Top 5 communication mistakes to avoid for finance & FP&A

1. Letting your nerves lead you

There are very few people who actually don't feel any nerves before public speaking.

If someone says they aren't nervous at all before presenting a forecast to the leadership team or walking into a board review, it's very likely they're lying (or trying to convince themselves to feel less nervous by saying that).

One of the common mistakes I see finance professionals making is when they let nerves take over. It's reasonable and okay to feel nervous, but don't let them lead you.

Don't let your nerves make you decide to change a slide in your budget presentation last minute.

Don't let your nerves cause you to speed through your variance analysis to "get it over with."

Don't let your nerves sell yourself short and make your voice sound too soft and lacking in confidence when you're delivering a recommendation to the CFO.

I still remember the first time I presented a forecast change to our CFO. I was the expert in that part of the business.

I had rehearsed it so many times in my head that by the time I joined the meeting, my nerves had already rewritten my delivery for me.

Shortly after I started speaking, I saw him glance at his watch. This threw me off and I began to speak twice as fast as normal because I didn't want to "waste his time."

In that moment, I convinced myself that the room wouldn't have the patience for it. The reality: Nobody in that room was thinking about my nerves.

They were thinking about the numbers. They were thinking about what needs to change in the forecast. They were eager to hear why.

That gap between what I imagined they were judging and what they actually cared about is exactly why this mistake is so common (and so avoidable).

At the end of the day, one simple reminder that I like to think of whenever I feel nervousness creep up is: "They're just people."

Repeat this in your mind, no matter who you are meeting with or who you are speaking to. I don't care if it's the CEO of the company, the head of investor relations, or a VP with 40 years of experience in corporate finance. They're. Just. People.

2. Lack of clear outcome

There is one easy test I encourage all of my clients and workshop participants to use with every single conversation (and yes, I do mean every single conversation, big or small).

That test is to ask: "What do I want them to think, feel, or do differently?"

In any interaction (whether it's a quarterly business review, a budget request meeting, or a casual check-in with your business partner) there has to be an identifiable outcome.

Outcomes give purpose. Purpose gives reason for time. Without purpose, people will feel as though you're wasting their time. Or, worse, that you don't know what you're talking about.

Earlier in my career, I sat in on a QBR where my manager at the time talked our VP through every line of a variance analysis in exact chronological order. That's the way I'd built the model, but it wasn't the way they actually needed to hear it. It didn't land.

About 5 minutes in, I watched the VP start looking at his phone. I immediately was uncomfortable and surprised. Now in hindsight, I understand what happened there.

Sure, it was a bit rude, but it was also honest feedback and data. The VP had no idea what my manager wanted him to do with the information we were sharing, so his brain simply opted out.

He didn't understand the purpose. He was likely thinking "this could've been an email."

That was the moment I started asking myself the "think, feel, or do" question before every single conversation, not just the big ones. And it's the single biggest shift that changed how people responded to me in a room.

So keep this in mind the next time you're preparing for any interactions. Think of your audience. Then identify what it is that you want them to think, feel, or do differently.

Do you want them to think about a risk or opportunity with a different perspective? Do you want them to feel confident about the forecast, concerned about a trend, or motivated to act on a cost savings initiative? Or do you want them to approve a decision, reallocate resources, or change course on a plan?

The more clear you are with your outcome, the more purpose your entire presentation or conversation will have.

And that is the key ingredient to establishing respect, trust, and commitment from the audience, especially when your audience is a room full of executives who have little time and high expectations.

3. Ignoring yourself

Do you often use a filler word because you're afraid of pauses? Do you tend to blink a lot when you start talking fast through a dense financial model? Do you constantly have a furrowed look in your eyebrows when someone challenges your assumptions?

These are all easy questions to answer if you raise your self-awareness as a speaker or communicator. It's too easy nowadays to NOT get this right.

You can record yourself on your phone. Record yourself on Zoom. Record yourself on Teams. Whatever mode of technology you're comfortable with, there shouldn't be an excuse as to why you're not self-aware of where you fall on the spectrum of bad to great communication.

Watching yourself speak is the single best way to pick up on cues and habits that you otherwise may not have noticed.

People are rarely going to give you the honest feedback that you very much need to improve your communication skills.

Your business partners aren't going to tell you that your budget walkthrough was confusing. They don't want to risk making you feel bad or having to deal with the consequences of you responding poorly to their feedback.

They aren't going to tell you that you used "um" 10 times within 5 minutes while presenting your long-range plan. They're not going to tell you that your body language gives off a snobby vibe or the way you stand makes you look timid.

I'll admit this one is uncomfortable to talk about because I lived it multiple times throughout my career (and still do).

I once rewatched a recording of myself, a Finance Business Partner at the time, speaking to a leadership team about their Q3 forecast during COVID. I counted the number of times I said "um," "so," or "right" and was mortified.

I had no idea I did it that frequently. Nobody had ever told me; not because they didn't notice, but because it's simply not something colleagues typically bring up with each other.

That recording taught me more about my communication habits in fifteen minutes than years of assuming I was fine ever did.

When you record yourself and watch it (as painful and cringy as you feel about it), I can almost guarantee that you will pick up on at least one behavior that you would really benefit from refining or changing.

The first step is self-awareness, and there is no better way to gain self-awareness than to witness yourself in action from a third party, objective point of view.

4. Too much detail

That saying "less is more" is not just with fashion. It goes with PowerPoint presentations. It goes with 1-on-1s with your manager. And it especially goes for finance professionals because we are wired for detail.

We live in spreadsheets, models, and reconciliations all day. So when it's time to communicate, we default to what we know: the data, the granularity, the backup.

And that's when people go on and on about something which leaves the other party wondering "why are they telling me this?"

During my process of becoming a professional certified coach, I had to have hundreds of hours of professional training, role playing, and research spent on deciphering how people behave and how to navigate conversations with clients that may be leading to nowhere.

I loved it, because it reminded me of my Psychology roots at UCLA. One of the biggest skills is to be able to take in a large amount of information (we call this the "story," when people spend a lot of time going through details in explaining or describing a situation) then distilling it down and filtering it down ultimately to the root of the issue.

But not everybody is a professional trained coach. They aren't trained to listen intently and they aren't equipped with the right tools and abilities to listen for what's not being said.

I think about this every time I remember a specific budget walkthrough with my business partner and his leadership team. I was a Senior Manager at the time and my business partner was a C-staff member leading a global team of over 2,000 people.

I brought every backup tab "just in case" someone asked. Someone did ask, but not about the backup. They asked, "So what do you actually want us to do here?" I hadn't even gotten to that part yet. I was still three tabs deep into showing the "what." I didn't even touch the "why" or the "how".

That's the moment I built my own "need to know vs. nice to know" filter in my communication, and I use it before every single deliverable I send out now, whether it's a one-pager or a board deck.

Remember that as a communicator, it's your duty to include what's absolutely necessary and leave out the details as a "nice to have" if someone wants those details.

A very effective way of doing this is chunking out your message in two areas:

1) Need to know vs. 2) Nice to know.

Need to know should only have 2–3 sentences or bullet points. Imagine an elevator door closing in on you as you're delivering your forecast summary to the CFO.

What are the 2–3 things this audience NEEDS to know before the elevator doors are closing? That's what you start with. Leave the rest (the bridge walks, the line-item details, the backup tabs) as optional details.

5. Using AI (or yourself) to script everything

This is a very common one that brings people comfort when they script out what they are going to say. Or they ask Claude and ChatGPT for a perfectly written script and start memorizing it like they're studying for an exam.

I see this often with finance professionals preparing for big presentations: annual planning reviews, investor updates, stakeholder readouts.

While scripting can help with getting all of your ideas and thoughts down, the major drawback is that it can easily get you into a mindset of having to say the "right" things and pressure you to feel as though you have to memorize every single word and sentence.

It strips you of your individuality and quiets your true voice. What this can look like is when you're speaking (whether on stage or presenting during a meeting) if you happen to forget or "go blank" with what you were going to say, it can make you feel even more flustered when you can't find the exact words you had rehearsed.

You start sweating. Your heart races. Your face turns bright red.

English is my second language. Being an immigrant from Hong Kong, Cantonese is my first and native language, so there are times I may stumble on a specific word or two, especially when I'm speaking fast.

Because of this insecurity, I used to script out my presentations word for word. I'd even write out the transitions. Then, during one quarter-end review when I was a Financial Analyst, a stakeholder asked a question that wasn't in my script, and I froze.

Not because I didn't know the answer, but because my brain was still trying to find my way back to the exact sentence I had memorized. That was the last time I fully scripted anything.

Now I brain-dump everything I might want to say, circle the 2–3 points that actually matter, and let the rest come out naturally. Ironically, that's when people started telling me I sounded more confident and not less prepared.

Now, even if I find myself mispronouncing a particular word or going blank during a presentation, I no longer get embarrassed by it.

I no longer need to search for that perfectly memorized line or script. Sometimes stumbling, mispronouncing, or blanking mid-thought just makes us more human. And that's okay.

Here's what I encourage people to do: if you have a lot of data or information you want to share, do a "brain dump". Type out everything you might want to cover. Bullet points are great for this.

Then, instead of using that as the main part of your presentation, pick and choose the top 2–3 "need to know" items and bring those to the center of your presentation. Leave the rest in your notes.

When you script everything you're about to say, it can also leave you sounding (and feeling) a bit robotic and rigid.

It doesn't give space for your personality or uniqueness to come through, and it will often leave your audience feeling bored or even frustrated; and in finance, a disengaged audience means your insights don't land and your recommendations don't get acted on.

If any or all of the above 5 mistakes resonate with you, I encourage you to practice refining that in your communication.

There is no right or wrong way to communicate, but there are clear differentiations between a concise, effective, and impactful communicator versus one that is wordy, robotic, and inconsistent.

Try incorporating ONE small change or refinement in your communication style at a time. No need to get overwhelmed with trying to become an expert in all of the above.

Over time, as you make these small but powerful shifts in your delivery and preparation, you will find that your audience is much more engaged and resonate with your message.

Have some fun with it and practice finding your unique voice!

About the author

Ricky Koo is the Head of GTM & Technology/Engineering Financial Planning & Analysis at Autodesk, a Fortune 500 global technology company, and one of the rare finance executives who will tell you his psychology degree did more for his career than his CPA license.

After 20+ years across JPMorgan Chase, Deloitte, Visa, Oracle, and Autodesk, he frequently draws from those experiences which helped shape everything he now teaches.

He is also an ICF PCC-credentialed executive coach and UC Berkeley Extension instructor who sits in an unusual space: the technical rigor of a seasoned finance leader and the psychological fluency to understand why the most skilled professionals often go unrecognized.

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Top 5 communication mistakes to avoid for finance & FP&A professionals