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This article was first published in the February 2017 international edition of Accounting and Business magazine.

In many ways Paula Kensington could be seen as a ‘minority’: a senior woman in what is still a male-heavy profession, with a CV that shows she has switched sectors; a Brit carving out a career in Australia; and an award-winning CFO who has never been to university. She is also forward-thinking – consciously developing her own brand through judicious use of coaching, networks and social media.

Her response to such analysis? ‘I think it’s a good idea to say yes more often and get scared more often,’ she says. Her achievements are all the more remarkable against a backdrop of tragedy in her personal life, which would have placed the career hopes of a lesser person on hold. 

Perhaps, though, she did have two advantages. The first was insight into the accountancy world – both her father and brother are ACCA-qualified, so maybe there is something in the blood. The second is that her first finance role was at a printing company, a sector where women were more likely to be adorning calendars next to the presses rather than making decisions in the finance team. Prosper there and you could do so anywhere.

It was 10 years ago, when CFO at KeyCorp (see box) in Australia, that Kensington really discovered the power of the network. ‘You don’t need to have all the answers,’ she says. ‘It is about surrounding yourself with people who can help you.’ One network she discovered was ACCA. ‘Everyone in London knew ACCA, but it wasn’t so renowned in Australia, and that’s when I realised I needed to do something about it.’ 

She joined the ACCA ANZ Network Panel and is now chair. ‘We’re 12 volunteers, but I want to look back and say we’ve made a difference. We need targets just like an ordinary business’ – such as posting regularly on the ACCA Australia and New Zealand LinkedIn group with its 1,190 members. ‘Each of us posting once a month isn’t onerous, nor is posting details of networking events,’ she says. ‘They are simple measures of success.’

Being named CFO of the Year at Thomson Reuters’ 2013 Tax & Accounting Excellence Awards, Kensington was determined to leverage that success. ‘Every January I ask myself what I want to do this year.’ One of the answers was to become a CEO, so she has created her pathway to this objective. While statistics on CFOs becoming CEO vary, none of the figures from around the world is reassuringly high; this step will be no mean feat. After carrying out a personal SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis and deciding communication was a weakness, she enrolled on a communication course at a Sydney university, which covered rhetoric and storytelling. ‘As CFO I am the communicator between the board, stakeholders, the business,’ she says. 

Inspiration for others

As well as communication, Kensington sees the CEO role as being about leadership and providing inspiration for others. So she has hired – at her own personal cost – a virtual assistant to put her brand onto social media. ‘My LinkedIn profile is two-dimensional. If people want to know me and my values they can read my blog. I write personally about what happens in my professional career.’ For instance, she has written about being bullied at work. 

As well as the forthright blogs, other strategic steps include speaking at conferences at least once a quarter and aiming twice a year for press coverage (so this article is another tick on the list).

Her aims explain her current role as CFO at Regus, which includes COO work. ‘Knowing what goes on at the coalface is going to help to get me to a CEO role,’ she says. Further research told Kensington that exposure across multiple functions increased the likelihood of making it to CEO. Her current role has ‘lifted the blinkers’, as she currently has 12 sales people reporting to her. As a leader she’s determined to sit down with them and help them get to where they want to be. ‘I’m going to get a better outcome than if I just asked them if they had met their KPIs [key performance indicators],’ she says.

Leadership for Kensington is about being the best she can be and helping others to do likewise. ‘That is my purpose. I work with a business coach; she spent 12 months trying to get me to articulate my purpose and I became frustrated and wanted to move on.’ The coach argued that once Kensington knew her purpose everything else would fall into place. People know in their heart what their purpose is,’ says Kensington. ‘Losing my partner seven years ago showed me the fragility of life and that it is a gift. And we should live each moment as if it were our last. That doesn’t stop me running around like a headless chicken, but some people don’t realise this until they are on their deathbed.’

‘We all did our best to kill each other’

She makes little of gender differences, perhaps because of her two brothers. (‘We all did our best to kill each other when we were kids.’) As part of her personal development, she is involved with a ‘workplace-ready’ scheme at Macquarie University in Sydney, where industry partners talk to accountancy students about life as a CFO. ‘Both male and female students ask me how to become more confident, so I don’t believe that is a gender issue,’ she says. ‘But I do think that being female can help in the battle of egos. I will get what I want but do so in a softer way.’

When first in Australia, Kensington took up singing again. As part of her singing exams she performed in a park in Sydney. ‘I was scared but I thought: what was the worst that could happen? Someone thinks me an idiot. Big deal.’ Her advice is to find mentors away from work who can hold up a mirror to weaknesses and offer diversity by being from different professional backgrounds. 

When going for a new job, she says the inner voice will challenge her capability for the role, but Kensington says it is a test of confidence to resist. ‘Don’t listen to that fear-based voice that says you can’t do something.’

What about her 2017 personal targets? She wants to improve on influencing; she reckons that, as CFO, she may have influence due to her title rather than authentic leadership. She wants to ensure that is not the case.

And there is the drive for the CEO role. One recent networking lunch involved Kensington meeting with six other women who all gave an elevator pitch. Kensington’s centred around having greater clarity over why she wanted to be CEO. ‘If my boss isn’t going to go any time soon, I need to look for the next step,’ she says. ‘It would be too easy to do another CFO role because that is what people know me for.’ Turning 50 in 2020, she aims to have made CEO before then, or at least made a clear step towards it. ‘Being an accountant I’ve even put it on a spreadsheet.’ 

Peter Williams, journalist