Ep. 104: Ed Lam - Building a Continuous Improvement Culture

Contact Ed Lam:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/edward-lam-9b97258/


FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTAdam: (00:05)
 Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things
affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm your host, Adam
Larson, and this is episode 104 of our series. Today's
conversation features Ed Lam, the Chief Accounting Officer at
Exeter Finance. Ed is an accounting and finance professional who
has seen many changes to the profession over the years. In this
episode, he talks with Mitch about his thoughts on the future of
work and how he envisions the role of the finance leader,
evolving even more. From change management and continuous
improvement to leadership and organizational culture development,
Ed offers great perspective on what is needed to gain buy-in and
succeed. Keep listening as we head over to the conversation
now.

Mitch: (00:55)
So Ed to the kick off this conversation, can you tell us a little
bit about how your job has changed in the last three to five
years and then taking it a step further? You know, what do you
anticipate kind of happening even more in the next three to five
years for the future of work?

Ed: (01:09)
Yeah. you know, I'll basically, define the last three to five
years in three phases. It's basically a stabilized standardized
and optimized. So when I first came in, I think we had a,
basically an under-resourced accounting group, without the right
technology and, you know, basically, inconsistent processing. So
the first two years was just looking under rocks and finding and
identifying and addressing any risks and any, any errors in our
process. So it took a little while, a lot of hard work, but I
think we were always looking to kind of develop a stable and
repeatable process and that just has to be built, over, over
time. And, as a transition from fighting fires into having more
reliable processes. So that was basically about year three
heading into year four. But then starting, back in early 2019, we
started to look for the opportunities to start optimizing
processes and bringing on new technologies. So, you know, I think
the optimized stage has been the most fun, just because you start
seeing a lot more buy-in from the organization now that we built
the trust and credibility, we need to basically, stack on,
improvements in how we do things. So that's the, you know, for
the last five years, just an evolution, it's been ongoing. We
still have a ways to go, but we can definitely see the
opportunities from there. So when we talk about the future, the
next three to five years, I'd say over the coming years, my role,
in directly managing my operations is going to continue to
diminish actually. And that's the due to the strength of my staff
and having efficient processes in place. So, you know, the focus
then she has really a way from day to do day to day doing and
managing, and just really a lot more on those continuous coaching
and development. I've had to learn to embrace that a little bit,
because it's a different aspect of being a hands-on manager. But
it's actually a little more meaningful than, what I started
doing, which was basically, giving bad news to my CFO whenever we
found a mistake.

Mitch: (03:32)
That's really interesting. you know, you talked about optimizing
and some of the changes to your role, obviously expectations of
you the organization in general, but how have you been able to
kind of change your management skills? Like you were just kind of
talking about, but in a way so that everybody you're working with
understands what the necessary changes are for the organization
to truly optimize its processes and move forward?

Ed: (03:56)
Yeah, I think changing the management skills comes down to, you
know, you go from, individual contributor skills, you know, and
just being a subject matter expert in areas and basically telling
people, you know, what the right answer is to basically focusing
more on, encouraging communication and collaboration, and
specifically outside of the department, because that's been a
shift, you start off early on just looking inward and saying
like, how can we, ensure that we put out a good product for our
customers? But once you've done that, then basically the
collaboration is a means of allowing you to influence the larger
organization. So it does take a lot of time to build, those
strong relationships with other groups, and that has to be
encouraged. It's not just me talking to my counterparts and other
divisions, but it's encouraging, all of the staff that part of
the role is to not just give output to other groups, but to also
communicate and understand, you know, why they need the things
that they asked for. So, you know, again, taking the time to
increase collaboration, encouraging that within, my org, and then
supporting it and staying engaged with any change management
initiatives. I mean, it's a way of basically, you know,
evangelizing for transformation, right? So, you know, we're
actually lucky to have a change governance committee at Exeter
and that's something we can engage in where, anytime there's a
change that impacts more than one division, it does need to get
brought up through an intake process with change governance. So
we stayed very engaged in that group, and it does involve
executives and that's pretty important as well. So, you know, a
lot of, how, I changed my management skills is just taking, any
of those intake forms that has the potential for impacting my
group or other groups that are aligned or adjacent to mine, and
basically sharing that information in a meaningful way.

Mitch: (06:02)
That's great. I know any, conversation that we've had around the
future of work and the changing profession, the word influence
always comes up. So for you to bring that up again, you know,
it's, it's right on target with what we're hearing, but I really
liked the encouraging communication collaboration. That's
something that I think will really stick, and truly shows the
shift right, in the roles of the profession, the individual, is
no longer just that contributor, like you said. So I think, some
people who are maybe not as familiar with some of these changes,
you know, they might have a little difficulty straying from the
traditional, you know, finance and accounting work. And then the
day to day that you were talking about the management style, how
do you go about getting the buy-in from these different
stakeholders in your department or these cross-functional teams
across the organization that you're working with? What role do
you get the team, you know, how do you get your team to really
buy into this kind of new initiative?

Ed: (06:59)
Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. And, you know, one thing
that you hear a lot of success begets more success, right? So, I
think part of this is just attacking incremental improvements
early on, and they can be very, very incremental. They could be
small improvements, but you celebrate those accomplishments, and
then also behind that consistently discussing what's next on our
roadmap. We're gonna discuss roadmap from a little bit, but just
the possibilities, and then periodically visioning kind of like
the optimal state. So, let me give you an example. when I first
started with Exter, our close process took more than seven days,
and sometimes just to address like an issue or, you know,
something that was broken, it could be up to 10 days to close the
books. So, you know, with some of the technology that we've
introduced, including a new general ledger and an account, sorry,
loan sub-ledger, with a lot of the process improvements we put in
place, including a close checklist and some management workflow,
and the, obviously a lot of staff development we've been able to
bring the accounting close down to...