The Skills You Need for a New Era of Finance.

• Author: Morrill, Christopher P.
• Position: FROM THE CEO

On the surface, public finance is about numbers--making sure that journal entries balance, creating forecasts, calculating anticipated tax revenue, monitoring spending against the budget, investing excess funds, preparing a fiscal impact analysis analyzing a new capital project ... But while finance officers will always need to be able to understand and explain the numbers, public finance is really about people. To be successful, a finance officer must be able to communicate, build relationships, lead teams, navigate uncertain situations, and adapt to an ever-changing world. Recent changes--some brought on by the pandemic and others caused by much larger changes to the environment in which we operate--threatens "the way that we've always done it" but provides opportunities to provide better services and build a more thriving community.

I believe that the public finance profession is at a critical juncture. It's easy to be optimistic about the opportunities that are in sight, and the innovations they might bring, but we must also be realistic about two major threats to our profession. Local governments face workforce shortages and serious challenges in recruiting and retaining qualified staff, challenges that many of us haven't seen in our entire careers. And the extreme level of political polarization at all levels of government is another risk we can't ignore.

At GFOA, our mission is to help you to meet the challenges you face in your own communities, and to do that, we must provide tools not just in the technical areas of finance, but also to solve problems that I describe with the acronym "VUCA"--volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Many of these situations require the leadership capacity to foster strong relationships, build partnerships, and work through disagreements, all while remaining true to our core values and ethical principles. One person can't do this alone, of course, which is why governments and the communities they serve are stronger when their finance officer is able to take on a collaborative leadership role.

We believe in working together, and over the past two years, we've been building partnerships with our peer...