‘That’s not my department’ might be the most expensive thing a CFO ever says about culture.
This is the one you might think isn’t your problem. Culture? When did finance have anything to do with culture?
Imagine this… You inherit a team of ‘nice people’. Professional. Competent. Nobody is causing trouble. On the surface, it looks fine.
But accountability is soft. There are errors, missed deadlines, complaints from stakeholders, and nobody owns it. Expectations are unclear and rarely enforced. Leaders avoid tough conversations because staying liked feels safer than being respected.
Then underperformance becomes the norm. Like a slow puncture, you don’t notice until you’re driving on the rim. The best people step into the gap and burn out first. The errors turn into bigger problems. Trust with the business drops.
And you find yourself wondering how a team of capable individuals can collectively deliver such inconsistent results.
This is culture risk. And it shows up in finance outcomes far faster than most CFOs expect.
Culture isn’t the posters on the wall
When most people hear ‘culture’, they think of company values, engagement surveys, and HR programmes. That’s not what this is about.
Culture risk in a finance team is about what gets tolerated day-to-day. The silence when someone underperforms and nobody addresses it. The avoidance when a difficult conversation needs to happen but everybody sidesteps it. The overload when the most capable person keeps getting more piled on because they’ll ‘just get on with it’. The inconsistency when standards shift depending on who’s doing the work or who’s checking it.
These aren’t big, dramatic failures. They’re small, daily patterns that erode performance gradually. And they compound. Silence becomes acceptance. Acceptance becomes the standard. And the standard becomes your results.
I often describe it like rust. You don’t notice it forming. But by the time you can see it, the structural damage is already done.
Why it catches CFOs off guard
Culture risk is sneaky because it doesn’t show up in the numbers… until it does.
You can’t point to a line item that says ‘cost of poor accountability’. There’s no variance analysis that captures ‘senior hire burnt out because nobody managed the workload’. The audit finding doesn’t reference ‘team leader avoided having the conversation six months ago’.
But the downstream effects are everywhere. Errors that should have been caught. Deadlines that keep slipping by a day or two. Key person departures that ‘came out of nowhere’ but were brewing for months. The Finance Business Partner who resigned because they were tired of picking up the slack for colleagues who weren’t held to the same standard.
The commercial impact is real. A surprise exit in the middle of an audit. A mis-hire because the role wasn’t designed around what the team actually needed. A forecast miss because the person responsible was too overwhelmed to challenge the inputs.
These are finance outcomes. But the root cause is culture.
The ‘nice team’ problem
There’s a version of culture risk I see a lot in finance teams. And it’s the most deceptive one.
Everyone is professional. Everyone is competent. Nobody is causing trouble. The team Christmas party is pleasant. The Slack channel is polite. On paper, everything looks fine.
But underneath, accountability is soft. The difficult feedback doesn’t get given. The underperformer isn’t managed. The overachiever isn’t protected. And the CFO doesn’t intervene because ‘we’ve got bigger fires to fight’.
Except this is the fire. It’s just burning slowly.
The problem with tolerating mediocrity is that your best people see it. They see the colleague who consistently misses deadlines but never gets pulled up. They see the leader who avoids hard conversations and gets praised for ‘keeping the peace’. They see the gap between what’s expected and what’s tolerated.
And they make a calculation. Either they lower their own standards to match, or they leave. In my experience, the best ones usually leave. And you’re left wondering what happened, when the signs were visible for months.
The early warning signs
Culture risk has some reliable tells.
Your best people are doing disproportionate amounts of the heavy lifting. They’re not complaining yet, but the distribution of effort across the team is noticeably uneven. The engine is running on two cylinders instead of six.
Feedback conversations aren’t happening. Performance issues are discussed informally (‘yeah, they’re struggling a bit’) but never formally addressed with a clear plan.
Standards vary depending on who did the work. Some team members get held to a higher bar than others, and everyone knows it. That inconsistency is corrosive.
People describe the team as ‘nice’ but can’t point to a time when a difficult performance conversation happened and led to improvement.
You’ve had a surprise resignation from someone good, and when you dug into it, the reasons had been visible for months. That one always stings.
What to do about it
Culture risk in a finance team isn’t fixed by a company-wide engagement programme. It’s fixed by what the leader does on a Tuesday.
Set clear expectations and hold people to them consistently. Not aggressively, not rigidly, but consistently. The same standard for everyone. And when it slips, address it in the moment, not three months later in an annual review when nobody remembers the detail and the damage is already done.
Protect your best people. They’re the first casualties of culture risk. Check in with them. Understand their workload. Make sure the weight isn’t falling disproportionately on the people least likely to complain about it.
Have the difficult conversations. Not because you enjoy them, but because avoiding them is more expensive. Managed early, most performance issues are recoverable. Left to fester, they become departures, errors, or worse.
And be honest about what you’re tolerating. Because what you tolerate is your culture, regardless of what’s written on the wall. The posters in reception don’t mean anything if the behaviour in the team tells a different story.
Culture risk shows up in finance outcomes fast. And it shows up fastest when you put a new leader into a pressured seat without understanding what they’re walking into.
What do you tolerate in your finance team that you know you probably shouldn’t?
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Culture risk is the one that sneaks up on you. Don’t wait for the surprise exit to take it seriously.
I’ve built a free scorecard that helps CFOs and finance leaders see where the human risks are building across all five areas. Takes less than 3 minutes. Might save you a lot more than that.
