Biggest Challenges Faced By An Associate Finance Manager At Lockheed Martin
Chris, an Associate Finance Manager at Lockheed Martin, finds the biggest challenge is "making Finance easy and applicable" for the engineers, requiring Chris to build tools and provide guidance to improve financial literacy. This involves overcoming resistance from high-level personnel who "think they know how the world works" and empowering engineers to be more self-sufficient, thus shifting from constant requests for help to a more sustainable support model.
Communication, Problem-Solving, Leadership, Financial Literacy, Mentorship
Advizer Information
Name
Job Title
Company
Undergrad
Grad Programs
Majors
Industries
Job Functions
Traits
Chris Seifert
Associate Finance Manager
Lockheed Martin
CU Boulder
UCLA - MBA
Business Management & Admin
Aerospace, Aviation & Defense
Finance
Scholarship Recipient
Video Highlights
1. Helping engineers and leadership understand and utilize financial tools and processes effectively.
2. Bridging the communication gap between finance professionals and non-finance professionals (engineers in this case).
3. Creating self-service resources and tools to empower engineers to manage their finances independently, reducing the need for constant assistance from the finance team
Transcript
What is your biggest challenge in your current role?
I would say it's making Finance easy and applicable for all of the engineers and their leadership teams that we support. We're often dealing with very high-level people, so they think they know how the world works and what our finance practices are at Lockheed.
Sometimes it can be challenging to sway them or make them change their minds on different things. In addition to that, we're dealing with engineers who don't have a finance background.
So, it's really about trying to build tools that can help them understand the financials better. If they need guidance on how to charge their time, we want to give them the tools and thought processes to help themselves rather than having to reach out to us all the time.
That's been a difficulty in the past years. We just get people reaching out to us all the time asking for help on every little thing. So, we need to focus on teaching them to fish, I guess.