Most Important Skills for a Director of Finance at Paramount
Tim, a Director of Finance at Paramount, emphasizes the importance of high emotional intelligence ("EQ") to influence executive decision-makers, complementing strong financial modeling skills. This, combined with "thinking outside the box" and a willingness to innovate, are key attributes for success in their role.
Financial Modeling, Emotional Intelligence, Strategic Thinking, Influencing Skills, Executive Communication
Advizer Information
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Job Title
Company
Undergrad
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Tim Gardner
Director of Finance
Paramount
University of Scranton 2008
UCLA EMBA Class of 2023
Finance
Arts, Entertainment & Media
Finance
Video Highlights
1. High emotional intelligence (EQ) to effectively interact with and influence decision-makers.
2. Strong financial modeling skills to create complex models and forecasts.
3. Creative thinking and willingness to take risks to improve processes.
Transcript
What skills are most important for a job like yours?
The thing I'm always very interested in seeing within finance, and particularly, is that you really do need a high EQ. A higher level of emotional intelligence is necessary so that you're able to interact and influence decision-makers, especially the executives, right? The highest level individuals on the operations end.
Your EQ helps to influence the people who are making the decisions, and that's going to be backed by your knowledge, your finance knowledge in this case. So that's an important skill, if you would call it that, just having that level of higher EQ. You'd be surprised that many people don't. People have a higher IQ, sometimes when they reach higher levels, but lack EQ. There is training that tries to cover that.
Another one is just strong financial modeling skills. That's going to be a given, so being able to create complex models to forecast revenue by, in my case, by set light packaging, by contracted deals with productions, things like that.
And then another skill is just thinking outside the box, just being able to create something that's new and to take a risk, to try to make a process better.