LEADERSHIP
A WINNING TEAM IT’S ABOUT AUTHENTICITY AND TRUST Together with her team, EOH CFO Megan Pydigadu, who won the High-Performance Team Award at the 2021 CFO Awards, provide exclusive insight into the makings of a group of people who pull together for a common goal. By Ronda Naidu
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This is the award I would have liked to win the most because it goes to the team. An award can be about one person, but this one is about the team – and I have an amazing team.” These are the words of Megan Pydigadu, CFO at EOH, who took home the High-Performance Team Award at the 2021 CFO Awards.
The winner of the award demonstrates capabilities to build a high-performing financial team that is both efficient and customer focused. It recognises a CFO with a clear vision, who invests in talent development to align future needs with the available skills set, is an inspiring coach for co-workers and gives attention to personal and professional development of their employees.
lems that need to be solved and put teams together to resolve the issue. She provides two examples of this, one being at the end of last year during a finance strategy day where all the different parts of finance had to put together a cohesive strategy for finance. “They all worked together to put together a cohesive plan to execute on that to deliver to the priorities we have in finance,” she says. Another good example of how high-performance is part of the fabric of the team was around year-end financials.
“This achievement wouldn’t have been possible without my team, quite literally. They are truly the stars of this award,” she said.
Megan says, “We have over 150 legal entities and historically have had intercompany loans flowing between all entities – it's a bit of a spiderweb. We have been on a mission to clean up and simplify. The team came together from business, treasury, tax and group reporting to work out how best to clean up loans so we get to a place where there are only loans from treasury to businesses – historically it has not been a structured way of lending in the group.”
Megan, who has been at EOH for three years, joined the organisation during a challenging time when it faced questions about ethical practices at senior management level and faced corruption charges.
“The team managed themselves to solve the issue at hand by declaring dividends, ceding and assigning loans to clean up the structure so that for year-end the audit process was smooth around the loan process,”she adds.
“I had to build the team from scratch and had to ask people to come into an environment that was full of question marks and uncertainty. It is not about I, it's about the team and the effort they put into turning things around,” she says.
Earn your place
During the awards ceremony, Megan gave full credit to her finance team, showing that she embodies both the spirit and intent of the award.
For Megan, the key to a high performance team is how they collaborate together and cross silos to solve issues. The team are all self starters, so often see prob-
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Megan is clear that a high-performance team means people have meaning and that there is no place for politics. In such an environment, it must be made clear that everyone has earned their place at the table and don’t need to prove what they can offer. This was starkly different to the environment Megan
