Building Effective Finance Teams: Enhancing People Skills for Better Financial Outcomes

A finance team can be technically excellent and still underperform. The businesses that get real value from finance are the ones where the team communicates well, works with the rest of the business rather than apart from it, and is led by someone who develops people as deliberately as they manage the numbers. That combination — technical capability plus genuine people skills — is what separates a finance function that merely reports from one that actively helps the business make better decisions. This guide takes the finance leader’s view: how a CFO or FD builds and develops a high-performing finance team, and why the people side matters as much as the technical.

Why people skills decide how good a finance team is

Having recruited finance leaders and the teams they build for two decades, I’d make the case plainly: once a finance team is technically competent, what determines whether it’s actually effective is almost entirely people skills. Technical accuracy is the baseline — it’s assumed. The difference between a good finance function and a merely adequate one is whether it can communicate financial reality clearly to people who don’t speak finance, whether it partners with the commercial side of the business or sits in a silo, and whether its people are developing or stagnating. Those are people questions, not technical ones, and they are set from the top by the finance leader.

This is why, when a business wants a stronger finance function, the most effective move is usually getting the *leadership* of it right rather than adding more technical headcount. A capable finance leader builds the team, sets its standards, develops its people and connects it to the business. Get that appointment right and the team’s effectiveness follows; get it wrong and even a technically strong team underdelivers. The people skills that matter most in finance, then, are the ones the leader brings and cultivates — and the rest of this guide is about what those are and how a leader builds them into a team.

Communication: the skill that unlocks the rest

If there is one people skill that determines a finance team’s value to the business, it is communication — specifically, the ability to translate financial complexity into something a non-finance colleague can understand and act on. A finance team that produces excellent analysis nobody outside finance understands adds far less value than one that makes the numbers land. A good finance leader builds this deliberately: coaching the team to lead with the ‘so what’ rather than the detail, to tailor how they present to different audiences, and to listen as well as report — because understanding what the operational side actually needs is what makes finance useful to them. This is a learnable, teachable skill, and developing it across the team is one of the most valuable things a finance leader does.

Partnering with the business, not sitting apart from it

The best finance teams work *with* the rest of the business — sales, operations, and the wider leadership — rather than operating as a separate, and sometimes obstructive, function. Effective cross-functional teamwork doesn’t happen by accident; a finance leader has to build it, by getting the team out of the finance office and into the business, by framing finance as an enabler rather than a gatekeeper, and by being genuinely useful to their colleagues. When finance is seen as a partner, its advice is sought earlier and acted on more; when it’s seen as the department that says no, it gets worked around. Building that partnering culture is a leadership job, and it transforms how much impact a finance team actually has.

Developing the team, not just managing it

A finance leader who only manages the workload gets a team that processes; one who develops their people gets a team that grows. The difference shows in how deliberately the leader invests in their people — giving them stretch, exposure to the business, and the chance to build the commercial and communication skills that technical training alone doesn’t provide. Practically, this means identifying where each person needs to grow, creating genuine opportunities for them to do so, giving honest and constructive feedback, and building a culture where people feel able to raise concerns and admit mistakes. Teams led this way retain their best people and keep getting better; teams that are merely managed tend to plateau and lose talent. Investing in the team’s development is one of the clearest markers of a finance leader worth having.

Getting the hires right in the first place

Building an effective finance team starts with who you bring into it, and this is where a finance leader’s judgement — and good recruitment — matters. The instinct is to hire on technical qualifications alone, but for most finance roles the technical bar is a filter, not a differentiator; the candidates who make a team effective are the ones who also bring the communication, commercial instinct and collaborative temperament the role needs. A good finance leader hires for that broader profile, and builds a team that is complementary rather than uniform — a mix of strengths that together cover technical depth, commercial partnering and delivery. Getting these appointments right is foundational, which is why it pays to recruit deliberately, with people who understand what a genuinely effective finance hire looks like beyond the CV. Professional standards set the technical baseline; the people skills are what you build the team’s effectiveness on top of it.

What a well-built finance team looks like

It’s worth being concrete about what ‘effective’ actually looks like, because it makes the goal clearer for any leader building towards it. In a well-built finance team, the numbers are produced reliably and on time without heroics, so the team’s energy goes into interpretation rather than firefighting. The business comes to finance for input early, because finance is seen as useful rather than obstructive. Non-finance colleagues understand the information they’re given and act on it. The team’s people are visibly developing, and the best of them stay. And the finance leader is spending their time on the things that need judgement, because the function beneath them is running well. Where a team is struggling, the opposite shows: month-end is a scramble, finance is looped in late or not at all, reports go unread, good people leave, and the leader is buried in detail. Naming these markers helps a business see honestly where its finance team sits — and, usually, that the route to the good version runs through stronger finance leadership.

Where it comes together: the finance leader

Everything here traces back to leadership. A finance team’s communication, its partnering with the business, the development of its people, the quality of its hires — all of it is set by the finance leader who builds and runs the function. That is why, for a business that wants more from its finance team, the most effective single step is usually to get the right CFO or finance director in place, whether permanent or fractional. The right leader builds the effective team around them. That is exactly what we do at FD Capital: place the finance leaders who build high-performing finance functions for growing UK businesses — and, where it helps, the strong team members who make those functions work.

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Adrian Lawrence

Adrian Lawrence FCA is the founder of FD Capital and a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). He holds a BSc from Queen Mary College, University of London, and has over 25 years of experience as a Chartered Accountant and finance leader working with private, PE-backed and owner-managed businesses across the UK. He founded FD Capital to connect growing businesses with the Finance Directors and CFOs they need to scale — and personally interviews candidates for senior finance appointments.