A healthy CEO-CFO relationship begins in the interview, Hasbro CFO says

Not too long ago, Hasbro CFO Gina Goetter found herself in the kind of job interview moment that either lands you the gig or gets your application quietly pushed aside.

She was speaking with the company’s CEO, Chris Cocks, about Hasbro’s consumer product margin.

“I went in and talked with him, and I said, ‘Why do you not have two numbers for your margin on the consumer product?’” Goetter told the audience at a panel during the CFO Leadership Council’s spring conference in Boston on June 4.

“He’s like, ‘Well, what should the margin be?’” she continued. Her response? “There’s usually two numbers before the decimal point.”

Correcting the CEO in a job interview? Bold, sure, but prescient for Goetter’s stint at Hasbro thus far.

“We had to get really real [with] where the business’s health was, and what we were going to be able to do to be able to fix this,” Goetter explained. “That started in the interview process. I was certainly not going to walk into Hasbro without us having that honest dialogue from the get-go of what we were jumping into.”

TLC needed. Her tenacity came in part from her background: Goetter’s whole career has been in the consumer product world: She spent nearly 21 years at General Mills in increasingly senior finance roles before landing at Harley-Davidson, where she stepped into the CFO seat.

She was driven to those roles in large part by a genuine love for the brands—her daughters learned she was leaving General Mills when she finally stocked Kellogg’s cereal in the house—but also because all of the companies she joined were “in need of a little bit of love and care and transformation,” she said.

Agree to disagree. That’s also why she needed to get down to brass tacks with her CEO so quickly.

“When I joined [Hasbro] about three years ago…the business wasn’t in a great spot, and that partnership between the CEO and the CFO, you are the two responsible for turning the business, and so we got candid and honest pretty darn quick,” Goetter said. Like, job interview level quick.

The dynamic continues to this day. “We trust each other immensely. We have different strengths; we have different blind spots,” she explained. “We’re also not afraid to debate.”

That was “weird” for some of their teammates, Goetter noted. “They were not used to the prior CEO and CFO debating in front of people,” she said. “Are Mom and Dad fighting right now?” employees seemed to be asking, in her telling. But having those difficult conversations and public disagreements allowed the company to “move faster and move through some of the muck a little bit quicker,” she maintained.

“For CEOs, that’s the hard part. You’re looking for that partner that’s going to tell you the good, the bad, the ugly,” Goetter said. “If I’m walking into his office all the time, agreeing with him, I’m doing something wrong.”

Double duty. Her confident approach to team dynamics also applies to the way she views her own role. Or, rather, roles: Goetter serves as both the CFO and COO as Hasbro.

“It’s one role in my mind,” Goetter said. “Every operational decision that you’re making lands somewhere on the financial statement, and so I see them as being very interlinked.”

That extends to her teams. “I don’t have a finance team that’s separate from my ops team, that’s separate from my technology team,” she said. “We are one team, and our job is to enable the organization.”

“I expect my finance team to be embedded in the operation,” she continued. “We are not the people sitting over on the side, keeping score, and putting out fancy reports.”

Goetter thinks more companies will take a similarly embedded approach, especially to unlock speed in decision-making.

“When basically half the company and half the company’s functions are reporting through my organization, we’re able to move really darn fast,” she said. “I don’t have to go get 50 approvals for what I want to do to manage my logistics network…We’re able to move very seamlessly through some of those types of decisions.”

It also helps her teams see the full picture of the company. “When my supply chain team is sitting next to me at the table with my finance team, they’re going to be able to connect their day-to-day decisions back to the financials, as our financial team is understanding what tech investments we have to go make because of X-Y-Z,” she said.