Ep. 79: Chris Wymbs - Innovation and Change with Strong Leadership

Contact Chris Wymbs: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-wymbs-b4b4b789/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch: (00:05)
Welcome back for episode 79 of Count Me In IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm your host, Mitch Roshong and today we will be hearing from Chris Wymbs, the Executive Vice President of Finance and Chief Accounting Officer for AMC networks. Chris has significant leadership experience at a Fortune 50 company and as a finance executive with a proven record of success and extensive background in all aspects of finance. In this episode, he speaks with my cohost Adam about the leadership qualities needed to succeed in your career and how one can effectively lead change and innovation in their organization. Keep listening to hear an insightful episode about leadership, innovation and business transformation. 
 
Adam: (00:54)
So, Chris, can you tell us a little bit about your career journey and how you got where you are? 
 
Chris: (01:02)
Yeah, sure Adam, be happy to. So, it has definitely been a journey it's a good way to depict it. So if I think of the start foundationally, it was early days at Ernst and Young progressing up through the ranks there. Was in the audit realm as well as a support in the advisory services side, worked in a lot of different industries, and I deem that to be foundational to my, as I mentioned to my career progression. From there, I moved on to a little company known as GE at the time, and to an internal audit role, in their corporate audit group, which was exciting and fun and leverage the skills I had from my audit baseline, if you will, or foundation. And then moved into a, at the time a controller role, a global controller role of one of their, financial services businesses, GE Consumer Finance. And there, I really kind of cut my teeth if you will in the operational expertise realm. We were very inquisitive. We had a lot of deals internationally and I got to travel quite a bit, see different cultures, even though I was based domestically and really built out, I'd say kind of the foundation of my leadership skills and more of the executive level, as well as just some financial skills that I really hadn't gotten involved in in my days at Ernst and Young and really owning aspects of the finance organization and building out a team which was exciting and fun. And from there, I progressed into a company, American Express, and took a controller role there. And soon thereafter, less than a year, I moved into more of an operational role. So I was in the FP&A role for a few years. I was in various segment CFO roles over the years, three or four of them. And as I progressed in those roles, it gave me an opportunity to, to steepen and the realms of operational finance, not only from a controllership perspective, but from an FP&A perspective, a corporate finance perspective, and really just continue to build out my financial tool set. And then that brings me to the current role as  I'm EVP of finance and chief accounting officer at AMC networks. And I operate in both the controllership realm as well as the operational finance realm and have a myriad of responsibilities. And as I think of the journey I've gone through, it really has set me up to, to excel in the role I'm in today. And it's, it's comprehensive and it's wide ranging across the finance spectrum. And, and I lead a reasonably sized team and I enjoy that and I am an extrovert by nature. So, being in the leadership role is exciting and fun to me, and it does get me out of bed in the morning, although these days getting out of the bed means just walking downstairs and not getting on a train. So that's kind of in a nutshell, hopefully that covers the question. 
 
Adam: (03:52)
So thinking about that journey, could you describe what leadership characteristics have enabled you to get where you are today? 
 
Chris: (04:03)
Yeah, another  great question. So leadership, it could mean different things to different people and means different things in different cultures and different companies. And as I mentioned, I've worked in a few different companies, but to me, leadership, there's just some foundational things that are absolutely, you know, core given definitions of what leadership is. And for me, it starts with kind of consistent values, and some of those, if I were to just dispel some of those fundamental values, first and foremost, it's integrity. And, everything I do and everything in the bedrock of my leadership is integrity. So my actions will match the words I speak. I, you know, I will always take the higher road whether, you know, whatever issues it might create. And, you know, if you don't have your integrity, then it's really questionable as to what leader you are. And I don't think you can have the right fabrics of a leader without the key bedrock of integrity. And then from there, it kind of builds out and you can kind of go different ways. And for me, if I were to think about the feedback I've gotten over the years from people who've worked for me, they talk about me being an empowering leader. So giving them the ability to go out and do things on their own without my direct oversight, but still providing them enough oversight and guidance to help them succeed. So that's hard as a leader to balance empowering people, but at the same time supporting people. And I think that's foundational to my leadership approach. And then around that, it's how do you develop people? And that's giving people an empowerment, but also how do you continue to develop them and build their skillset and give them confidence and create a safety net around them at some level, although you do need to let people fail at times, and that's how we often learn the best, but, you know, just giving them an ability to continue to develop and supporting them in that development, whether it be getting additional training, having conversations with them in tough areas, and as they develop and progress and become leaders of people, that's a whole different dynamic there's leadership in the entity, as far as driving things forward, but then there's leadership of your team and those mean different things and helping people develop skill sets and both project and people leadership, you know, it takes some effort and some support to do. 
 
Adam: (06:30)
So what counts as innovation in your organization? How would you define it, and what does innovation mean to your employees? 
 
Chris: (06:39)
Yeah, innovation, a tough question. Not unlike leadership. How do you define it? It's defined quite different people define it different ways. The way I think about innovation is kind of through a three-pronged definition, if you will, firstly, there's technological innovation, that's we all know what that is, right? It's the next generation of the, whether it be the app or, you know, the platform where using the next generation of, you know, Oracle so on, so forth or SAP for that matter. There's also process innovations. So that to me could be evolving and driving more efficiency and effectiveness in a process, technology unchanged. And then thirdly there's, and this is where I think most people define innovation. It's the new thing. It's the new app that didn't exist before. It's the, you know, it's the Uber, it's the, you know, however you want to define it as the Priceline if you go way back that just didn't exist previously in the travel realm. It's the ideation of something that didn't exist and that at its core is kind of foundationally innovation, but for finance organizations, it's kind of hard to focus and operate in the ideation realm of innovation. So where I tend to hone my team and more is how do we ...