🏠︎ | Past Sessions | The Agile CFO, Creating Trust, Speed, and Excellence in Finance Teams
- Event: Finance Forum 25
- Date: 7 October 2025
- Speaker: Veronika von Heise-Rotenburg, Chief Financial Officer and Managing Director, everphone
- Estimated read time: 8-9 minutes
Quick read summary
This session explored why traditional finance leadership models struggle under sustained pressure, and how Agile leadership principles can help CFOs rebuild trust, speed, and performance inside finance teams.
The core argument was not that finance should copy technology teams, but that the CFO mindset must shift. Control heavy, fault focused models slow decision making and reinforce fear based behaviour, particularly in volatile economic conditions.
Agile leadership, when applied thoughtfully, helps finance teams move from blame and rigidity towards ownership, transparency, and continuous improvement. The result is not looser governance, but stronger accountability, faster response, and more resilient teams.
Why the current environment exposes the limits of traditional finance leadership
The session opened with a clear description of context. Finance teams are operating under persistent strain, including funding constraints, profitability pressure, longer sales cycles, economic uncertainty, and ongoing organisational change.
Veronika von Heise-Rotenburg described how these conditions create a threat based mindset inside teams. When uncertainty rises and promises around stability can no longer be guaranteed, people default to defensive responses. Blame, risk avoidance, and disengagement become more likely.
In finance, this dynamic is amplified by long standing leadership patterns. Centralised decision making, siloed information, and a zero error culture reinforce caution rather than initiative. Over time, this erodes trust and slows the organisation’s ability to adapt.
The central risk is not operational failure, but behavioural freeze. When teams are focused on avoiding mistakes rather than solving problems, finance becomes a bottleneck instead of a decision partner.
From control to capability, what Agile leadership really means for finance
A key clarification in the session was that Agile leadership is not about adopting ceremonies or jargon. It is about behaviour and intent.
Veronika distinguished between doing Agile and being Agile. Tools alone deliver limited benefit. The larger gains come from leadership behaviours that consistently reinforce trust, empowerment, and learning.
She framed Agile finance leadership around four reinforcing principles:
- Empowerment, giving teams autonomy and ownership
- Speed, removing decision bottlenecks
- Trust, creating psychological safety and transparency
- Continuous improvement, replacing fault finding with learning
These elements do not sit in sequence. They form a reinforcing loop. Empowered teams move faster. Speed builds confidence. Trust enables openness. Continuous improvement strengthens results and resilience.
Why finance teams struggle to adopt Agile behaviours
The session acknowledged a practical reality. Finance is often the last function to be digitised. Manual processes persist longer, which increases error risk and reinforces a compliance first mindset.
Early career training in finance rewards precision, deadlines, and error elimination. Exploration, experimentation, and iteration are rarely encouraged. Over time, this shapes leadership behaviour.
Veronika described how this culture unintentionally suppresses initiative. When doing nothing wrong is the highest virtue, people avoid doing anything new. Innovation becomes risky, even when change is required.
Agile leadership challenges this pattern without removing discipline. The goal is not to tolerate poor standards, but to shift the focus from blame to ownership and from fear to responsibility.
Replacing blame with ownership to break crisis cycles
A recurring theme in the session was how teams respond to disruption. Crisis, whether personal or organisational, often triggers a blame cycle.
Statements such as “everything was better before” or “if only another team had done their job” are signals that responsibility is being externalised.
The leadership intervention Veronika emphasised was personal responsibility. Leaders must model the mindset of “I am here to solve it”.
When responsibility is reclaimed, teams rebuild self efficacy. Having solved one crisis, they develop confidence that they can solve the next. This resilience becomes a competitive advantage.
Agile leadership supports this shift by ensuring teams feel backed, informed, and trusted as they work through problems together.
Practical tools that support Agile finance leadership
The session introduced several concrete practices that help translate Agile principles into finance team behaviour.
Objectives and Key Results, focus without overloadOKRs were presented as a tool to reinforce empowerment and continuous improvement.
Used well, OKRs align personal, team, and organisational goals. They narrow focus, clarify priorities, and make progress visible. They also provide a structured way to say no to competing demands.
Veronika stressed that OKRs should not be treated as individual performance measures or tied directly to bonuses. Doing so undermines collaboration and shared ownership.
Instead, they work best when leadership participates fully and treats progress as a learning signal rather than a scorecard.
The Manual of Me, making trust explicit
One of the most distinctive practices discussed was the “Manual of Me”.
This is a short, personal document that explains how someone works, communicates, and sets boundaries. It may include working preferences, availability, values, and expectations.
For leaders, this creates clarity and reduces friction. Team members know how to engage effectively, when to escalate, and what good collaboration looks like.
Veronika shared how this tool proved especially powerful in remote and hybrid environments, and for individuals who find informal social cues difficult to navigate.
The broader value is trust through transparency. By making working styles explicit, leaders invite mutual adaptation rather than silent frustration.
Meta communication, agreeing how teams communicate
Another practice was explicit communication rules, created by the team rather than imposed from above.
These rules covered principles such as honesty, constructive collaboration, and leading by example. Their power came from ownership.
By agreeing how information is shared and what good communication looks like, teams reduce ambiguity. This supports psychological safety, particularly in fast changing environments where information may evolve.
The leadership signal is simple but strong, information shared is truthful to the best of current knowledge, and updates will follow as things change.
Retrospectives instead of post-mortems
Traditional post-mortems focus on what went wrong after a failure. The session argued this reinforces fear and narrow problem solving.
Agile retrospectives take a broader view. Teams reflect on what worked, what did not, and what can be improved next time. The aim is learning, not fault allocation.
These discussions work best when they are live, inclusive, and lightly facilitated. One to one feedback complements this by supporting individual growth in behaviour and capability.
Veronika referenced Radical Candor as a useful framing, focusing on expressing concern clearly while offering support.
Hiring and staffing for agility, skill matters but mindset matters more
Agile leadership is limited if hiring does not support it.
Veronika argued that finance leaders should assess adaptability, learning orientation, and willingness to switch context alongside technical competence.
She suggested aiming for people who may be slightly under the ideal technical profile but significantly stronger in mindset and flexibility.
Project staffing also benefits from clarity around strengths and preferences, allowing diverse teams to collaborate effectively without forcing uniformity.
Why this matters for CFOs personally
The session closed by addressing the CFO directly.
Agile leadership reduces the need for micromanagement, freeing time for strategic thinking. It lowers emotional strain by shifting the role from controller to coach.
Teams led this way tend to show higher motivation and retention, because autonomy is paired with trust and accountability.
Transparency improves through shared goals and visible ownership, and collaboration reduces duplication and internal friction.
The final message was pragmatic. CFOs do not need to adopt the full Agile manifesto. They should start early, start small, and start intentionally.
“You don’t have to do everything, but do start, and start today.” Veronika von Heise-Rotenburg, Chief Financial Officer and Managing Director, everphone
What good looks like, practical actions you can take now
Questions to ask yourself
- Where am I still the decision bottleneck, and why
- Which behaviours in my team are driven by fear rather than ownership
- How clear are expectations around communication and decision rights
- What work remains manual that increases error pressure unnecessarily
- Do my leadership habits reinforce trust or control
- Whether people surface problems early or hide them
- Whether decisions move without escalation on routine issues
- Whether retrospectives lead to change, not defensiveness
- Whether priorities are clear enough to say no elsewhere
- Whether trust is strong enough for honest feedback
- Treating Agile as a toolkit rather than a mindset
- Using OKRs as performance scoring mechanisms
- Assuming trust will emerge without explicit effort
- Keeping leadership preferences implicit
- Waiting for perfect conditions before starting
What good looks like in practice
An Agile CFO leads a finance team that is confident, informed, and accountable. Decisions move faster because trust replaces permission seeking. Errors become learning moments, not reputational threats.
Finance shifts from protecting the past to enabling better decisions in the present, even under pressure.
Conclusion, Agile finance is a leadership choice
This session made a clear case that Agile finance is not about speed for its own sake. It is about creating conditions where people can think, decide, and improve together.
For CFOs, the shift is from hierarchy to high performance. From controlling tasks to building capability. From fear based precision to trust based excellence.
In volatile environments, that leadership choice becomes decisive.
Speaker
Chief Financial Officer and Managing Director, everphone, CFO and Managing Director at everphone, with extensive experience in digital finance, asset based financing, and scaling finance teams in high growth, asset heavy businesses.