How to Excel in Executive Decision-Making: Lessons from a Finance Leader’s Success

By Linda Bodnar

Effective leadership often requires moving beyond day-to-day responsibilities and cultivating strategic influence across an organization. This case study explores how a talented finance leader enhanced her executive decision-making, strengthened her presence, and broadened her impact through focused coaching and intentional development.

Context for Engagement

Abby, vice president of finance at a 2,500-employee financial services firm, is seen as an extremely capable and diligent finance leader who is very likable, collaborative, and brings positive energy to teams and projects. 

Problem: High-performing leaders can become bottlenecks

Prior to coaching, she was also perceived as not being decisive enough, resulting in being a bottleneck and holding up work. This impacted her executive presence and influence.

Having been recently promoted, she needed to elevate herself to be more on par strategically with her new peers and to contribute more at the enterprise level rather than more narrowly from her finance perspective.

Solution: Developing self-confidence in the executive role

Abby had two main goals:

1. Be more decisive and timely.
2. Elevate her strategic thinking, executive decision-making, and enterprise perspective.

By focusing on these two goals, she also felt she would enhance her self-confidence and her presence.

Project Execution

To support Abby in achieving her goals, we followed a structured approach that combined feedback, planning, and ongoing coaching. Here are the steps we took:

1. Gathered qualitative 360 feedback.

We selected a set of leaders for the interview-based process that included direct reports, peers, and senior leaders. We worked together to come up with questions that I used as a basis for an in-depth discussion with each feedback provider, exploring key strengths, areas for development, ideas for how to improve, etc. I summarized that feedback in a way that preserved the confidentiality of who said what, and Abby and I went over that feedback carefully to help her refine her goals.

2. Created an action plan. 

Based on her goals and the 360 feedback, we crafted an action plan to guide her development. It included specific action steps and measures of success. Abby added a column to track her progress on the plan over the six-month coaching engagement.

3. Had alignment meetings with her manager and HR.

Abby and I met periodically with her manager and HR to share her goals, share progress on her action plan, and get feedback, insights, and support.

4. Had bi-weekly coaching meetings.

Abby and I met roughly every other week to assess progress on her plan, debrief on meetings and interactions over the last few weeks, plan for upcoming interactions, explore new ways to think about past experiences, explore new approaches to try, and think through some mindset shifts that would help her think about things differently.

5. Gathered follow-up feedback.

At about the five month mark, we gathered follow-up feedback through an online survey to assess progress on her goals and help guide future focus and development.

Outcome

Client’s takeaways:

By the end of the six-month coaching engagement, Abby had:

• Gained self-confidence
• Improved meeting preparation: Incorporated a practice of checking in with the meeting organizer before meetings, when appropriate, to identify what would be expected of her (e.g., absorb for action later on vs. share her views vs. make a decision in the moment) which allowed her to prepare accordingly and come into the meeting ready to meet people’s needs.
• Accelerated executive decision-making: As a result of that and an increased focus/intention on executive decision-making, showed noticeable improvement in removing herself as a bottleneck on processes and projects . She received follow-up feedback showing that she was making decisions more quickly, was more comfortable “going with her gut,” and was resisting the need to check/escalate her decisions unnecessarily, while still maintaining the high quality of her decisions.
• Delegated more effectively: Delegated more to her team, which enhanced their confidence and freed her up to do more strategic work. She did this partly by identifying each day what meetings one of her team members could attend instead of her. She also provided timelier directions and decisions to her team, which reduced their frustration/stress dramatically.
• Strengthened strategic thinking and leadership presence: Increased her strategic thinking and strengthened perceptions of her being a more strategic leader. One way she did that was by reviewing content prior to leadership meetings to identify potential strategic/enterprise ideas and questions.
• Enhanced organizational strategic impact: Worked closely with a peer to further enhance the organization’s leadership understanding of Enterprise Risk Management, identifying top tier risks and cross-departmental impacts. Other examples of increased strategic impact include suggesting ideas to other functional heads (e.g., Marketing, Information Security, Benefits) that they have used in initiatives and communications.
• Maximized learning from events: At conferences and industry committee meetings, Abby approached participation strategically. Rather than just attending, she went with an intention to expand her strategic thinking and to bring back key learnings to share with her team and peers as appropriate.

Coach’s takeaways:

Abby is a role model for effective leadership and coaching. She embodies openness, reflection, and action, demonstrating the value of continuous growth and strategic thinking. Her approach sets a best-practice example for executive coaches and aspiring leaders.

• Openness to feedback: I was so impressed with Abby’s approach to feedback. I was initially a bit concerned about sharing with her the candid and quite critical feedback gathered in the interview feedback, but she was amazingly open to hearing it and learning from it. I felt like she was a role model for me in how to seek, welcome, and deal with feedback non-defensively. As for many, this is a lifelong journey for me, and this was a great reminder of how to approach it.
• Commitment to leadership development: I was also so impressed with Abby’s determination to become a better leader. She took her plan and executed on it consistently. During our coaching meetings, she shared numerous examples of times she had approached interactions and meetings differently as a result of focusing on her development goals.When I would wonder if there’s another way to think about something, she would pause, reflect, share her “aha”, and outline how she was going to implement that in the coming weeks. If I offered a new approach, tip, or tool for her consideration, she would often say “wow, that’s really cool, I look forward to using that.” And then would! 
• Proactive engagement: She connected regularly with her manager throughout the six months to ensure she was meeting his expectations around her development and to ask him for opportunities to get involved in more enterprise-level and strategic work. If all my coachees could show up like Abby did for this coaching engagement, it would be amazing. If you are looking for a role model of how to be a great coachee, Abby’s approach definitely includes some best practices to emulate!
• Strategic growth beyond functional expertise: This coaching engagement reminded me of the many functional leaders I’ve coached from accounting, legal, regulatory, compliance, IT, etc., many of whom went into their field because of their diligence and attention to detail, and then over time realized that “what got them here won’t get them there”. They come to understand that they have to rise above that, get out of the day-to-day, and become more influential and strategic. This is not an easy task! Abby was a perfect example of someone who has been successful in that endeavor.