Five Short Trainings That Changed How I Manage a Team

Somewhere between learning SAP FI/CO and closing my first multi-entity group set of books, I went through five short professional-development trainings that had nothing to do with accounting standards and everything to do with how I actually lead a finance team. They are listed plainly on my homepage under Training. Here is what each one actually changed.

Jump Start Leadership (Hong Kong / Vietnam, 2016)

This training, run by Guiding Eagles Coaching and Consulting, was less about theory and more about practising leadership decisions in real time, in a room with people from different operating cultures. What stayed with me: leadership style has to adapt to the team in front of you, not the other way around — the way I delegate to a Dhaka-based reconciliation team and the way I brief a regional stakeholder in a different market genuinely need to be different conversations, not the same script delivered twice.

Effective Supervision and Delegation (Bangladesh, 2015)

I thought I already delegated well before this course. I did not. The specific gap it exposed: I was handing off tasks, but not the authority or context needed to actually own them, which meant people kept coming back to me for decisions I had, in theory, already delegated. The fix was mechanical and unglamorous — being explicit, every time, about what decision-making authority came with a task, not just the task itself.

Time and Stress Management (Bangladesh, 2015)

Finance has a predictable stress cycle — close weeks, audit weeks, year-end. This training's most useful idea was distinguishing between stress caused by genuine workload and stress caused by poor sequencing of the same workload. A surprising amount of “close week is always chaotic” turned out to be a scheduling problem, fixable by moving specific tasks earlier or later in the cycle, not an unavoidable feature of the job.

Creative Problem Solving (Sri Lanka / Bangladesh, 2014)

Dr. Upali Mahanama's decision-making training built a habit I now use constantly when a reconciliation or a variance does not make sense: generate several possible explanations before checking any of them, instead of chasing the first plausible story and stopping there. The first explanation for an unusual number is often wrong, or only part of the picture, and a structured way of forcing myself to consider alternatives before investigating has caught more than one real error that a narrower, faster instinct would have missed.

The 7 Habits (Hong Kong / China, 2014)

Johnny Chan's session on Stephen Covey's framework gave me one distinction I still use every single close cycle: the difference between urgent and important. A late vendor query feels urgent. A control weakness that has not caused a problem yet is important but rarely feels urgent. Left unmanaged, the urgent-but-not-important tasks will fill 100% of a finance manager's calendar. Protecting time for the important-but-not-urgent work — process improvement, control design, developing the team — has to be a deliberate act, every week, or it simply does not happen.

Why I list these on my homepage at all

It would be easy to only list technical certifications — CMA, SAP FICO — and leave these off as “soft skills,” implicitly less important. I do not think that is accurate. The technical certifications are why I can be trusted with the numbers. These five short courses are a real part of why a team can be trusted to work with me.

Written by Liakat Hossain

Finance and accounts professional with experience in FP&A, SAP FICO, Power BI, internal control, reporting, audit, tax, VAT and export-oriented business operations.

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This is an original blog post written by Liakat Hossain, drawing on his own professional and personal experience. It is a personal reflection, not regulatory, tax, legal or investment advice; verify any technical or professional point against current standards before relying on it.