King's College London

 

Ask most senior leaders outside finance what holds them back in the boardroom, and they will point to the same thing: the numbers.

Financial statements often feel like someone else's territory. The CFO speaks the language naturally; everyone else improvises. Think of the lawyer handed a set of management accounts before a board meeting or the senior manager presenting to a finance committee. The instinct in these situations is to either nod quietly and pretend to know what the CFO is talking about or reach for technical training in order to decode the balance sheet.

But what if the real barrier to financial confidence isn't just about technical fluency?  At King’s, teaching finance is about judgement, communication and strategic challenge.

Numbers are not facts

Professor Crawford Spence, Professor of Accounting at King's Business School and course lead on the executive education programme ‘Finance for Non-Financial Leaders’, has spent his career examining how financial figures are produced, communicated and interpreted in organisations. His research points to something that surprises most non-financial leaders when they first encounter it: a significant proportion of the numbers in any set of financial statements involve judgement, assumption and discretion. Depreciation rates, asset valuations, revenue recognition — all of these require managers to make choices which could produce materially different outcomes. The numbers are not simply read off from reality. They are, in important ways, constructed.

This is not an argument for cynicism about finance. It doesn't mean that organisations are routinely misrepresenting their position, or that the figures can't be trusted. What it does mean is that financial statements are better understood as a set of argued positions than a set of objective facts. And once you see them that way, the whole question of financial confidence starts to look different.

The confidence gap is behavioural, not mathematical

This is where Professor Spence's research takes a surprising direction. His work draws on behavioural analysis of how people actually relate to financial information inside organisations: how numbers are used to narrate performance and how they structure the conversations happening around them. Consistently he has found that it requires less mathematical mastery and considerably more skill in interrogation, interpretation and communication than most non-financial leaders assume. In this respect, engaging with finance requires more social skill than it does financial knowledge, something that Professor Spence explores in detail in his recent book on financial intermediaries.

The professionals who tend to feel most locked out of financial conversations are often those with the most relevant skills to contribute to them. Questioning assumptions, probing the logic behind a decision, asking what a set of figures is actually telling you: these are not specialist competencies. They are the habits of experienced leadership, and they transfer directly.

What the numbers can reveal

Financial statements also carry information that any careful reader can learn to notice. Patterns within financial data can signal organisational distress long before a crisis becomes visible through other means, and they show up in the structure and movement of figures across statements rather than in obscure technical detail. Knowing what a company's financial profile reveals (and what it quietly conceals) is a practical skill with real strategic value, particularly for anyone with governance or oversight responsibilities.

Finance as a leadership capability

Understood properly, financial literacy is not a specialism that has to be left to the finance team. It is a leadership capability that shapes how effectively a senior professional can contribute to strategic conversations, challenge a business case, engage with external partners and exercise their responsibilities with genuine confidence rather than performed assurance.

King's Business School's ‘Finance for Non-Financial Leaders’ programme is built around this premise. Delivered over three intensive days in person at King's central London campus, it moves through financial management, communication and strategy as an integrated leadership challenge rather than a set of separate technical modules. Participants leave with the ability to hold their own in financial conversations. 

Finance has long felt like a closed door for those without a specialist background. This programme helps leaders open it and, more importantly, understand why it was never as firmly shut as they assumed.