Ep. 127: Carmen Rene - Team Management & Multi-Disciplinary Work Groups

Contact Carmen Rene: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carmen-rene-a063546/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch: (00:00)
 Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. This is your host Mitch Roshong, and I'm here to introduce you to our guest speaker of episode 127, Carmen Rene. Carmen is the Vice President of Finance and Corporate Controller at Salt Health. She is a passionate leader who focuses on and emphasizes team management, multidisciplinary work groups, and coaching through obstacles. In this episode, Carmen talks about what it takes to be a leader and build teams around trust. Keep listening as we head over to their conversation now.

Adam: (00:46)
Simon Sinek said, “a team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other”. What does that quote mean to you and how you interact with your team?

Carmen: (00:57)
Sure. This is one of my, certainly one of my favorite philosophers, if you will, on leadership, but certainly one of my favorite quotes by Simon Sinek, because of what it really says to me is just because you are surrounded by a group of people and just because you work with a group of people, you don't necessarily have a shared vision and a common goal and a shared interest in being successful. And so without all of those things, I don't really think that you have a team that is focused on the same thing. And my belief is that, that objective or that dynamic comes when you trust each other. If you have a group of people who you know have your best interests and a common objective in mind, then I believe you have a team and you have an opportunity of being successful.

Adam: (01:53)
So what I'm hearing with that, what you just said is having that common objective, having that common mind, you know, how do you get to that common mind? That seems easier said than done.

Carmen: (02:05)
It's always easier said than done, right? I mean, I think that's a big part of what leadership is about all day long is a constant reminder and communication and check in about what we're looking to accomplish. It's often referred to as the why. What are we looking to get out of what we're accomplishing? What are we looking to accomplish? What are we trying to get and why? And if everybody understands the why, which I believe is a common interest, but, you know, oftentimes I work in accounting, right? It's very easy for people to go, we have to close the books, or because we have month end reporting, or we have investors, we believe we work for a company that we believe in, we're working towards an objective that we believe in, we have a team of people that we care about and we want them to be successful. So our why, is not the journal entry, our why is not finishing the books, the why isn't even for the most part the day to day. The why is where are we going and how do we know when we get there? And then we all understand that what I'm doing today is a step in that journey so that we can achieve, or, you know, land at the destination at some point. I think that's that common interest. And in many cases in business, we don't know what it is, right. If the common interest is I need a job because I need to pay my bills. That's not a common interest, that's Carmen's interest. But if the common interest is to leave mankind better than it was when we got here, because we work for a company that's working on a health solution or a cancer cure, or we're looking to have renewable power so that we can save the planet, right? Then all of a sudden we have a why that means something bigger than the journal entry. But my role in that big why is this team will be successful to ensure that this company has the financing that it needs in order to continue the projects down the path to achieve the objective. And if everybody on your team and keep in mind a team is very often multi-disciplinary, right? It's not just the, in our case, the team of accountants, the team of FP&A analysts, a team of treasury management, right? It's our executive team. It's our supply chain team. It's our friends on the manufacturing side of the house. It's our, everybody who manages the shipping and receiving departments, right. If we all understand the role that we play in that greater objective, then we show up to work, ready to give people the benefit of the doubt, ready to trust that we're all here at the end of the day to accomplish the same thing. Then I think you have a team, not just a group of people that you hang out with all day long.

Adam: (05:17)
You mean that makes a lot of sense. And you don't always work in with people who are doing the same thing you're doing. Many times there's people from multi-disciplinary groups who come together within a group and it seems like the things that you were just describing would work very well for that group, that multi-disciplinary group would have to understand the why in order to work well together. What are some steps you've taken to make sure that these types of groups are successful?

Carmen: (05:47)
You know, I think that the most important thing that you can do is be curious. And what I mean by that is, for example, I just put into place, purchasing policy. Kind of boring, right? But as part of that process, I spent some time with the, Ph.D. scientists who worked in laboratory, and we were having a conversation about how they use pipettes. I’m sorry pipettes and pipette tips in the laboratory. Now, as I mentioned, I'm an accountant, right? I never used a pipette tip in my life, but as members of the supply chain, I've ordered them before. So I was sitting with them for a day, observing them in the laboratory about how they use pipettes and how the process in an experiment is impacted or how the results are impacted by the process and how clean they can keep the sample. So literally every time they would move to a step to a next step, they would change the pipette tip. Now that seemed a little excessive to me for a minute. But then later in that day, or sometime later that week, I was reviewing results of something that had come out of the laboratory, product that we had to scrap, right, we had to throw it away. And I asked the question, well, why are we throwing this stuff away? What happened? They said, well we had some contamination in the processing. And it connected me back to that exercise of watching them prepare samples and changing the pipette tips. So all of a sudden I understand a whole lot better why we need pipette tips, why we need so many of them and where contamination can occur. And I brought that back to the purchasing policy around how do I set up a policy that enables them to have a blanket purchase order, right. A standing order for pipette tips, because they use them all day long, every day, all month. Right? So, because I understand, I have a much better understanding of the why, and this is a very small example, but I have a much better understanding of the why and how these products are used, so I can understand how I need to design a process that accommodates, not just me who happens to hate blanket purchase orders, but I can accommodate my scientists who wants to know that there's just going to be a constant stream of product being delivered to their laboratory so that their experiments aren't in any way altered or impacted. I hope that makes sense as a how you can bring multi-disciplinary teams could together to just have a simple conversation. So why their day to day is impacted by my day to day.

Adam: (08:51)
It's a simple conversation of being able to turn off your perspective and point of view for a moment and look at things through somebody else's shoes for a moment, and then suddenly your w...