Coworking with Hilary Maxson

Coworking is a weekly segment where we talk to CFOs and others in the finance space about their experiences, their companies, and the larger economy. Let us know if you are—or you know—a CFO we should interview.

Hilary Maxson is group CFO and EVP at Schneider Electric, which bills itself as “the world’s most sustainable company,” as an early adopter of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) initiatives.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

One of the things I wanted to ask about is the idea of “energy as a human right.” Schneider Electric is working to provide 50 million US residents access to green electricity in the coming year. That’s a very ambitious goal. And I’d love to hear your thoughts on why that’s important for Schneider and how you see that coming together.

So Schneider’s purpose is defined as empowering all to make the most of our energy and resources, bridging progress and sustainability for all, which is very unique, because most people think progress and sustainability work against each other to a decent degree. In Europe, for example, everyone’s quite nervous that winter is coming and the gas is going to be turned off and that type of thing. You cannot build a new LNG [liquefied natural gas] terminal for yourself. But you can figure out a way to reduce your energy consumption by 30% in a much shorter time period.

I’m wondering what you see on the economic horizon and how you are preparing for it.

I’m cautiously optimistic. Everything in front of us from a medium-term standpoint, is still positive, over the medium, even long term because we’re really on the right trends as a company. Now, what that means though, is that we really need to balance and get through this short term.

What that means very pragmatically is looking right now very carefully at our resource allocation. Making sure that the money that we are spending is definitely on the trends that are being accelerated by the issues with Russia, Ukraine, that we’re not wasting our money elsewhere. So I don’t want to slow us down from the medium-term stuff, but we need to really make sure that we’re focused on the right things.

What advice would you give to aspiring CFOs to prepare for the role?

You need to know something about accounting and how stuff works through the P&L, treasury, investor relations, M&A, and then all of the strategic advisory side. So I think I’ve always thought about finding my career path and getting exposure to each of these areas. But, the CFO is not the expert in each of those areas. The CFO is the one that keeps those things together, the sort of person that’s balancing the CEO to some degree, and I think a lot of that actually has to do with general management skills, learning how to work with your colleagues, learning how to manage through influence. And I think understanding how to operate in different environments with different people and still be able to get results.

What is something that people would not be able to guess about you from your LinkedIn page?

I think if you’ve looked at my LinkedIn, Pinterest, my résumé, it looks very ambitious, very finance-oriented. In terms of work-life balance…what I like to do in my free time is a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with the business role. I really love blockbuster movies and I love reading novels, particularly mystery novels, detective novels. I’m sure no one would guess that from my LinkedIn.