How Clear Priorities, Trust, And Timely Decisions Transform Performance

Episode # 151: Start the year with leadership that actually moves the needle. We walk through the strategic actions that make teams faster, clearer, and more resilient—without adding noise. 

We begin with the culture you model when pressure hits, because people copy what you do, not what you say. Calm, integrity, and active listening create psychological safety and higher standards at the same time. From there, we narrow in on priorities: how to publish a short, ranked list, tie it to forecasts and analysis, and adjust in real time so finance and accounting stop guessing. You’ll hear practical ways to align tasks to business objectives using specified, implied, and essential work—an approach that reduces miscommunication and keeps execution honest.

Governance becomes your engine for speed. We outline how to set clear escalation thresholds, run effective risk and operating reviews, and reward early warnings over last‑minute heroics. Then we tackle direct engagement and decision timeliness: structured operating rhythms, skip‑level listening, and defined decision rights that accelerate choices without micromanaging. The throughline is clarity—who decides, what matters now, and why trade‑offs are worth it—so people can move with confidence.

By the end, you’ll have a checklist for today: model one cultural behavior, publish your priorities, and set a simple escalation path. Whether you lead FP&A, accounting, or the broader enterprise, these moves build trust and momentum that last beyond January. 

Episode outline:

1. Set a positive team culture,
2. Establish clear priorities, transparency, and accountability,
3. Encourage risk issue escalation with good governance, and 
4. Lead with more direct engagement and better decision timeliness. 

Please connect with me on:

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2. Twitter: smclainiii
3. Facebook: stephenmclainconsultant
4. LinkedIn: stephenjmclainiii

For more resources, please visit Finance Leader Academy:  financeleaderacademy.com.

Transcript

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Stephen McLain: 0:04

We are now into 2026, by a few weeks, and it's time to look over our goals for this upcoming year. Not only are we looking at our goals, but we also need to review our leadership philosophy, our habits and how we affect others. How we lead our team also affects how employees go about their day and their task completion process. We can affect another person's success by our words and our attitude. So I am challenging you this year to strategically improve your leadership ability, to positively affect your team. If you do this successfully, you may be pleasantly surprised by the results. We are going to review several strategic key leader activities to leverage helping our teams to be more successful. Please enjoy the episode. Welcome to the finance leader podcast where leadership is bigger than the numbers. I am your host, Stephen McLain, this is the podcast for developing leaders in finance and accounting. Please consider following me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. My usernames and the links are in this episode's show notes. You can also follow finance leader Academy on LinkedIn. Thank you. This is episode number 151, and I'll be talking about key strategic leader actions that set up the organization for success. And I will highlight the following topics. Number one, set a positive team culture. Number two, establish clear priorities, transparency and accountability. Number three, encourage risk issue escalation with good governance. And four, lead with more direct engagement and better decision timeliness. We are off to 2026 and with the beginning of a new year, there are all sorts of possibilities. I hope you had a great 2025 that you accomplish much and that you have great news in your life or in your career or maybe both. But if you struggled or had to work through a tough situation, then I also hope you have a great circle of support to help you manage and get through it. There is another side to the struggle or sadness or crisis, and that is relief and support and also winning. Find your circle of support and embrace it until you get through your personal challenges, then be someone else's rock of stability when you get a chance. We all need each other, and that is the most important lesson of leadership and humanity that I have ever learned. The last episode I shared, episode number 150 finance, leadership beyond the numbers, really resonated with many of you. It was one of my most popular episodes of 2025 thank you for the incredible support. Now I had listeners from Vietnam, Rwanda, Zimbabwe and many others, and especially in Germany, which was my second most popular location, again. Thank you for listening. My goal is to always share something that can help you in your own career development, how to better lead your team or to help your organization become more efficient and thus more competitive this week, I am focused on how strategic leaders can positively impact their organization so it becomes more competitive and able to achieve its strategy and business objectives. This requires specific actions, both internally and externally, along with the right attitude and leadership approach. What do we all want to achieve when we are strategic leaders, for everyone to be on the same page, so that there's no confusion, which means we need to be more aligned on our strategy and business objectives. So how can we do that? Everything related to how our teams are set up for success always begins with us and how we approach our work, how we treat others, how organized we are and how much of the chaos or clarity of the organization belongs to how we lead. First, let's address a typical day our teams already have more tasks than capacity, and then what happens a senior leader gets a new idea or has a question because they hear something. The next action involves other executive leaders getting told the new idea or asked a question, which then gets sent down to their teams. Here is my question, Where does this new idea rank in the organization's priorities? Does my team stop working on their tasks to take on this new idea next, let's expand our discussion about priorities. Do the fpna and accounting teams all the way down to the individual contributors? Know the CEO's priorities? Yes, it's not good enough for the senior leadership to know the priorities. Everyone must know them, so we can build those priorities into our forecasts, projections, our analysis and our decisions. It also helps us with compliance reporting and month end close. What happens when we don't know the priorities, then we get miscommunication. Well, we get teams working on the wrong tasks. We get the wrong assumptions or planning factors built into our models. We also get the wrong analysis, which won't help with decision making or in the assessment of the business performance. Now, how do we stay on track with priorities? They come top down based on what the CEO or the board decides on where to focus the organization's resources. Changes to priorities must be shared immediately, and sub tasks or team related tasks should be easily mapped to the organizational priorities. This is what your team should be working on when there is a change, we update our team immediately so that the task order can be shifted if necessary. A key leader task is to ensure your team members are working on the priority tasks. This will cause better alignment throughout the company, and speaks to a team culture that values transparency, collaboration and accountability. Who likes to know the why behind a decision? It's important to know how a decision is made, so we can use the same facts and assumptions in our own work. When I was serving in the army, we were not always given a detailed, quote, unquote, why on a decision it depended on the situation in combat operations, we are given an end state so we know what it should look like when the mission is done, while following the commander's intent, our job was always to execute the decision with as much motivation and intensity as necessary to get the job done to a high standard. Please subscribe to the podcast on the platform you are currently listening to, and also subscribe to my weekly email. When you subscribe to the email, you will receive a free guide about developing your finance leadership. It's filled with many tips and strategies to grow your leadership. Thank you. I don't understand why it's so hard for some organizations to establish and then share business priorities. Every task we do should be able to be mapped to a business objective. As a reminder, we have three types of tasks, and they are specified, essential and implied. This goes back to my army days. A specified task is one that is assigned to you from higher implied tasks are necessary actions, not stated, but they are required to complete the specified tasks. And essential tasks are the critical specified or implied tasks that must be completed for the organization to be successful in its core mission, all these types of tasks that your team has should be able to be mapped back to the organization's key business objectives. Now let's talk about key strategic leader actions that lead to success. Number one, set a positive team culture. Organizational leaders set a positive culture by deliberately modeling the behaviors they expect from our teams, recognizing that actions speak louder than words. When leaders demonstrate integrity, professionalism, collaboration and respect in their daily interactions, they establish clear, unspoken standards for how work gets done and how people treat one another, by staying calm under pressure, listening actively and approaching challenges with accountability rather than blame. Leaders show that values are not just statements but lived practices. This consistency between what leaders say and what they do builds credibility and trust, encouraging team members to mirror those behaviors, and reinforcing a culture where expectations are clear, performance is aligned and values are demonstrated through everyday actions, trust is built when leaders communicate openly, follow through on commitments and demonstrate respect for diverse perspectives, making team members feel safe to speak up and also contribute. Number two, establish clear priorities, transparency and accountability, clear priorities help the team focus energy on what matters most, reducing confusion and aligning daily work with broader organizational goals. Decision transparency further reinforces trust by explaining the why behind choices, especially when decisions are difficult. Result or resources are constrained. Finally, holding others accountable fairly and consistently signals that standards matter and that everyone is responsible for outcomes, reinforcing a culture where performance integrity and mutual respect are the norm, rather than the exception number three, encourage risk issue escalation with good governance, a CEO can encourage and expect strong organizational governance by clearly setting expectations for ethical behavior, discipline decision making and effective risk oversight throughout the organization. This begins with establishing well defined governance structures, roles and policies, and reinforcing that, risk management is a shared responsibility, not a compliance exercise, by promoting open communication and psychological safety, the CEO makes it clear that escalating risks control gaps or compliance concerns is not only acceptable, but expected, formal escalation pathways, such as risk committees, internal controls, reporting and clear thresholds for when issues move from management to executive or board review help ensure consistency and also timeliness. When the CEO visibly supports those who raise issues early and holds leaders accountable for managing and resolving risks and reinforces a governance culture where transparency, stewardship and long term organizational health take priority over short term results number Four lead with more direct engagement and better decision timeliness. A CEO can increase direct engagement and improve decision timeliness by being deliberately visible and accessible while remaining disciplined about decision ownership and also scope. This means engaging through structured forums such as regular operating reviews, skip level listening sessions and focused site visits, where the goal is to understand trends, remove obstacles and reinforce priorities, rather than direct day to day execution by clearly defining decision rights and empowering leaders to own outcomes. The CEO can ask probing questions, set guardrails and accelerate decisions without prescribing solutions. When the CEO consistently focusing on direction, trade offs and accountability and resist stepping in unless an issue crosses strategic risk or performance thresholds, they stay closely connected to the business, while preserving autonomy, speed and accountability across the organization. To balance accessibility with effectiveness, the CEO should clearly define what types of topics warrant CEO level attention, such as enterprise risks, major strategic decisions, cultural issues or material financial impacts. Formal escalation criteria help leaders determine when to elevate issues. Strengthening the executive leadership team as the primary filter, reinforcing decision rights through governance frameworks and modeling, respect for the chain of command all reinforce proper gatekeeping this approach preserves the benefits of approachability, while ensuring the CEO remains focused on leading the organization strategically, rather than managing day to day execution. Now for action today, what can you do today to improve your leadership that encourages more transparency and decision timeliness that sets and communicates the priorities of the organization and to provide more clarity, how can you help your team to be more successful, starting today. Today, I talked about key strategic leader actions that set up the organization for success, and I highlighted the following points. Number one, set a positive team culture. Number two, establish clear priorities transparency and accountability. Number three, encourage risk issue escalation with good governance. And four, lead with more direct engagement and better decision timeliness. Now I love leadership and the leaders who make sure they set up their teams for success before their own unselfish leadership is the ultimate goal. If everyone understood this, as they develop as a leader, they would realize that a team set up for success sets you up for success. To me, it's a no brainer. This does not mean you don't hold everyone accountable. Trust me when I say your team wants this. They want accountability. They want the team motivated to a high standard. No one wants to work with someone who is not holding up their part of the team's responsibilities. Now one last thought, don't forget to set up your goals for this year. I am sharing this episode at the beginning of the second. Full week of 2026 I'm sure that most people are close to giving up on their resolutions. It always happens a resolution is nothing but a dream without a plan. I want you to set up a realistic plan that gives you the best chance of success. Set up your individual development plan that makes sense. Now, let's get that done this week, and don't forget about your team. Next episode, I will be talking about how we can help the operations team in their duties and responsibilities, which will translate to winning for the organization. I hope you enjoyed the finance leader podcast. If this episode helped you today, please share with a colleague and leave a review. Please check out finance leader academy.com, for more resources, and if you'd like to chat with me about how I can help you and your team, and now go lead your team and I'll see you next time. Thank you. You.