Conventional wisdom is to challenge the business, and make recommendations.
Here are the 3 biggest finance business partner myths that hold back our relationships and influence:
The easiest way to create resistance and damage your relationship is to criticise someone - especially by email! Your chances of influencing them have just crashed.
The best way to make a sales, marketing, or operations person defensive is to challenge their ideas. Instead we want to coach & sell the benefits of doing things differently.
Recommendations also create resistance - especially recommendations from finance to non-finance. Better to explore options and scenarios.
We have all been senior finance leaders, where we subscribed to the conventional wisdom.
Then we moved outside of finance, had finance partnering us, and realised that this advice and thinking is not helpful.