Supporting Leaders to Deliver Change

Business Context

Our client was a profitable company grown through global acquisitions. The CEO was on a mission to keep growing and need business leaders to transform the business. Like many companies built through acquisitions, it was fragmented across countries with different systems. This made change difficult and held the Finance team back. Finance had a history of struggling with transformation and lacked strong project management experience. The CFO needed to identify leaders to drive change in Finance and the HR Director wanted to help.

The Challenge

The HR Director felt he had the solution and he need expertise to help him prove the concept. He has the idea to build a Change Acdamemy and in order ot do this, he help they needed:

• To mobilise a team of Finance professionals to design and deliver change to their function.

• To deliver tailored ‘training’ to equip the team with the skills they needed to design the business change themselves.

• To provide ongoing 1-1 project coaching support to embed the learning and help the team to deliver change at pace.

The Transformation Guide Approach

Paul Cook partnered with the HR Director, Learning Team and the Head of Change, to shape what a Change Academy could look like in practice, balancing the Finance team’s needs, the current change approach and a cost effective way of training people. Paul developed:

• Developed a simple curriculum of ‘best practice’ change and project management topics which we fine-tuned with the in-house Learning team – we added more topics along the way based on feedback from the team and spotting other gaps to be plugged

• Ran a series of working sessions where we blended the theory with live practical Finance projects using the specific challenges the team faced to embed the theory in ‘business as usual’ (BAU).

• We supplemented this with ongoing ‘situational coaching’ support sharing our experience with the Finance team.

Outcomes

Over a 6 month period, working with the team we:

• Transformed the Finance team’s approach to change, focusing on holistic outcomes over individual projects.

• Embedded simple transformation and change principles into day-to-day work.

• Reinforced learning through ongoing 1-1 coaching to shift mindsets.

• Upgraded progress reporting from basic governance to a balanced view of momentum and outcomes.

• Achieved a clear step change in transformation capabilities.

The HR Director was delighted “I knew Paul was the right man for the job - he’s led transformation, knows Finance and has a lovely simple down to earth approach. It was the coaching support which really changed team behaviour”

Key Lessons

Finance leaders can be influential leaders of change. We need to combine their technical skills with the basics of change management to give them the confidence to step into a role leading Finance transformation.

As Paul puts it:

“Supporting finance leaders isn’t about teaching them finance - they know that already. It’s about giving them the change skills, and confidence, to lead change with clarity, resilience, and credibility.”

If your finance leaders are being asked to deliver change on top of their day jobs, The Transformation Guide can help.

📌 Explore The Change Compass — a 2-day workshop that equips leaders with the clarity, tools, and support they need to thrive during transformation.