Leadership alignment: How CTOs can forge more productive relationships with Finance and executive peers
Daniel Walters, a Consultant at Conflux, shares his experience as CTO for Seek Asia (2015-2020), where building strong relationships with his CFO and executive peers proved essential during the acquisition and merger of two of Southeast Asia's leading employment marketplaces. His partnership with CFO Jackson Peters transformed initial friction into strategic alignment, enabling successful integration while modernizing delivery practices across the combined entity.
This article is for CTOs, technology leaders, and senior executives seeking to enhance cross-functional collaboration and drive organizational transformation through more effective leadership alignment.
Drawing from real experience leading organizational transformation during a complex merger, this article reveals how technology leaders can transform friction with finance teams into strategic partnerships that drive organizational success.
Key takeaways:
Embrace the 'First Team' mentality — your executive peers are your primary team, not just your direct reports
Transform budget conflicts into collaborative planning through genuine curiosity about finance operations
Create aligned systems that serve both technology and finance goals simultaneously
Build trust through small wins before attempting larger organizational changes
Develop shared visibility tools that enable proactive decision-making across departments
Foster cross-functional strategic planning to avoid departmental silos
As a CTO, the relationship you cultivate with your Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and other executive peers is paramount to your organization's success.
I was the CTO for Seek Asia (2015 - 2020) during a critical formative phase of the organization, which was formed from the acquisition and merger of two of Southeast Asia’s leading employment marketplaces. A key part of the success of bringing these organizations together into one space, where modern practices thrive and engagement levels are far higher than those before the acquisition, was the relationships between CTOs and CFOs across the merger. In this article, I draw from my five years of experience in the role of CTO, as well as my broader career experience leading organizational change, to set out valuable guidance for those technology leaders looking to enhance collaboration and achieve greater strategic alignment within their companies.
Why CTOs need strong relationships with executive peers
A foundational piece of advice (that I learned through getting it wrong initially) is that CTOs should recognize that their executive peers constitute their primary team. The importance of this realization, and what its connotations are, is well described by Patrick Lencioni's ‘first team’ concept — it's a brilliant description of the dynamic that, for most, leads to that ‘Aha!’ moment. You see, it's easy for new CTOs, and many in tech, to focus predominantly on their direct reports. When you first join an organization, you often have people to support and fires to attend to that draw your attention. Your peers all seem busy doing their thing, and frequently, the behaviours of the CEO and board might reinforce that through engaging with each member of the executive team separately. I cannot stress enough the importance of building strong relationships across all executive roles, their teams, the board, and other stakeholders.
It may seem self-evident, but I suggest you take an honest assessment of where those relationships are for you, right now. Are you only investing in these relationships when you have time? Are there uneasy truces? Elephants in the room? Do you feel some are unlikely to support you or actively undermine you? These are all very human responses to underinvested relationships, where there is less mutual understanding of how each of you can more effectively contribute to the organization’s success. Addressing these issues involves dedicating a significant proportion of your attention to these relationships. Practical steps, like planning to sit in the same area a couple of days a week for serendipitous discussions, can foster these connections far beyond formal one-on-ones.
Building professional trust through personal connection
My own journey with Jackson Peters, CFO at Seek Asia, illustrates the power of intentional relationship building. Let me first say that the journey was two-way, both from the initial failings and for the ultimate success. This is just my recounting of my experiences and takeaways.
Our initial interactions, generally around budgeting, and in particular the setting of those budgets, were fraught with "fireworks", mainly due to our differing expectations and preconceived notions. Jackson, having previous experience of disorganized and unreliable technology teams, saw tech as not caring about finances. My contribution to this dynamic was that, being new to a C-level role, I hadn't provided the expected level of detail nor delivered the expected information in a timely manner, and as a result, I did not give his team enough time to work with it.
It was our CEO who initially recognized the mutual detriment of this dynamic. After a few false starts, we actively worked together to bridge the gap. This started with informal coffees, lunches, dinners, and even getting to know each other's families. This personal connection laid the groundwork for greater professional trust.
Curiosity as a catalyst for alignment
One thing I knew I needed to achieve to support the scale of the change required — to both integrate two previously competing companies, and modernise the approach to product delivery and operations — was to change how we approached funding work. This meant potentially disruptive change for the finance team as well, so simply rearranging everything to suit product development without considering the impact on the finance team would not cut it.
A key element in my approach was to have genuine curiosity about the finance team's operations. Jackson leveraged his existing knowledge of the finance team’s systems (which his IT teams supported) to ask in-depth questions, aiming to understand the team’s motivations and challenges. This led to identifying areas of intersection where both finance and product/technology could achieve their goals.
We started with small wins, focused on improving the timely availability of financial data through technology. We found ways to do this which also enhanced the workflows of the product development staff, such as empowering them with budgets in exchange for a simple way to identify intended spending. This made life easier for Jackson's team and began to build trust. This trust then enabled more significant changes, such as mapping product and development domains (six groups of teams) to the finance team's journaling system for cash flow. This innovation made it easy for finance to understand tech spending and provided flexibility for domains to align expenditures with value creation. We soon were able to provide a real-time snapshot of budgeting and spending in the organization, enabling us to provide more rapid and accurate forecasts.
Benefits of CTO-CFO alignment: Streamlined financial planning, empowered teams, and organizational resilience
The impact of this robust CTO-CFO partnership was profound:
Proactive budgeting: Product and technology budgeting, previously prepared last, now came first, as it could be done quickly and continuously. This enabled accurate forecasting and early warnings for unexpected financial events, which finance teams highly value.
Enhanced visibility and strategic decision-making: At Seek Asia, where two previously competing businesses (Jobs DB and JobsStreet) were merging, good visibility into market performance, revenues, and costs was critical. Technology teams, holding data on online market share (Google position, monthly views), could model this to job ad revenues. This alignment was vital for making informed choices, especially when facing new competitors like LinkedIn, Indeed, Google Jobs, and Facebook Jobs.
Empowered cost management: By aligning budgets to the six product and development domains, teams gained responsibility for their own costs. Simple run-rate trackers and one-liners for new spending intentions allowed for easy conversations and reliable projections. This decentralized cost management, initially met with skepticism by the CFO, proved remarkably accurate (less than 5% variance) and was later encouraged across other business units. This shifted the finance team's role from being "bad cops" to focusing on revenue and value-related activities.
Mindset shift and agency: The shift from functional budgeting (tech, product, design) to value-oriented domains empowered teams to make smarter judgment calls on spending. They could now allocate resources based on improving value or system resilience, fostering a greater sense of ownership, and reducing internal quandaries over budgets.
Resilience and adaptability: The long-term planning cultivated through this executive alignment, including foresight into flexible communication and remote work capabilities, allowed Seek Asia to adapt to the COVID-19 outbreak swiftly. Within two to three weeks, ~800 sales and operations staff across eight countries in Southeast Asia were working from home seamlessly, because the necessary infrastructure and understanding of capabilities were already in place. We hadn’t predicted the pandemic, but recognition of the importance of resilience and adaptability meant we had already set a foundation for these capabilities, with other teams such as product development, corporate, and digital marketing leveraging this flexibility.
Building shared vision through cross-functional executive leadership
Another key ingredient was the work of the entire executive team in building a shared vision, rather than working in silos with individual departmental visions. Numerous times as CTO/CIO, I worked with our Strategy Director and CEO to run quarterly planning off-sites, ensuring a cross-functional understanding of how different areas fit together. I wasn’t the only executive contributing, but I highlight this because it's not always common for a CTO to contribute in this way — often because they are too busy or it feels to them like it's outside their remit. The reality is, if you need the organization to work differently to reach the aspired level of performance, then your contribution as a CTO in shaping how the entire organization operates is essential. These off-sites led to the company adopting tools like OKRs and goal trees, fostering a common understanding of strategic objectives and enabling better, shared decision-making and monitoring of results. This cascaded down to teams, allowing them to set their OKRs in conversation with leadership, enabling greater agency and more informed choices.
My experience at Seek Asia, particularly the success we had as an executive team over a complex merger in very competitive market conditions, clearly demonstrates the benefits of a strong, trusting relationship between the CTO and CFO (and between all the other members of our ‘first team’), built on genuine curiosity and shared understanding. These strongly forged relationships are not merely beneficial but essential for organizational agility, financial health, and strategic success. By embracing the ‘first team’ principle and proactively building bridges across executive functions, technology leaders can reduce potential friction and enable powerful partnerships that drive organizations forward.
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