During the careers of most CFOs, the finance organization structure has evolved only marginally — requiring them to reskill teams, sharpen revenue strategies and incorporate new technology.
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Now, the pace of change is accelerating dramatically. Artificial intelligence and digital tools are ever more embedded across the enterprise and are fundamentally reshaping the necessary skills and talent across finance organizations. Market volatility and geopolitical uncertainty have become the norm. These forces, together, are exacerbating change fatigue while eroding trust and confidence amongst the C-suite, employees, boards and external stakeholders.
The CFO’s functional excellence won’t be enough to meet these modern challenges. Today’s CFOs must learn to excel in people-centric leadership to drive business value and resilience, whether transforming teams, enhancing collaboration, planning for succession, or reinforcing employee engagement.
People-centric leadership is increasingly important for CFOs
To address these challenges, CFOs must commit to their personal development, as well as that of the senior leaders and rising stars on their team. Gartner experts advise this means leading with executive presence across five dimensions to enhance their ability to lead.
Source: Gartner (July 2026)
CFOs must practice self-awareness and personal development, while also building external influence and engaging stakeholders. Empowering and mentoring their teams is essential, as is collaborating effectively with peers. In addition, the most successful CFOs are skilled at influencing the CEO and the board. At the heart of each of these success factors is the ability to relate, empathize and influence others.
Lead within: Evolve yourself first
Effective leadership starts with self-awareness; therefore, CFOs must understand how their behaviors and biases impact results. This requires CFOs to reflect on how their personal values are shaping business outcomes, whether favorably or not.
CFOs should seek and normalize candid (360 degree) feedback from stakeholders, peers and direct reports regardless of seniority or lack thereof. It may also help a CFO to hire an executive coach or advisor to observe them in action and guide their exploration of personal biases and their impacts. Further, this could mean using evidence-based assessment tools for personality, cognitive and emotional intelligence or engaging with leadership or peer learning communities where leaders can share and discuss insights.
When it comes to technology, 82% of CFOs cite this as a crucial adaptability skill. The enthusiasm and technology literacy of the CFO cascades throughout their organizations. If the CFO is not engaged with new technology, it is less likely their teams will be and outcomes will suffer.
Standard of excellence: Integrate accountability into your personal development management process to ensure new skills become habits.
Lead out: Influence the ecosystem
CFOs must look to evolve their organization’s ecosystems of external entities beyond traditional partners and markets to drive innovation and resilience. That means engaging with new potential partners, suppliers and investors and then sharing insights gained across the business to foster a more customer-centric approach. In practice, CFOs can broaden their vision in this domain by fostering new relationships at conferences and other public events.
To stay relevant this will require evaluating and updating external relationships as the ecosystems evolve, as well as the CFO being prepared to adjust how they position themselves in a particular ecosystem as new risks and opportunities arise.
Standard of excellence: Listen to and influence the “voice of society,” balancing profit with ethical and sustainable practices. CFOs must be clear what corporate values and priorities they will advocate for with partners and communities.
Lead down: Empower and mentor teams
High-performing organizations depend on empowered, engaged teams. CFOs should focus on how their organization’s culture and norms must change to ensure business continuity and resilience in a high-change world.
In practice, this means a commitment to productive and empathetic change management that communicate the necessity of changes to achieving key business priorities looking at the underlying ROI.
When engineering organizational changes, it’s also key to provide as much autonomy as possible to teams while maintaining alignment on goals. By letting teams figure their own path through change with a focus on goals, not process, and creating opportunities for ongoing dialogue and agency, CFOs will build better motivation and sense of purpose around change initiatives in their teams.
Part of navigating change is modeling a continuous learning and growth mindset, where change is seen as an opportunity to learn new skills and potentially advance within the organization rather than just something extra to manage.
This will require partnering with HR and the C-suite to address skills gaps and workforce strategies to remedy them, and mitigate succession risks in key areas.
Standard of excellence: Teach rising midlevel and senior leaders to embrace uncertainty by sharing leadership’s real-world experiences and lessons learned and creating opportunities for them to engage with current C-suite leaders.
Lead across: Collaborate to innovate
As technology blurs functional boundaries, CFOs must collaborate effectively with peers. The modern leader must be able to understand, influence, create dialogue, collaborate and innovate across the organization.
CFOs must build trust with C-suite peers by reliably supporting them. This means embracing resolving their challenges for the collective good of the organization. In effect CFOs should model the behavior they’d wish to receive from peers.
CFOs should encourage open dialogue, stress-test assumptions and co-create solutions with their peers and enable their success as a customer-centric partner. Often, that will require tolerating disagreement and failing safely because this kind of culture is key to effective collaboration and innovation.
Standard of excellence: Actively engage with other leaders to understand current sentiment, fears and aspirations and lead a discussion about the desired future for the organization in a flexible and creative way that accepts the business will need to adapt to thrive.
Lead up: Engage the CEO and board
CFOs must anticipate and address the needs of the CEO and board, using data-driven storytelling to clarify strategic choices. This means building both the CFO and the board’s business and AI acumen to inform decision making.
Furthermore, it’s important to foster a culture of constructive friction and discussion. For example, this could be framing business needs as positive questions that foster collaboration grounded in shared goals (e.g., “What is needed for a great experience?” vs. “How do we stop attrition?”).
Standard of excellence: Influence better decisions by deconstructing requests to remove hidden biases, motivations or assumptions and reconstruct alternatives that align with organizational priorities.
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