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At a glance
Accounting and finance professionals now operate in an environment defined by accelerated technological change, rising scrutiny, regulatory complexity and shifting workforce expectations.
Technical expertise remains essential, but it is no longer sufficient on its own.
This six-part series of articles shines a spotlight on the critical capabilities professionals must unlock to remain relevant, trusted and future-ready.
Unlock leadership and influence
Technical expertise remains the essential entry ticket to a career in accounting, finance and business. But as workplaces become more digital, distributed and fast-moving, leadership and influence are emerging as critical capabilities for long-term success.
Leaders who can influence rather than simply direct can foster collaboration, encourage innovative thinking and create cultures where employees feel engaged. As artificial intelligence (AI) automates more routine and analytical tasks, human capabilities such as communication, empathy, critical thinking and relationship-building are becoming more valuable.
Lim Li San FCPA, group chief operating officer at Sri Lankan telco Dialog Axiata, says effective leaders use these skills to help teams manage competing priorities and respond to emerging opportunities and risks.
“Technical capability is the prerequisite, but it is not what determines whether someone becomes a great leader,” she says. “The real differentiator is how well they work with people.”
Why are leadership and influence skills important for the future?
While leadership expectations vary across the Asia-Pacific region, leaders are increasingly required to balance commercial outcomes with employee wellbeing and stakeholder expectations.
According to a recent survey by leadership advisory and executive recruiting firm Russell Reynolds Associates, leadership capability has shifted towards soft skills that enable agility, creativity and collaboration. These skills include strategic thinking, change management, decision-making and resilience.
“Work is no longer purely task-driven,” says Sophie Bretag, leadership expert and author of The Kind Way. “It is increasingly about supporting clients, building relationships and caring for the people you are serving.
“Organisations still have KPIs that need to be achieved — that is the reality of work,” she adds. “However, leaders also need to understand the human behind the role while being clear about expectations and outcomes. Empathy and accountability are not opposites.”
Skills like communication, emotional intelligence and stakeholder management enable leaders to align diverse groups around a shared purpose and maintain engagement during periods of uncertainty.
These skills are also vital for creating a sense of team cohesion within a hybrid workforce and can help navigate intergenerational differences by creating cultures where people with diverse experiences and communication styles can contribute effectively to a common goal.
However, while human skills like emotional intelligence are essential, a guide published by Harvard Business School also shows that successful leaders employ AI to support their teams. For example, by using AI to handle complex analysis, teams can focus on higher-level work, such as creative problem-solving, strategic planning and improving customer experiences.
What do leadership and influence look like in practice?
Lim says successful leaders create a “bubble of certainty amid uncertainty”.
“My job is to absorb the noise, make sense of what is happening and distil it into the handful of priorities the team needs to focus on,” she says.
“You need to separate what is within your control from what is not. External volatility is real, but if you obsess over things you cannot control, you lose energy. My role is to understand how those external changes affect us and then focus the team on what they can actually influence.”
"Technical capability is the prerequisite, but it is not what determines whether someone becomes a great leader. The real differentiator is how well they work with people."
Lim adds that successful leaders break projects into smaller milestones to influence team motivation.
“People need to know what success looks like at the end of the month, the quarter and the year. If the destination feels too far away, they lose energy,” she says. “When people see progress, they gain confidence that the strategy is working.
“Momentum is the best antidote to anxiety,” Lim adds. “Anxiety does not come from hard work. Anxiety comes from knowing something needs to be done but has not been done yet, so when people can see progress, they feel more in control and less overwhelmed.”
Upskill
What can happen if these skills are lacking?
Organisations face significant risks when technical experts lack leadership and influence skills.
Research from employee experience platform Culture Amp shows a correlation between leadership quality and team performance: employees with high-performing leaders are more than four times more likely to be high performers themselves. The reverse is also true — professionals with low-performing leaders are three times more likely to be low-performing employees.
“There are many instances where someone with strong technical skills gets promoted into a leadership role and then struggles, because leading people requires a completely different skill set,” Bretag says.
“The most obvious risk is disengagement, but it goes much further than that,” she continues. “If a team is not functioning well, it is unlikely to achieve the outcomes expected of it. You may see higher absenteeism, presenteeism, employee turnover and difficulty attracting talent.”
How can you build skills in leadership and influence?
Self-awareness is the foundation of strong leadership, Bretag says.
“You cannot lead others effectively without understanding your own triggers, values and reactions in different situations. Knowing yourself is one of the essential building blocks for any leadership role.”
From there, she recommends seeking a leadership mentor. “Look for someone in the workplace who behaves in a way you admire and learn from them through proximity.”
Effective leadership also requires influence. Lim believes this can be built in three steps.
“First, you need to earn the right to be heard, and that comes down to trust,” she says.
"You cannot lead others effectively without understanding your own triggers, values and reactions in different situations. Knowing yourself is one of the essential building blocks for any leadership role."
“Trust is built through credibility, reliability, openness and a lack of self-orientation. Credibility is your capability, reliability is how you deliver consistently over time and openness is being transparent about your intentions. As for self-orientation, the more your intent is linked to the greater good, the more likely you are to garner support.”
The next step, Lim says, is gaining a clear understanding of people’s motivations.
“Even if I have one goal and someone else has another, I first need to recognise that difference,” she says. “Once I understand what’s driving them, I am in a much better position to create a win-win outcome.”
The third step is “making it easy for people to say yes”, Lim continues. “Too often, we throw a complex problem at someone and expect them to solve it.
“That creates resistance, because people then focus on why it cannot be done. I like to break large problems into bite-sized pieces with clear accountability. That lowers resistance, because people can see a path forward rather than feeling overwhelmed,” she says.
“Leadership is not about doing the work yourself,” Lim adds. “It is about creating the conditions for other people to succeed.”
Capability-building tip
“One of the hardest transitions for technically strong leaders is learning to stop being the hero. If your instinct is to always jump in and solve the problem yourself, people never develop. Over time, you become a bottleneck rather than a multiplier. Leadership is about becoming the producer rather than the protagonist of each story.”
Lim Li San FCPA, Dialog Axiata
Production credit
Banner image Nuthawut Somsuk via Getty Images
