#264 The Confidence Blueprint Every New CFO Needs, Lee-Wen Chen, GrowCFO Mentor
In this episode, Kevin Appleby hosts GrowCFO Mentor Lee‑Wen Chan to explore the confidence blueprint every new CFO needs. Drawing on a 40-year trans-Pacific career spanning Deloitte Taiwan, FedEx, and ultimately a history-making CFO appointment at NTT Communications, Lee‑Wen distills how new finance leaders can build durable confidence, overcome imposter syndrome, and translate financials into business impact. Her story threads together cultural dexterity, executive coaching, and practical leadership habits that help CFOs step into influence quickly and credibly.
The conversation focuses on how confidence is learned and operationalized: knowing one’s strengths, confronting low-confidence areas, and using clear business language that resonates across functions. Lee‑Wen shares how executive coaching refined both her capability to operate as a CFO and her ability to communicate as one—offering pragmatic guidance for newly appointed CFOs who must move from technical mastery to strategic partnership, change leadership, and people empowerment.
Key topics covered:
- A first-principles confidence blueprint: “be comfortable in your own skin,” know your strengths, and deliberately shore up low-confidence areas to maximize influence.
- Confronting imposter syndrome with structure: targeted executive coaching for “being a CFO” and “communicating as a CFO.”
- Translating finance into business action: simple narratives that resonate (e.g., “$1 cost saving equals $4 of sales to hit the same bottom line”).
- Cultural agility as a leadership multiplier: thriving across Taiwanese, American, and Japanese corporate contexts; first non‑Japanese CFO at NTT.
- Strategic impact through proximity to the business: learning sales/engineering to make financial data genuinely useful and forward-looking.
- Change leadership at scale: FedEx supply chain expansion to 20+ countries; building regional hubs and accelerating learning under pressure.
Links
Timestamps
- 0:03:29 From master’s graduate to CFO: mentors, adaptation, and the stepwise journey to the first non‑Japanese CFO at NTT.
- 0:07:37 Lessons from Japanese leadership: zooming out to strategy, zooming in to detail, and reading between the lines.
- 0:12:17 The confidence blueprint: self-respect, truth-telling, leveraging strengths to counter low-confidence areas.
- 0:13:56 Tackling imposter syndrome: why new CFOs struggle and how executive coaching accelerates confidence.
- 0:17:01 Making finance useful: business-first framing (the “$1 saves equals $4 sales” clarity test).
- 0:18:42 Strategy via business partnership: learning sales/engineering to turn numbers into decisions.
- 0:19:55 Change leadership case: FedEx global supply chain expansion and accelerated capability building.
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