Bloom & Wild CFO: Sometimes you need to ‘reframe kindness’

Bloom & Wild's tagline is ‘care wildly’ - a message that could also be an apt description of the leadership ethos conveyed by CFO Dominique Highfield, who became the letterbox flower brand’s first finance chief when she was appointed in the autumn.

In the two decades since she started out as an auditor at PwC, however, Highfield has also learnt that sometimes you have to “reframe kindness”.

She draws an analogy between the difficult conversations you might occasionally have to have with an underperformer at work and the awkwardness when someone has something stuck in their teeth.

“You could be loosely kind and not tell them and make it awkward - or you could tell them. It's that [idea of] radical candour…It might be slightly awkward at the time, but you've done it for their own best interest.”

This week’s guest on Leadership Lessons, Highfield tells MT about how the company is driving top- and bottom-line growth through a combination of new categories, market expansion and technology. “We use AI in our customer contact team, we use it in our marketing…[for] creating scripts and…converting into different languages. I'm even using it in finance to help speed up our financial close so that my team can spend more time on value-added tasks.”

The finance executive joined Bloom & Wild from online estate agents Purplebricks, where it quickly became clear that the task at hand was quite different from that on the job description. “Within the first 100 days I had issued a profit warning, put the business up for sale, found new owners and narrowly escaped administration.”

While Bloom & Wild hasn’t required Highfield to summon the same reserves of resilience - the company’s positive growth trajectory was in fact part of what drew her to the role - she says that she is still learning in her latest position.

The data-centric nature of the business, combined with the high level of financial literacy among employees, has meant that her traditional leadership style of “cheerleading, bringing everyone on the journey and giving them the story and…reasons why actually often isn't enough”. Instead, the unique company context also demands greater specificity and for ‘the story’ to be rooted in data points. “So I think being able to…understand the culture and then how your communication style and negotiation style or delivery style has to flex in light of that culture is really important.”

Credits:

Presenter: Antonia Garrett Peel

Producer: Nav Pal

Artwork: Jenny Hardy

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