What Boards Get Wrong About CFOs

Rebekah Le explains that boards are frequently held back not by evidence, but by the labels they attach to people.

“We like boxes. We like labels. We’re very quick to say, oh, so-and-so is a CFO and they must be this and they must be that."

She recalls a time when she was a CFO and a board president said: "Well, you're a CFO, you must love numbers. I said 'Well, I'm not exactly Rain Man. I don't love numbers—I love people. I love solving problems. I love puzzles."

The two most common label-driven objections boards raise about CFO-to-CEO succession are predictable:

1. A CFO can't be technically sound enough to give credible guidance to engineering, construction, or operational subject matter experts.
2. CFOs tend to be seen as risk-averse—not oriented toward growth, wired to protect margins rather than build markets.

Tabb encourages CFOs to reframe the conversation and get into specifics. The CFO should drive beyond the question of whether a finance person can run an operating business. The point to make is: What does this specific business need right now, and how does my background equip me to deliver it?

There's no reason why a CFO can't come to the table with a concrete commercial strategy that addresses how, for example, a company could revamp its sales model and what margins are needed to scale.

“I’m not a subject matter expert on the technical side of electricity and power demand," Tabb explains. "But I understand the way EPC should work in the business cycle, and what success looks like in engineering, construction, and procurement. I can say: 'This is where we are today. This is where we need to move.'”

The Mindset Shift: From Strategic Finance to Enterprise Leadership

The most important transition a CFO must make on the path to the CEO role is not a skills transition. It is a mindset transition. And it is more demanding than many expect.

One core competency for a CFO is analysis — identifying signal in noise, stress-testing assumptions, quantifying risk and return. This is enormously valuable. But the CEO’s core obligation is synthesis and commitment. Where the CFO asks “what does the data tell us?”, the CEO must ask “given what the data tells us, what do we believe, and what are we going to do?”

Kathy Pattillo, Boyden Managing Partner, points to another core competency. She emphasizes that emotional intelligence—being self-aware and having social awareness for relationship management—are among the most critical traits of CFOs who thrive as CEOs.

From Governance to Culture

Governance is the CFO’s native language. Culture is the CEO’s responsibility. It's built through symbolic choices, patterns of behavior, and the lived experience of people at every level of the organization.

Le notes that when the Signal board assessed Tabb for the CEO position they could see he had been addressing this consistently for years. He had flagged problems before they became larger challenges, stood beside people through difficulty, and showed up in ways that demonstrated genuine care for the organization.

From P&L Oversight to P&L Ownership

CFOs have deep visibility into P&L performance across the enterprise, but the CEO bears ultimate accountability. The CEO also owns revenue generation, customer focus, talent development, and operational delivery simultaneously.

Tabb explains that he built credibility by behaving like an enterprise leader long before he had the title. In his CFO roles, he made a point of spending time on project sites, developing deep familiarity with the challenges of field operations, and building genuine relationships with operational and sales teams. "I had a very good command of the issues and challenges in the field.”

From Scrutinizing to Creating

CFOs analyze and challenge operating models. CEOs design and own them. Tabb says he presented a three-pillar plan for Signal — building a high-performance culture, re-engineering the core business model and processes, and accelerating value creation. It was not a finance plan, it was an enterprise transformation plan. He showed the board that he could conceptualize and articulate what needed to change and why.

The sequencing matters, too. Tabb’s framing was deliberately ordered: culture first, then processes, then value creation. “If you have the right people, they’ll fix the processes. And then the processes will dictate the systems we need to make that efficient.” This kind of thinking — people as the lever that moves everything else — distinguishes an enterprise leader from a financial steward.

How do Boards Assess CFO CEO Readiness? The Signal Energy Case

Boards assessing CFOs for CEO roles are managing their own institutional risk as much as they are evaluating the candidate.

“After a month of rigorous due diligence, the board reached a clear consensus,” says Le. “That level of thoroughness reflected a strong commitment to the decision and helped build confidence in the leadership process.”

Several dimensions consistently emerge as decisive when evaluating a CFO for the top role:

• Boards appoint people they know and trust. Has the CFO demonstrated genuine curiosity about markets, customers, and competitive dynamics? Boards want to see evidence that the candidate can grow revenue, not just protect margins.
• Cross-functional leadership and field credibility. The new CEO must lead functions they have never run. Boards assess whether the CFO has operated primarily within a finance silo or built genuine partnerships across the business and is trusted outside the finance function.
• Leadership presence and executive communication. CEOs must inspire as well as direct. They must be able to energize a room of employees, investors, regulators, board members, or customers. "Can the CFO provide clarity in moments of complexity?" Le asks. Boards may assess this based on unscripted moments rather than formal demonstrations.
• Experience of transformation and turnaround. Boards want to understand whether the CFO has led through genuinely difficult conditions — not just reported on them.
• Integrity and behind-the-scenes behavior. Does this person behave with the proper values and care when no one is watching? For CFOs who aspire to the CEO role, this question is answered by years of consistent behavior.
   

Building the Experiences That Prove CEO Readiness

CFOs who aspire to the chief executive role should not wait for a succession process to begin before preparing for it. The most credible candidates are those who have spent years deliberately accumulating the experiences that speak to enterprise leadership capability.

Tabb explains that his path to the CEO role was not a sudden pivot. It was the logical outcome of a career spent making deliberate bets: leaving valuation work for industry, taking a contract role that turned into a front-row seat with a CEO, building a finance function from scratch at a public company, taking an interim CFO role in a crisis.

1. Seek General Management Exposure. One of the most powerful steps a CFO can take is to run something directly—a division, a region, a significant integration, or a new business. If a pure general management rotation is not available, leading a major transformation program with full cross-functional accountability is a good alternative.
   
   What matters is the experience of being ultimately responsible for outcomes that go beyond financial reporting.
    
2. Demonstrate Commercial Strategy, Not Just Financial Discipline. When Tabb pitched the board on how he would run Signal, he led with a commercial strategy — how the company would revamp its sales model, restructure its margins, and grow its backlog. CFOs preparing for CEO succession should be able to articulate a growth thesis, not just a cost thesis. The board needs to see that the candidate understands value creation from both sides of the P&L.
    
3. Build Deep Investor Relations and Stakeholder Management Capability. When Tabb was a public company CFO in his early 30s, he spent significant time in boardrooms, working across committees, and managing investor relations through turbulent periods. This experience with external stakeholder management translated directly into CEO readiness.
   
   CFOs should invest in this dimension intentionally, treating investor relations not as a reporting function but as a strategic leadership platform.
    
4. Champion Talent and Culture Visibly. Future CEOs need to be known as leaders who build teams and develop people. For CFOs, this means investing personal time in mentoring, sponsoring high-potential talent across the organization, and earning a reputation as someone people want to follow.
    
5. Seek Wisdom Actively. Tabb emphasizes that he developed the habit of seeking advice. “I learned very early on that there are a lot of people who have been there and done it. Seek wisdom — that’s one of our guiding principles, and it’s always been one of my personal guiding principles.”
   
   Intellectual humility and a genuine curiosity about how others have solved hard problems can be valuable executive leadership traits.
    
6. Develop Board Relationships. For CFOs who are building toward the CEO role, the relationship with the board should be built long before a succession question arises. Boards appoint people they know and trust. CFOs who are known to the board as candid, forward-looking, and genuinely oriented toward the organization’s long-term success — not just its quarterly numbers — are already positioning themselves as enterprise leaders in the minds of the people who will ultimately make the succession decision.
    

The CFO to CEO Pathway Demands Intentionality

The CFO to CEO pathway is not merely a trend. It reflects a genuine evolution in what enterprise leadership demands and how boards think about the capabilities required to lead through a period of accelerating change.

Financial acumen, rigorous decision-making, and the ability to see the whole enterprise through a common lens have never been more valuable in a chief executive.

But as Robert L. Tabb and Rebekah Le make clear, the pathway remains demanding precisely because it requires more than financial excellence. It requires:

• A willingness to expand one’s identity from finance leader to enterprise leader.
• The accumulation of experiences — in general management, in commercial strategy, in culture-building, in field operations, in stakeholder management — that speak to the full scope of what a CEO must do.
• A leadership presence that inspires confidence not just in boardrooms and investor meetings, but in the daily experience of the people who do the work.

Boards conducting CEO succession planning may look to their CFO as a principal candidate — one who may need to deliberate development and sponsorship to reach full readiness.

And CFOs who aspire to lead should begin that journey long before a succession process begins: moving beyond the label, building toward the whole, and showing the board — every day, not just in the formal pitch — that they are already thinking and acting like the enterprise leader the organization will need.

 

For organizations seeking to discuss their financial leadership strategy, Boyden's Financial Officers Practice offers the global expertise and local insights necessary to identify, evaluate, and place the executives who will drive success in your business.