, it also presents an opportunity for financial leaders, says Steve. One of the greatest assets a financial leader can possess is their own uniqueness. In leadership, as in business, differentiation can be key to gaining customers or, in this case, followers.
In that sense, learning soft skills like empathy can set a leader apart from their industry peers and provide a competitive edge in attracting and retaining top talent. This is especially important for smaller organizations, like many of the tech startups that Steve was a part of earlier in his career. Employees often look at compensation packages as a primary indicator of an organization’s ability to care for its team, and a smaller company can’t hope to compete with the ability of industry giants to offer competitive salaries. As Steve tells it, this doesn’t necessarily put a smaller company at a disadvantage if leadership can differentiate itself in other ways, like with its capacity for empathy. Offering other benefits, like a flexible remote work policy, in addition to proving an authentic desire to look out for the team, can help leaders create a work environment that’s more enticing than a higher salary.
To Steve’s dismay, leadership that backs up its team-centric talk with concrete actions is still an uncommon feature of modern financial leadership, as the Forbes statistic proves. However, especially in a post-Covid world, employees are longing for a workplace that cares for their human needs beyond their capacity as a worker. Practicing humility, empathy, and attentive listening is a fantastic way for finance leaders to separate themselves from the pack in the eyes of potential employees, helping them build talented and committed finance teams.
It’s for this reason that Steve is an advocate for the human side of finance. Becoming a better financial leader isn’t always about honing your accounting skills or becoming a better financial analyst. True leadership is remembering that people are people, not just assets to be exploited. To Steve, leaders who practice a more empathetic financial approach can create strong teams with a healthy work culture and can drive organizational success from the ground up.
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