When Profit Personalities Conflict
You have your profit personality. You have a pretty good idea what your clients’ profit personalities are.
What happens when those personalities seem to be oil and water? Or clashing more often than not?
How do you not only handle the conflict but also keep on track with helping your client get the profit results they want and need?
First, the good news. Having different profit personalities viewing and reviewing the results of any company can enhance how those results are viewed. If company results are only being seen through the eyes of visionary profit personalities, the observations and ideas that can came from other viewpoints is diminished or sometimes non-existent. Nothing gets done on the day to day because all the profit personalities are looking at the next 3 years!
But what if your client is a visionary and you are a tactical profit personality?
Symptoms of Profit Personality Conflict
The easiest diagnosis often happens based on what people say. If I eavesdropped on your conversations, I would probably hear things like…
From the visionary client: “I know we need to worry about this month’s revenue, but I am more concerned about how we are set up for next year when we have all these new customers.”
From the tactical CFO: “The plans for this month’s revenue can be used for next year as well. Let’s review the pipeline to make sure we can meet the bank’s expectations for monthly reporting.”
AND….
From the visionary client: “Can we project the rest of the year’s results based on our sales being above $1 million every month? We need to buy new equipment to meet the increased demand I can feel coming our way.”
From the tactical CFO: “Is this significantly different than the budget we already have in place? Are you sure there is a sales plan and pipeline to support that revenue coming in?”
To be clear…none of the comments above by either person are right or wrong. The tactical CFO is questioning the vision because it seems less than concrete. The visionary wants some element of analysis to land their future-focused decision.
The issue can be that the visionary can feel challenged more than supported. The tactician can feel like they are building a house on sand. There is room for both – and there should be. Managing through the difference in viewpoint and how it is communicated will make all the difference in the outcome of the conversations, the actions and the future dialogues.
How to Handle Profit Personality Conflicts
As with any conflict, the first step is to get to the root cause and not just look at symptoms. For example, profit personality differences often manifest themselves in what appear to be miscommunications. Sometimes that is key element that needs to be addressed – but not in the way you might think.
Overexplaining tactics to a visionary doesn’t help. They may not understand or fully appreciate the tactics but saying the same thing five different ways isn’t the answer.
Trying to get a tactician client to not look at every angle may make them more anxious than not. They need a certain amount of hardcore facts to be able to move forward.
Getting a reactive personality to slow down long enough in their decision process to consider alternatives is a skillset that involves bullet points and condensed facts.
Your role as a CFO is to understand what needs to be known by the decision maker and then to put it into the context that works best with their profit personality. That may mean it is different than what resonates with how you like to present or be presented to. That may mean you have to get out of your own profit personality and think more like your client.
It doesn’t mean you need to cave to their whims and only give them what they want.
It does mean that you need to know your audience and craft your message accordingly.
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