Four tips for ‘good to great’ career progressions

To understand how successful leaders maximize their effectiveness, it’s helpful to know how they shape and expand their role over time. This McKinsey report looks at how leaders shift into a higher gear in the middle years of their tenures. Based on interviews with eight former finance leaders reflecting on their roles two years in and later, the report contains career-management insights that are also relevant for tax leaders. 

McKinsey outlines four key moves for faster, smarter, bolder leadership that helped finance leaders ascend to a new level of performance: 

1. Reinvent your organization – and yourself: As businesses pursue growth, investments in infrastructure tend to lag, until pain points accumulate and it’s time to look for different ways of working and resource optimization. Several of the execs interviewed by McKinsey said that they looked outside their organization, to their peers in other businesses, for inspiration. External input can help you benchmark your competencies and approaches while gleaning insights in complex areas such as cybersecurity, performance management or M&A. It can also help you polish skills and reexamine beliefs. For example, you may find you want to consider using reverse mentoring – requesting feedback from two or three subordinates you trust – to help you improve as a leader. 
2. Collaborate with your CFO (or CEO) on a new strategic aspiration: Mid-tenure tax leaders can help their CFOs and CEOs reevaluate strategic directions and understand how, where and why value gets created. Tax leaders have unique perspectives on customers, markets, risks and opportunities to better position the business for long-term growth. 
3. Reevaluate your team and develop future leaders: As the organization’s priorities shift, especially during new growth phases, you may need different capabilities on your team, which might require reassigning people from their current roles. Assess talent quickly, identify what your future organization looks like and get HR on board as a partner. In addition, you’ll want to think about how you can develop future leaders and your potential successor. Two-to-three-year rotations can be helpful here. Encourage your staffers to expand their broader business knowledge and develop their ability to motivate and coach a team.  
4. Expand your horizons: You can enhance your department’s value by broadening your perspective to include the company's overall environment, lifecycle, and financial status. Participating in cross-enterprise tasks such as finance digitalization and IT transformation projects can help you build close relationships with other senior leaders and hone your influencing skills (which can help advance tax transformation initiatives). You may want to consider joining the board of a non-competing company – an experience that can spark fresh ideas and give you a sense of what’s possible.