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Looking back on their career-building years, few finance leaders ever forget the first time that they presented to a board of directors.

For many, the stares of the individual directors around the table remain locked in time, forever evergreen.

For Jim Young, the gazes that stay ever-present are some that were cast not from across a boardroom but instead by a room populated by hundreds of employees attending an offsite management gathering.

\u201cMy job was to communicate some of the important trends\u2014with a little bit of perspective on the investment community\u2014and to highlight different aspects of what was going on with our business,\u201d explains Young, who adds that his primary intent was to bring the company\u2019s customer value proposition into sharper focus and better expose how it translated into customer retention.

What happened next, Young tells us, left a lasting impression.  

\u201cThere were a lot of questions, and I could see this high engagement as I scanned the audience,\u201d remarks Young, who differentiates this experience from his more frequent discussions with the company\u2019s investment community.  

\u201cThe audience\u2019s interest was not because I had brilliant insight or was presenting a great analysis of how we could create value in the business,\u201d comments Young, who reports that following the gathering he completed a postmortem on the talk in order to better understand what was responsible for the gathering\u2019s rapt attention.  

\u201cWe had this very specific metric that in the past had gotten a few nods and maybe even been paid some lip service, and now at this session it suddenly became the focus of a discussion that revealed it to be something that was really quite valuable,\u201d recalls Young, who today credits his talk with simply having \u201cconnected the dots.\u201d

\u201cThe average employee could now understand and translate the metric to his or her business area and to their salespeople and all the rest,\u201d continues Young, who observes that the talk also helped to raise the profile of his finance team by enabling it to better engage with business managers intrigued by what Young had shared.

\u201cI make company leaders better at what they do by helping them to explain where we\u2019re driving value and by making these connections visible all the way through to very tangible things,\u201d notes Young, as he issues what might well be his CFO mission statement.     

Reflecting back on the talk, he adds: \u201cTo this day, I use it as a lesson as far as how I should do my job goes\u2014if I\u2019m not connecting dots, I\u2019m not doing my job.\u201d \u2013Jack Sweeney