Working as a CFO When Your Personality Doesn't Fit the Box

As an accounting graduate with strong academic results and no clear idea of which direction to head, I applied for just about every graduate program going. The recruitment process was a lot. Applications, phone interviews, in-person interviews, panel interviews, group workshops. Then came the personality assessments. And then the letters. "We regret to inform you..."

No feedback, ever. Except for one time, when an HR manager actually called me back. She said, "Don't take it personally. This isn't for you. You'd be bored within a few months." I insisted I wouldn't be. I was wrong, but that's beside the point.

Over the years I've done countless assessments. For work, for curiosity, occasionally just for fun. Different models, different language, but they all have the same basic idea of what an accountant should look like: high attention to detail, cautious, precise, present-focused. The box I kept landing in was the opposite. Flexible, innovative, future-focused, creative. The box that was generally associated with artists and designers.

I stopped thinking about it and got on with my career. Tried a few run-of-the-mill accounting jobs. Was bored. Eventually found my way into a tech start-up that went through massive growth, redundancies, more investment, more redundancies, acquisitions, divestments. It was fast-paced. It was chaos. It was genuinely fun.

Years later, now a CFO, an HR manager I worked with wanted to introduce personality assessments and explore team dynamics. Here we go again, I thought. Maybe after decades of being good at my job, I'd finally shifted into the accountant box.

She came to me one morning and said, "Your results are in. They're... not what I expected." She looked confused. And a little scared to deliver the news. I laughed and told her not to look so worried, I already knew I didn't fit the box. The relief on her face was something.

We had a formal session with an organisational psychologist who went through everything in detail. And for the first time in my career, I stopped feeling confused about it, or quietly bothered by it. The org psych explained that a CFO who doesn't sit in the accounting box brings something genuinely rare to a CEO partnership and senior leadership team. Strategic outlook, big picture thinking, the ability to pivot quickly, ideas that come from a different angle. Most CFOs sit firmly in the accounting box, which makes them excellent accountants. It doesn't automatically make them excellent CFOs.

At Compono, my type is the Pioneer. Doing things differently is the whole point of it. It's not the Auditor. It's not the Doer. It took me a long time to understand that, but once I did, I stopped fighting it.

I've come to understand my personality type well enough to use it deliberately. In how I advise my CEO, how I work with a leadership team, how I present to a board. The things that made me a poor fit for a graduate program at a large corporate are the same things that make me well-suited to a start-up or a company in serious growth mode. I like coming in early, influencing the journey, and growing with the business. A large, stable company where everything is already built would probably bore me senseless. That HR manager from my graduate days was right, I just needed a few decades to admit it.

If there's anything I'd pass on from all of this: understand your personality type. Don't spend energy trying to squeeze it into the box you think it should fit. The box is rarely as fixed as it looks. And the people who don't fit it are often the ones worth paying attention to.

Amy Larfield is the CFO at Compono, an Australian people and culture platform that combines hiring, culture, and learning with people insight.