Your Finance Team needs developing. What if they’d rather you didn’t?

16/09/2026

Your Finance Team needs developing. What if they’d rather you didn’t?

Short on Time?  Hit the link to go straight to the 8 questions you need to ask before developing your finance team.

 

Knowing your Finance team needs to develop is one thing, telling them you have booked an away day can be quite another.

The reaction is likely to stop short of mutiny. Finance teams are generally not here for that.

You may get enthusiasm from some people, polite silence from others and at least one version of:

“What exactly are we going to be doing?”

And it’s a fair question.

There is also a very good reason for Finance leaders to be asking it now.

EY’s 2026 Global DNA of the CFO Survey asked 1,610 CFOs, Finance Directors and Heads of Finance across 28 countries about the changing demands of the role.

One finding leapt out.

People and culture leadership ranked as the second weakest capability among the CFOs surveyed, while coming only fifth among the areas they most wanted to develop. EY also points to Finance transformation as a fundamentally human challenge, where mindset, confidence, skills and ways of working need to evolve alongside technology.

That creates an interesting tension.

The human side of Finance is becoming harder to treat as secondary, while the humans themselves are often not remotely excited by the prospect of being “developed”.

And a Finance team is rarely one kind of team.

It may have highly commercial operators, deeply technical specialists, natural challengers, people who think brilliantly out loud and people who would quite happily spend an uninterrupted afternoon with a spreadsheet, a problem to solve and nobody talking to them.

Some will welcome the chance to step away and think about how the team works. Others may see it as time away from an already demanding job. A few may have endured enough generic offsites, personality exercises or forced group sharing to approach the whole idea with understandable, well-practised scepticism.

That does not make them difficult to develop.

It makes their reaction part of the design brief.

 

Finance has become even more of a people job

Technology is changing what Finance people spend their time on and what organisations need from the function as a whole.

Technical excellence still matters enormously. Alongside it sit judgement, challenge, influence, collaboration, adaptability and the ability to turn financial insight into better conversations and decision-making across an organisation.

That means the quality of the relationships inside Finance, and between Finance and the rest of the organisation, matters too.

At the same time, the people doing that work are under pressure.

ACCA’s 2026 Global Talent Trends research found that 54% of finance professionals surveyed said their mental health suffers because of work pressures, while 42% said collaboration across different generations is a challenge.

So developing how the team works together is becoming more commercially important at exactly the point when people may be busy, stretched and distinctly unexcited by anything that feels like an interruption to the real work.

Which is why the development has to feel like real work too.

 

Resistance is not necessarily the problem

If somebody on your team hears team development and internally groans, there are plenty of possible reasons for this.

They may have “been here” before. Perhaps…

• the last away day was enjoyable enough and then disappeared without trace by the following week.
• they sat through a generic programme that failed to connect with the work they actually do.
• they were asked to talk about themselves in a way that felt uncomfortable, perform enthusiasm for an exercise they did not believe in or contribute instantly to a group discussion when they would rather have had ten minutes to think.
• nobody ever explained what problem the day was supposed to solve.

If their conclusion was “I have actual work to do”, you can see how they got there.

We think that scepticism can be useful.

Finance functions are expected to test assumptions, question whether the case stacks up and notice where something feels woolly. Team development should be able to survive the same scrutiny.

• Why are we doing this?
• Why now?
• What is it connected to?
• What should be different afterwards?

If the answers are vague, the sceptic may indeed have a point.

The aim must always be  to create development that is relevant enough to earn people’s attention.

 

The “people stuff” is already in the work

Words such as trust, communication, relationships and collaboration can sound soft when they are separated from the work.

Put them back into Finance and they become much more concrete.

• Can someone raise a concern early when the numbers do not look right, even when the message is inconvenient?
• Can a Finance Business Partner challenge a senior stakeholder without the conversation becoming defensive?
• Can two people disagree strongly about an assumption, reach a decision and move forward?
• Do colleagues understand one another’s pressures well enough to avoid unnecessary delay, duplication and hand-offs?
• Can people challenge the CFO as well as one another?
• When something difficult happens, does the team deal with it, or does it eventually arrive back at the CFO or another senior leader to sort out?

Those are human questions with commercial consequences.

The same is true when Finance is changing.

New technology, new operating models and greater expectations of Finance as a strategic partner land with people rather than inside a process diagram.

People have to learn differently, let go of familiar ways of working, ask questions, influence colleagues, use judgement in new situations and sometimes admit that they don’t yet know the answer.

The quality of the relationships around that work matters immensely. So does the environment in which people are expected to change.

 

Don’t make the team fit the development

A common mistake in team development is to decide what the day looks like first and then ask everyone else to fit themselves into it.

As humans, we are inconveniently less standardised than that.

Thoughtful development has to start with the people, so before deciding what happens in the room, find out what is happening in the team.

What are people experiencing now?

• Where is the friction?
• What has already been tried?
• What does the CFO or Head of Finance see that others may experience differently?
• Who tends to dominate?
• Whose thinking arrives after everyone else has moved on?
• What might make somebody feel exposed, sceptical or shut out?
• What would need to change for the time together to have been worthwhile?

Then design around the answers.

That means giving people enough information beforehand so they know what they are walking into.

It can mean individual thinking before group discussion, pairs and smaller conversations alongside work with the full team, or structured ways to contribute that do not reward whoever is quickest to speak.

It means no forced vulnerability and no assumption that the loudest voice contains the clearest thinking.

It means accepting that different people may need different routes into the same conversation.

One person may love a creative exercise. Another may need to understand precisely why they are doing it before they will engage. Someone else may say very little in the large group and then completely change the direction of the conversation when the setting changes.

Contrary to a lot of team development, inclusion is not making everybody participate in exactly the same way.

It is creating enough routes in for everybody to contribute meaningfully.

That is the difference between development being done to a team and development being done with them.

 

They should arrive curious

We do actually think people should arrive feeling positive about the experience.

Perhaps not “I cannot wait to spend an entire day talking about how we work together!” positive.

We are realists.

What we do want is curiosity.

A sense that there is a point to this. Confidence that somebody has taken time to understand the team. Enough belief in the process to arrive willing to take part properly.

And that work starts before the day.

At Lead Happy Teams, the experience begins with an Insight Process. We spend time understanding what is really happening, speak to people individually through 1-2-1 conversations and communicate properly with the team about what is coming and why.

That gives people the opportunity to ask questions, explain what they need, share concerns and tell us things they may be less inclined to announce in front of the whole team.

It also means we can understand individual preferences before we design the experience.

Someone who hates surprises can know what to expect. Someone who needs time to process can have it. Someone who is sceptical can understand the purpose rather than being expected to suspend disbelief until 9am on the day.

This is not simply preparation for the real work.

It is part of the real work.

By the time people arrive, we should not be strangers asking them to throw themselves into a mysterious exercise. There should already be context, some relationship and a growing sense that what is about to happen has been designed with them in mind.

That approach is reflected in the feedback we receive. People have specifically told us that knowing their preferences and concerns had been heard beforehand helped them feel understood, supported and able to contribute once the team was together.

So yes, we do want enthusiasm.

We just think you have to earn it.

 

Finance people do not need to become different sorts of people

That is perhaps the most important point.

David Barber, CFO at Sonihull, spoke about never identifying with the traditional image of a leader as extraverted and gregarious. He described Lead Happy as helping him:

“not by moulding me into something I wasn’t, but by helping me dial up what was already really positive about my personality.”

Georgina Cowley, CFO at Warwick Business School, described her Finance team’s Lead Happy experience as:

“one of the best team building days I have ever experienced.”

She also said the Lead Happy House™ helped the team reflect on where it was and what it could do to become even stronger and happier.

Neither story suggests that Finance people need a personality transplant in order to develop.

Quite the opposite.

The development works better when people can bring more of how they actually think, communicate and contribute into the room.

And yes, it can be fun.

Fun is not the commercial outcome. Neither is a nice lunch, a good venue or people saying they enjoyed the day.

Enjoyment matters because people engage more fully when an experience feels human, relevant and safe enough to participate in.

The real test comes later.

• Are better conversations happening?
• Are people challenging earlier?
• Are decisions cleaner?
• Is ownership stronger?
• Are old tensions being handled differently?
• Is less of the team’s difficult stuff landing back with the CFO?

That is where team development earns its place in the team calendar.

 

Your Finance team doesn’t need a different personality

The most interesting thing about Finance teams is not whether they are introverted, extroverted, highly analytical, wildly sociable or secretly happiest immersed in Excel.

It is that they contain different humans doing increasingly interconnected work.

Those humans need to challenge, collaborate, decide, influence and adapt, often under considerable pressure.

So if you know your Finance team needs developing and suspect at least some of them will welcome the idea like a wet weekend in Skegness, that is not a reason to avoid it.

It is a reason to design it better.

The question should move from:

“Are my team the sort of people who will enjoy team development?”

to:

“Is this development relevant, thoughtful and useful enough to earn their attention?”

And perhaps one more:

“Have we done enough before the day for them to understand why it is worth giving their attention in the first place?”

If the answer is yes, even the person who would rather be left alone may surprise you.

 

Before you book team development for your Finance team, ask these 8 questions

You know the team needs to develop.

You may also know that at least some of them will greet the idea with a degree of scepticism.

Before you book anything, ask:

1. What actually needs to change?
   Not simply “communication” or “collaboration”. What is happening now that is getting in the way?
2. Why does it matter commercially?
   Where is the issue showing up in decisions, ownership, stakeholder relationships, rework, pace or leadership capacity?
3. Has anyone actually understood the team before designing the development?
   If the solution was decided before anyone spoke to the people involved, question it.
4. Will different people have different ways to contribute?
   Some people think aloud, others need time. Some thrive in a big conversation and others contribute far more in a smaller setting.
5. Will the team understand why they are there before the day starts?
   They do not need to arrive bouncing with excitement, they should arrive curious, informed and confident that the time has a purpose.
6. Does the development connect to the work they actually do?
   Can people see the link to challenge, influence, decision-making, collaboration and the pressures they face every day?
7. What happens afterwards?
   What will help new insight survive once deadlines, meetings and familiar habits return?
8. How will you know whether anything has changed?
   What should you see happening differently in the team three weeks, three months or six months later?

If the answers are vague, don’t book it yet.

If they are convincing, you are no longer asking your team to give up a day for some “team development”.

You are investing in changing how an important Finance team actually works.

 

Thinking about your Finance team?

If you know the development matters and are wondering how to make it work for the humans you actually have, spend 30 minutes in a free Team Health Review with us. We guarantee you’ll leave thinking differently about your team and what might matter most right now. 

BOOK A FREE TEAM HEALTH REVIEW

 

“It’s certainly an investment worth making. When we were looking at the business case for something like this with our teams, one of the issues we saw most often was disconnects within the teams, which were ultimately having an impact on the bottom line.

We certainly felt that the issues that were having a financial impact started to reduce when the teams and tribes started to work more collaboratively together. So for us, the cost-benefit was clear.”

Carly Allan – Professional Services Director