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A best-in-class CFO is a value-creating enterprise leader who combines rigorous financial stewardship with strong capital allocation, strategic judgment, and operational insight. They build trust with investors, the board, and management through credible communication, disciplined controls, and the ability to turn strategy into sustainable performance, resilience, and long-term shareholder value.
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Strong financial leadership can be the difference between steady value creation and avoidable loss. The CFO role is no longer confined to controls and reporting; it increasingly shapes strategic choices, technology implementation, operational resilience, and ultimately market outcomes—often with visible impact on market performance. That market sensitivity is precisely why getting the CFO profile right has become a board-level priority.
At Russell Reynolds Associates, we have observed this evolution firsthand through our search and leadership advisory work and shifting client expectations. To deepen our understanding of how this key role is evolving, we analyzed the Hogan psychometric test scores of 58 best-in-class (BIC) CFOs¹. We then paired this analysis with a detailed review of 289 CFO job specifications2 from 2016 to 2025 across leading globally complex public companies to determine how the role has evolved and the skills, capabilities, and psychometric characteristics have evolved with it. This article explores:
How the CFO role has evolved from financial steward to strategic orchestrator
How required experiences and skills have shifted from accounting oversight to digital finance leadership
The psychometric characteristics that distinguish BIC CFOs
Our longitudinal analysis of job specifications from 2016 to 2025 reveals a steady broadening of the CFO role, with expectations expanding beyond traditional financial management to include strategic, analytical, and cross-functional leadership.
The evolution is progressive, rather than abrupt. Each year reflects incremental expansion of scope, occurring alongside accelerating digital transformation, more data-driven decision-making, heightened economic uncertainty and post-pandemic operating models. CFO responsibilities increasingly encompassed digital enablement, agility, stakeholder management, and cultural stewardship.
Over the past decade, the CFO mandate has shifted from stewardship to strategic orchestrator - implementing tailored strategies and facilitating improvements. While financial discipline remains table stakes, transformation, operating model change, performance acceleration, and capital allocation now share equal weight. Today’s CFO is expected not only to safeguard value, but to shape it.
This shift comes with a dependency, as the CFO’s remit moves towards strategy, the foundational disciplines that once defined the role, controllership, reporting integrity, and treasury can’t be ignored. These areas of expertise must be owned and owned well, by a strong supporting bench. The orchestrator or value creation model only works when a capable controller and finance leadership team cover the fundamentals flawlessly, freeing the CFO to operate strategically above them.
As the CFO mandate expanded, the required skills and competencies shifted in parallel.
As part of our job specification analysis, we conducted a unique count search across the documents looking for traditional CFO skills (including accounting, controls and audit), as well as future-focused skills (such as technology, data, transformation, analytics, AI and digital acumen).
The outcome is a marked rise in references to technology and digitalization, juxtaposed against a steady yet still dominant focus on traditional accounting practices.
For CEOs and boards, the message is unequivocal: there is a fundamental change in how companies are redefining the CFO role. Companies are now navigating a landscape in which digital fluency is no longer optional but integral to the finance function’s strategic mandate.
In the face of the CFO role’s marked expansion over the past decade—spanning skills, experience, and responsibilities—RRA also sought to understand the psychometric characteristics associated with BIC performance. Analyzing our assessment data, we identified 58 high-performing CFOs and benchmarked their psychometric results against Russell Reynolds Associates’ broader population of senior executives (Figure 1).
Three traits emerged as statistically significant differentiators of BIC CFOs: Energy & drive, continuous learning, and a practical orientation.
Figure 1: Psychometric characteristics exhibited by BIC CFOs
Source: Russell Reynolds Associates proprietary analysis of Hogan psychometric data. N = 58 high-performing CFOs, n = 6,644 senior executives. Figure uses mean scores across samples of CFOs and focuses on differences that are statistically significant.
From 2016 to 2025, the CFO role has moved from strategic partner and value creator as an aspiration to an expectation. In the early years, the terms start to appear as mostly supporting language. From 2020 onward, it is paired with explicit ownership: value creation, transformation, technology, performance and outcomes. What separates today’s BIC CFOs is their ability to orchestrate performance across the enterprise: aligning capital allocation, transformation, data, talent, and operating resilience into a coherent system that produces better, faster, and more predictable outcomes.
Right now, having a BIC CFO is a confidence signal to the board, investors, and the broader executive team.
As organizations are faced with growing pressure to communicate amid uncertainty around performance, outlook, and fast-moving issues like tariffs and AI, increasing demand for CFOs who can articulate the path forward in high-stakes forums they are turning to experienced hires to deliver. RRA’s Global CFO Turnover Index highlights that experienced CFOs represented 43% of global appointments, the highest share in seven years.
Given the supply and demand challenges when recruiting experienced CFOs, organizations need to recognize the benefits of defining a BIC CFO profile for the business’ needs. Both the incumbent CFO and the next generation of finance talent should be measured against this evolving profile.
BIC CFOs pair intense ambition and learning agility with grounded, reality-check judgment—the combination needed to convert transformation from a narrative into measurable results.
To boards, CEOs and CHROs, pressure-test the following:
Before evaluating the current CFO, align Board members on what the role demands now. Many sitting board members were appointed when the 2016 archetype of control, reporting and compliance was the standard. There is a real risk that today’s CFOs are being measured against an outdated archetype.
Pending alignment with the board, evaluate the incumbent CFO against current and future business demands. If the organization needs a step-change in transformation, performance, or external communication under uncertainty, be explicit about whether the current CFO can deliver it. Assess specifically for the traits that distinguish BIC performers: the ambition to drive outcomes under pressure, the learning agility to stay ahead of a modernizing function, and the grounded judgment to turn bold bets into disciplined plans. If not, act decisively: accelerate development or implement mentorship where the gap is fixable, going external where the mandate requires a different level of experience and impact.
Understanding the psychometric, experiential and competency differences that set BIC CFOs apart, helps CEOs, boards and HR leaders better understand the CFO population, sheds light on the environments and circumstances CFOs are most and least drawn to, and can inform development and coaching and more effective retention efforts.
Do not wait until succession becomes urgent. Assess your finance leadership bench now for the experiences, competencies and psychometric characteristics that not only set BIC apart in the current market, but in the future one: ambition, learning agility, judgment, enterprise thinking, transformation leadership, data and technology fluency, and the ability to articulate a credible path forward to boards and investors. Development priorities should focus on building leaders who can convert ambition and learning agility into measurable outcomes, not simply deliver functional excellence.
With experienced CFOs accounting for a growing share of appointments and demand rising, succession risk is increasing. Organizations should build a 3–5 year CFO succession plan that includes both rigorous internal assessment, external benchmarking and development plans. If there is no credible successor today, that is not a future issue — it is a current exposure. The goal is a seamless transition, not a reactive replacement.
The organizations that outperform will be those that build—and sustain—a BIC CFO capability through deliberate selection and succession.
1 A panel of RRA experts reviewed a list of CFOs who were assessed by RRA and determined if they matched the BIC description. Cases where the panel was in agreement were considered BIC.
2 A job specification is a detailed role mandate developed for each CFO search, built in partnership with our clients and continuously refined through lessons learned across hundreds of engagements.
Ben Jones leads Russell Reynolds Associates’ Financial Officers capability in EMEA and our UK Board & CEO practice. He is based in London.
Jim Lawson leads Russell Reynolds Associates’ Financial Officers capability Globally. He is based in New York.
Mohammed Khan is a member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Financial Officers capability. He is based in London.
Randy Octuck is a member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ Assessment, Culture and Development knowledge team. He is based in Portland.
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