Unlock Financial Excellence: Six Sigma Black Belt Strategies

Megan - 00:00:26: Today, my guest is William Washington, Global Chief Financial Officer for Baker McKenzie. His atypical career climb has afforded him exceptional experience outside the legal industry that he utilizes to solve institutional challenges. In addition to being a certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, he has worked annually to develop his leadership skills through education, coaching, feedback, and personal development. His financial and business acumen, together with his leadership skills and Six Sigma principles, have contributed to his effectiveness as Chief Financial Officer. His work at several global law firms has included being intimately involved in developing and leading high-performing finance and accounting teams, liaising with senior executive teams to identify and execute strategies to drive profitability and reduce operational risk, evaluating financial aspects of new business ventures, and providing input on potential mergers as well as acquisition and or disposition of key assets. In addition to his Master Black Belt, he holds a Master's in Law Firm Management, MBA, BBA, and is a Certified Manager of Quality/Organizational Excellence Excellence. William, thank you so much for being my guest on today's episode of CFO Weekly.

William - 00:02:15: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Megan - 00:02:18: Yeah, today we're going to be talking about financial leadership, process improvement, and operational efficiency, among other things. And I'm excited about the opportunity to learn about you and your experiences. So let's jump right in.

William - 00:02:31: Sounds great.

Megan - 00:02:32: Your career spans several prominent law firms and industries with a strong focus on financial leadership and Six Sigma process improvement. So can you start off by telling us just a little bit about your career and what initially drew you to the intersection of finance and law?

William - 00:02:49: Well, that's a great question, Megan, and thank you for asking it. I'm actually the son of two lawyers, so I think somehow I got here. Honestly, I just threw my upbringing at home. And I also initially majored in finance, expecting to go to law school afterwards. I was fortunate to study finance and find a great career at Accenture. And after that, Fannie Mae for several years. But when I landed back in the legal industry at my first law firm, it kind of felt like home. It kind of felt like a mix of being around my parents who were lawyers and also being around similar profile of people that I worked with at Accenture where I cut my teeth. Once I got into the law firm, I saw the career path of CFO very clearly. And I've been here about the past 14 or 15 years.

Megan - 00:03:41: What years were you at Accenture?

William - 00:03:43: I was at Accenture. Oh, you're dating me. Oh, wow.

Megan - 00:03:46: I was there too. I'm just wondering.

William - 00:03:48: Yeah, no, I'll tell you, I was there in 1999 to around 2004, 2005.

Megan - 00:03:54: Okay.

William - 00:03:55: So back when they were separating from Andersen Consulting.

Megan - 00:03:59: Yeah.

William - 00:03:59: And towards the tail end, right when they were changing to Accenture and moving to a public company.

Megan - 00:04:05: Yeah, I started with them in 2003 and was there for about 12 or 13 years.

William - 00:04:11: It was a good company. So we overlapped for like a year or two there.

Megan - 00:04:14: Yeah, we did. So looking back on your career, can you share maybe just a defining moment or experience that shaped your leadership philosophy and how you approach financial strategy today?

William - 00:04:26: Yeah, I think there are several key moments that really shaped leadership, and in particular, working underneath great leaders. I was fortunate in my career to always look up and see someone that was a great dynamic leader, whether it was the leadership at Accenture, which always had young, vibrant leaders, or the leader at Bain & May, a guy named Frank Range, who was legendary in the D.C. area. But really, what really changed my whole leadership approach was back before I became a CFO, I hired an executive coach. And I didn't really know what an executive coach did. And the one I hired kind of had a dual approach that was very business-focused, but very like yoga, like a Zen-type approach as well. And one of the things he showed me was, in order to be a good leader, you obviously have to have people that are willing to follow you, but even more importantly, you have to be authentically yourself. And I think when he walked me through those concepts and we sat and did the hard work of change, even though I had kind of a lot of leadership and work habits built in, I think that's really what, changed? My whole trajectory of being a leader. So I kind of build doing the things I learned early in my career, but I added things that are really important for leadership. And from that moment on, I almost immediately went into the C-suite and I've been here ever since

Megan - 00:05:54: And let's switch gears for a minute and talk about Six Sigma. So first of all, what inspired you to become a Six Sigma Master Black Belt? Because that's a pretty grueling process.

William - 00:06:05: Well, I'm a glut for punishment. I'm a lifelong learner. I literally always have books with me. I'm always in some class somewhere doing something. And it was interesting because I took on a role, a finance role at Fannie Mae that was with their brand new Six Sigma team. And since the team was new, the team had to train people and develop people in order to roll the program out at Fannie Mae. And so again, I'm a glutton for punishment. So I was like, well, we're doing training. I might as well sit there so I understand what I'm financially reporting on. And so I started taking some of the classes for the green belt and the yellow belt and doing some of the projects. And at the time, Fannie Mae didn't have any black belts in Lean Six Sigma. So I actually went to a junior college and started taking some classes. And then I came back and started teaching the team what I was learning at the junior college. And we just kept moving with that process until you have to test and you have to do projects and you have to do a lot of different things in order to check the box. But I will tell anyone interested that it is very complex, grueling and difficult because it's heavy in statistics and it takes a lot of work to sit for the test. But it's worth it. It's fun. I enjoyed it. Like I said, I'm a glutton for punishment.

Megan - 00:07:32: Yeah, you must be. I got my green belt and that was far enough for me.

William - 00:07:38: Sometimes I surprise myself. I can't even believe that I ever did it. I can't believe I cast it, but I love that it's inside me now. I look at it as a toolkit that I use on a day-to-day basis. It's just another opportunity to learn and grow.

Megan - 00:07:55: Yeah, well, congratulations on that. And speaking of using it on a day-to-day basis, how have you integrated it into your own theme and financial leadership?

William - 00:08:05: Well, I think if you're not going to have us, and for those who don't know, you can separate lean from Six Sigma, but a lot of people do talk about the Six Sigma, which is a combination of the two methodologies from Toyota and Motorola back in the day. And what I would say is it's a toolkit. And if you don't have a structured approach as a company to rolling it out, then you can have a unstructured approach to teaching the tools to people on your team. So every leader on my team, every person that reports to me gets some dose of William Washington's Lean Six Sigma concepts because I want them to embrace the theory of continuous improvement in everything that they do. And I think it helps their career, it helps their functions that they work in, and then it helps, their team members to have something that they can embrace in order to develop. And so for me, each area is a little bit different, but starting with understanding the basics of where is there waste in the organization. A Lean Six Sigma does a good job of laying out the types of waste that exist in an organization. And you can really take any process through that, through the eight steps of, or the eight types of waste. And once you identify a waste, then you want to go through a process for eliminating that waste or making that process area better. And I really do sound like a Six Sigma geek even when I hear myself talking. But I think it's just to oversimplify it. For me, life has always been about trying to get better, whether I was on my high school football team, just trying to earn a position on a bill, or whether it was trying to solve a Six Sigma equation in order to get my black belt. I think life is always about continuous improvement. And any tools that you have that you can incorporate in your day to help you do that, I consider a valuable tool.

Megan - 00:09:59: As you've mentioned, you've worked with several global law firms over the course of your career. So what unique financial challenges do you find that law firms face?

William - 00:10:09: Yeah, well, law firms are very unique. They are owned by the partners of the law firm. So their owners aren't shareholders who sit outside the firm. And then those same owners are the product, right? So the product isn't a car. The product is the people. Like we sell legal services to clients. We sell our knowledge to our clients. And so dealing with that balance where the product can actually talk to you, the product can actually argue with you, the product can actually become its own. Worst enemy in the sense that if they aren't fully aware of the business strategy and the goals, it's hard to get everyone rowing in the same direction unless they know what that strategy and those goals are. And so for me, I embraced that challenge. I think I learned a lot at Accenture on how to drive profits and add value. And I think lawyers go to law school and they learn a lot. They definitely are prepared to add value. It's teaching them how to understand their value proposition and get them out into the market. And for anybody out there listening who thinks, oh, my gosh, this is like this high-volume, like, technical stuff that you have to figure out, I like to tell stories to our lawyers to make it simple. And I often tell them, even the driver who drives, or those who remember ice cream trucks. An ice cream truck used to come through our neighborhood. I say, even an ice cream truck driver needs to understand their product that they're putting on their truck. And they need to understand how to be profitable so that they can continue to drive that truck. And if an ice cream truck driver oversimplifies, it can do it. Then a lawyer can do it. You just have to teach them how to think about their services as a product in the same way that the ice cream truck driver thinks about on a day-to-day basis. Because if they put the raw type of ice cream on an ice cream truck, it won't sell. They won't make money, and it'll just spoil, and they'll just lose a bunch of money. So they really have to pay attention to what the market wants and what sells. They have to price it accordingly. And they have to put the little teasers on a truck in order to get you to come in. They add a little gumball that costs 10 cents, and then you go buy that. Next thing you know, you're buying a blow pop.

Megan - 00:12:33: And supporting all those partners.

William - 00:12:35: Yeah.

Megan - 00:12:37: Support. Yeah. I remember the days of ice cream trucks. Yeah, the music coming down the street. All the kids would come running. So supporting that many partners, is it like working for many CEOs?

William - 00:12:53: I wouldn't call it many CEOs because I think that working for that many partners is like working for a lot of different bosses and understanding, really being able to listen and relate to everyone that you support. So working at a firm like Baker McKenzie, I find myself in. Germany one day and Thailand another day and Argentina another day. And one of the things I really learned during my time doing Lean Six Sigma was. Listen and understand the clients in the market. And for me, those clients may be the partners who are for me, internal clients, maybe those partners sitting in that office in Argentina. And I really take the same approach. I took the Lean Six Sigma is I try to study their market and their business before I get to their office. Then when I get there, I try to listen to them and document what I hear them saying. And then I try to test what they're saying. And I do all of that long before I open my mouth with any advice that I have for them. And I found that listening type of consultative approach to really be the thing that gets them to understand that I'm not a CFO or a leader or a finance person who's standing on shore. Watching them out there rowing the boat, hoping they can figure out how to get to where they're going. They want to believe that you're in the boat with them and that you're rowing with them and that you're adding enough value to help them move faster and swifter through the waters to get to their destination. And when you can do that as a leader, especially across multiple different business models or practice groups or lawyers, then you really start to be able to help the business as a whole to reach its goals. And that's what excites me on a day-to-day basis is the ability to look at a different problem each and every day and tackle a different problem each and every day.

Megan - 00:14:57: Yeah, keeps life interesting for sure. And your background includes driving financial performance through strategic planning and operational efficiency. So what do you believe are the most crucial metrics that CFOs should focus on to ensure financial health and growth?

William - 00:15:14: That's a great question. Wow. So first of all, one of the questions I get asked around that same concept most often is, how do you drive strategic growth in an unpredictable market? Be like, oh, we're going to have elections this year. Oh, we have a new president coming in the United States. So what's going to happen and how do you plan? And I say the truth is the future is always unpredictable. And so how do you help people get focused on the right metrics in order to drive into an unpredictable future? And for me, it's about understanding the two or three things that are most important to the business. So and I tend to walk into rooms and hear a lot of different things. People call me about 15, 20 different things that they think are the most important. And I try to get everyone focused on the two or three biggest things that drive the business and try to get agreement on what we're setting as targets for those key things. And in the law firm, it's fairly simple, right? Like I said, our resources, people, the rate we charge and how many hours those people work and the cost that we pay for those people are three of the biggest levers that we have to control. But they're not always the three biggest levers in any given year. In a market where services may be declining, our ability to turn our aim toward our ability to build and collect in the most timely fashion may be the key driver of our business. Or in a market that's growing, it may be our ability to invest in the right areas and get a return on that investment. So I think the most important thing is to understand which two or three things are most important and to be able to get everyone focused on those two or three things and to be able to tell the story about why they are important. Because I believe as a strategic leader, your biggest quality is your ability to tell stories and to get people rolling in the same direction.

Megan - 00:17:13: Yeah, I can't tell you how many times this year I've heard the role of CFO aligned with the word storyteller. It seems like that is such a crucial skill these days to know your audience and be able to tell the story of the business.

William - 00:17:31: Yeah, I'm actually one CFO who's done throwing up numbers. For all of these years, I've seen people go into Excel, copy and paste five different columns and 10 different rows and paste them into a PowerPoint. And think that it tells a story. And often I'll challenge my team. I'll say, what's the story you're trying to tell by putting that chart up there? And they'll say, look at line four. You'll see that our technology costs are going up. I'll say, then why don't you just put up on the screen technology costs are going up and we need to address them. Okay. Instead of throwing that graph, if you want them to see it, then show them what you want them to see instead of throwing a lot of different things up there and hoping everyone comes away with the same takeaway. It's two different ways to get to the same answer, but I do believe too often we try to overwhelm people with the numbers and in order to, with the goal of having transparency and detail and showing that we know what we know. Well, guess what? We know what we know. You need to focus on technology costs or whatever may be the issue of today.

Megan - 00:18:44: And throughout your career, you've been heavily involved in evaluating financial aspects of new business ventures and potential mergers. So what is your approach to conducting due diligence in these situations? And how do you go about assessing risk and opportunity?

William - 00:19:00: I think the going back to my Lean Six Sigma days, the biggest thing that I've always carried with me is the mantra of trust, but thereby. And having a healthy dose of skepticism while also having a healthy dose of optimism. Because I think whenever people enter into any type of merger or combination, I think both sides are looking for some type of win situation. And no one has a crystal ball. No one. Obviously, experience matters. People who have been through that experience multiple times kind of know where to look. And you want to. Make sure you have enough experience or as my wife often says, enough gray hair in a row. I satisfy that obligation all by myself. And then you want to take that experience and go through the process of trusting, but verify. And nothing should ever feel urgent or rushed because that's how you find yourself with a situation that's in distress that you have to get back out of. So I don't know for myself. I think the analysis is fair. It's really simple. I think most business models. Even though they're complex, can be broken down into simple components. And then I think when you get the right people at the right table with the right goals, you can see where your goals align and end up making the right decision. And expect to make mistakes or I shouldn't call them a mistake. Expect to have everything, every project that you take on that be a success as part of the analysis.

Megan - 00:20:37: Yeah. Like, how do you make it okay for your team to fail, to maybe not be perfect and feel okay about that?

William - 00:20:45: Yeah, I think it goes back to that authentic leadership that we talked about early on. There's one thing, I mean, this might be the most important part of our conversation. Because I spent the majority of my career feeling like it wasn't okay to fail. And I think a lot of that was the tone set by leadership. When in essence, there are times where failure is okay. And I think that we've all failed in some sense. And as a leader, my first thing to my team is to show them that it's okay to fail by leading by example, right? By opening up to them about areas of failure, whether it's small projects, big projects, times that failed in the past, times that failed today. I think once you start the conversation going, then the rest of the team will see it's okay and that they'll respond accordingly. And I think the message around failure isn't that you want people failing because they didn't take the right steps or they were incapable or incompetent. I think the message of failure is I want my hard driving, smart, successful, ambitious team members to have enough energy and belief and confidence to go forward with their ideas that will get the successes in the midst of the failures, which is a lot different than having a group of incompetent, incapable people who take shortcuts and fail because of their shortcuts and they taint the business. That's a different concept. My goal is always to empower people to bring their best selves to work, to bring their best ideas to work and to feel empowered and have enough autonomy to go forward with those ideas and not feeling like William's going to come back and somehow admonish them because they tried. Trying is not failure. Trying is success. And everybody benefits when everyone feels that same empowerment to try. If you don't have good people or you have incompetent people who take shortcuts, you should give them a pathway out of the group anyway. And you wouldn't even have that risk.

Megan - 00:22:55: Very well said. And as a certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, how do you apply Six Sigma methodologies to financial operations? And can you maybe share a particular project where you did this?

William - 00:23:09: Yeah, I think that it applies to everyday routine tasks as well as big projects. And I think the areas where it shows up the easiest to see has been the big projects. So I've taken on several big projects during my career in legal or when I've been a CFO, some of the biggest included, like not just replacing the technology we use, like our budget tool, but. How to replace it while also making it more efficient, doing it in less time, getting everyone to buy in. And I've found that using the Lean Six Sigma tools, like, I'm forgetting, I'm blanking on the name, of Kaizen events, where we do these speed iterations and make changes in each of our Kaizen events while getting the ideas of each of the teammates. Being able to teach a small concept like that then executing it in the midst of a project helped us deliver one of our budget tools that someone that projected would take 18 months, we were able to deliver it in six months on time, under budget, with no limit, little to no defects in our implementation because we were able to use some of the Lean Six Sigma concepts, particularly around process improvement or product development and just combining the concepts that we were able to use. And I'm the type of person where I know it's coming, so I'll hand the team, I'll find some small book on, like Kaizen's, and roll that book out to the team and hope that everyone reads it. But if they don't, it just makes it that much harder to get up to speed. And then we'll read the book over a couple of weeks and then we'll start to utilize the concepts right away. And everybody doesn't get up a black belt or a green belt or a yellow belt, but they get the tools in order to continue to improve processes, which I think is most important.

Megan - 00:25:09: And you've touched on this a bit, but as someone who's deeply involved in leadership and organizational excellence, how is it that you foster a culture of financial discipline, not only within your own team, but really across all departments in a global organization?

William - 00:25:25: I think you have to be able to explain the why, right? I think that just telling people they need to tighten their belts or reduce costs or operate more efficient, isn't enough. It'll work in one, like one-time instances, or when you're just hiring somebody and you got to give them a mandate, but to get a whole team rowing in the same direction, they have to understand the why. And the why is something that you don't give out one time. You continually bake it into every conversation and every meeting that you have. And so to give you an example, in our law firm, we said we wanted to grow here as a law firm. We're a $3.5 billion law firm. We want to grow to $4.5 billion or $5 billion. What does that mean for people on a day-to-day basis? And what I created was for the team to get everyone to understand is what we call our growth-based budgeting scorecard. And it's called a budgeting scorecard, but it's really a scorecard that you can look at on any given day. And it really just has the five key levers that are important for us to drive the business forward. And if you understand those five key levers, and you can see very clearly on one page where you currently fit on those five key levers and which two or three are most important for you to execute and pull at this given point in your juncture, I think really helped us to have a common communication tool and to get everyone in the firm, whether you sit in finance, marketing, HR, whether you're a lawyer, a partner on the executive committee, everyone can look at that same one-page document and know how we're performing against the key things that are important for the business and what can we change in order to help drive us forward.

Megan - 00:27:20: And let's switch gears for just a bit and talk about technology. So obviously, AI is the hot topic of the day. How do you see technology and maybe specifically AI and generative AI changing the role of the CFO and the role of finance in general?

William - 00:27:42: Yeah, I think it's going to dramatically change it. And I think we all see it coming. No, again, none of us have a crystal ball. To know exactly what it will do, but... Similar to the iPhone and other major changes, I think we'll all look back on today's time and be amazed at some of the things we used to do before AI. So there'll be a light before AI and a light after AI. And although I don't have a crystal ball, I can definitely say there's two things that are super important. I want to be one of the leaders who embraces life after AI, which means I have to first lead by example. And I've done that by setting up a committee within finance to look at what AI means for us as a team. I've also done it by I recently enrolled in a six-month class at Wharton that, like I told you, I'm a glutton for punishment, where it's a class designed for C-suite executives who want to have a game plan for how AI will roll out in their organization. And again, just leading by example, that shows my team that I'm willing to take four to eight hours a week of my own personal time and dedicate it to growing, even at my advanced stage of my career. And I expect the same from others who want to grow in this field. In terms of just how we do finance. I think for so long, we've been trying to professionalize the profession and get people away from doing the task-oriented grunt stuff and get them to the higher level thinking of analysis and work. And I think that AI is going to facilitate a lot of that value that buying professionals bring while automating some of the simple tasks. But you'll never get rid of the human element of interpreting or analyzing the results of what AI will hopefully produce in the future.

Megan - 00:29:41: And looking back at your career, what advice would you give to someone in the early stages of their own career who aspires to take on a senior financial leadership role in a global organization? What experiences and skills should they be focusing on?

William - 00:29:57: Well, you probably heard it through most of my conversation here. And if you've ever been around me, I'm constantly talking to young people and professionals that they should obviously be lifelong career learners. I think today young people have the benefit of clearly being able to see other people who are more advanced in their careers. They have LinkedIn available to them. And I highly recommend anyone that's listening to this connect with me on LinkedIn. They can see the full resume and background of people that have gone before them. And they can do research through Google or other things in order to understand the steps that others that came before them have taken. But I do think one of the key things when you look up or to your left and right, one of the things that can make young professionals more competitive is to find a way to continue to grow and add value. No leader will ever resent someone on their team who's getting smarter every day and who's getting better at their job every day. I think those people will stick out and advance in their career ladder. We're great. And those who don't.

Megan - 00:31:08: Totally agree with that. As a lifelong learner myself, it's such a crucial skill these days to just keep changing. Everything else is changing. And then you need to change as well.

William - 00:31:18: Yeah. Well, if they're listening to this podcast, then we're probably preaching to their boy, right

Megan - 00:31:23: That's right. William, thank you so much for being my guest today.

William - 00:31:27: Thank you for having me. I always enjoy talking shop and I always enjoy giving back to the next generation of leaders.

Megan - 00:31:34: I really enjoyed speaking with you. And thanks for finding the time to be here with us today to share your experience and knowledge. And I wish you all the best. And to our listeners, please tune in next week. And until then, take care. Thank you for listening to this episode of CFO Weekly. We hope you picked up some useful insights and strategies to help move your business forward. If you enjoyed the conversation, be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode. And if you found it valuable, we'd love for you to leave a review and share it with your network. It helps us bring even more great content to finance leaders like you. For more episodes, resources, and to see how Personiv can support your accounting and finance needs, visit personiv.com. See you next week.