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

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

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam: (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...