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By Steve Saah, Executive Director of Finance and Accounting Permanent Placement, Robert Half
When evaluating your finance and accounting talent bench to identify future leaders, it’s natural to focus on employee performance. Who handled pressure well during close, audit, tax, reporting or planning cycles? Who demonstrated strong technical skills or volunteered ideas to improve efficiency? Who stepped up to coach less-seasoned colleagues or maintain communication with auditors, business partners or senior leaders?
The answers to those questions can help reveal which employees have the skills and qualities to guide projects, support teams or eventually transition into a senior management role. But what about willingness? Even if a team member seems like a clear candidate for your organization’s succession plan, that doesn’t mean they want to pursue that path.
Unless you’re having career conversations with employees regularly, you can’t know how they want to grow professionally. Without the insight you can gain from these discussions, you could end up spending valuable time and resources preparing a top performer for a leadership move they don’t actually want. That employee may also feel pressure to follow the leadership track, believing it’s the only way to grow within the finance organization. This can lead to frustration, disengagement or the loss of a talented team member who might have stayed for the long term if they’d been offered a different opportunity.
It can also leave the organization with a succession plan that looks stronger on paper than it is in practice. If leaders don’t know who wants to lead, who wants to grow and add value in other ways and who may need a different kind of opportunity, they risk investing professional development time in the wrong assumptions. That’s why finance and accounting succession planning should reflect not only performance and readiness, but also employees’ interests, motivations and long-term career goals.
Get insight into succession and pipeline planning trends for the second half of 2026 in Robert Half’s Demand for Skilled Talent report.
Finance succession planning through career conversations
Don’t assume high performers share your vision for their future
In many finance and accounting departments, high performance has long been associated with upward movement: staff accountant to senior accountant, senior accountant to accounting manager, accounting manager to controller or finance manager to director of finance. These traditional transitions still matter—and appeal to many professionals—but they aren’t necessarily the best paths for every high-potential employee.
A technically strong senior accountant may enjoy complex reconciliations, reporting or technical accounting work but have little interest in managing a team. A manager may excel at communicating with business partners but feel unsure about taking on broader people leadership, strategic planning or executive communication responsibilities. Another top performer may not aspire to become a senior executive but could still play a valuable role in helping the finance organization improve workflows, evaluate technology or create a more consistent reporting and planning experience for the business.
Creating space for more than one kind of growth can make finance and accounting succession planning more realistic. While your organization needs to invest in developing future leaders, you also need to develop the specialists and contributors who strengthen the finance function in other ways, including technical accounting specialists, FP&A experts, internal controls contributors, systems-minded professionals, process improvement leaders, trainers, mentors and employees who can help teams use automation, data and AI-enabled tools for finance more effectively.
These roles may not always follow a traditional ladder, but they can still support reporting quality, operational efficiency, business partnership and employee retention. For accounting firms and corporate finance teams alike, employee retention often depends on whether high performers can see meaningful growth opportunities that align with their strengths and ambitions. They also help protect against a common succession planning risk: pushing people toward roles that don’t align with their strengths or interests simply because the organization hasn’t created other meaningful options.
When high performers can see a future on the finance team that reflects their strengths and ambitions, they may be more likely to stay engaged and keep building value. And when someone does want to take the leadership track, finance and accounting leaders can invest in that path with greater confidence because they know the employee is both capable and interested.
Ask open-ended questions that encourage employees to share what motivates them
Many finance and accounting leaders schedule career conversations during performance review season to outline development goals for the year ahead and identify leadership candidates. However, a once-a-year discussion won’t help you gauge how an employee’s goals may be evolving. People’s career aspirations and priorities can change for many reasons—including taking on new job responsibilities, starting a family, developing new professional or personal interests or even facing burnout.
Regular career conversations with employees give you a better way to understand what kind of work people want to do, how they define growth and what support will help them stay motivated and engaged. These conversations don’t need to be overly formal. In fact, they’re often most useful when they’re direct, practical and part of the normal rhythm of managing your team.
Rather than treating career conversations as a once-a-year planning exercise, finance leaders should build them into the normal cadence of management so they can spot changes in motivation before they affect retention, development investments or succession plans.
During these 1:1 discussions, consider asking your employees questions such as:
What type of work energizes you most?
What responsibilities would you like to take on more often?Are there parts of your current role you would rather move away from over time?How do you feel about managing people?Do you see yourself pursuing a finance leadership role?
What kind of support would help you explore that path?Are there other ways you would like to grow within the finance organization?
Avoid framing career conversations as a test. Employees may be hesitant to say they don’t want a traditional leadership role if they worry it will limit their future with the company. Managers need to make clear that there are multiple ways to contribute, grow and pursue meaningful professional development. That message can make it easier for employees to be honest about what they want from their careers and help managers invest professional development time where it is most likely to benefit the employee and the organization.
Succession planning isn’t just for large organizations. Learn how small and midsize firms can benefit from prioritizing this practice.
Connect aspiration with professional development planning
Understanding what employees want lays the foundation for more targeted professional development/ It also helps you avoid treating finance and accounting succession planning as a purely internal exercise in staffing future roles, rather than a shared conversation about where the organization’s needs and employees’ ambitions intersect.
If a high-potential employee does want to pursue a management or senior finance leadership role, career conversations can help identify the experiences they need next. That might include owning part of the close process, leading a reporting initiative, coaching staff, presenting financial analysis, supporting a budgeting or forecasting cycle, working with auditors or gaining exposure to finance operations and systems.
If the employee doesn’t want to take that road in the organization, the conversation should shift to how their strengths can create value in other ways. For example: A professional who enjoys technical work may be able to deepen expertise in a complex accounting, tax, reporting or compliance area. Someone with strong business instincts may be able to support FP&A, planning conversations or cross-functional decision-making without managing a large team. Another employee may be well-suited to training responsibilities, quality control, process improvement or helping the finance team evaluate and adopt new technology.
Those paths can benefit the organization as much as they benefit the employee. They can help preserve institutional knowledge, improve processes, support staff development, strengthen business partnerships and more. Importantly, they also give high performers a reason to stay and grow without feeling pushed toward a role that doesn’t align with their interests.
Career conversations also give finance leaders a more accurate view of the leadership pipeline. If an organization assumes a top performer is on track for a controller, director or C-level role but that person has little or no interest in taking that step, the succession plan may be weaker than it appears. Knowing that earlier gives leaders time to adjust development plans, identify other potential successors or consider outside hiring where needed.
Succession planning is only as strong as the assumptions behind it. Career conversations can offer real insight into who wants to lead, and who wants to grow professionally in other value-adding ways. That insight can help you build a succession strategy that considers both performance and aspiration and give you more confidence the employees you’re preparing for the next step aren’t just capable, but also genuinely interested in taking it.
Need to hire permanent or contract talent for your finance and accounting organization? Contact Robert Half.
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