First day as Head of Tax vs 2 years

Becoming a Head of Tax is navigating endless risks and challenges 😬. The good news? You can grow into it. Here’s what 100s of tax leaders have taught me:

Firstly, accepting that you will work in a challenging environment is crucial to success.

Let’s be honest, as an incoming Head of Tax, it is undeniable that your job will be complex. You and your team will be exposed to a lot of risk, that is part of the tax game. You will need to learn a lot, on the fly.

You will need to find a balance between risks and rewards, or efficiency and compliance. All the time. You will be working under pressure, and flexibility and adaptability are must-have traits. It’s all about the details in tax, and unfortunately we are not in a binary domain.
I can continue, but I don’t want to further dramatize just before the holiday period.

What I do observe when talking to successful tax leaders is that they have certain common characteristics:

💡 They remain calm under pressure

💡 They build great teams and delegate

💡 They are proactive, think ahead, and embrace change

💡 They are strategic and can avoid constant fire-fighting

💡 They are close to senior leaders including the CFO

💡 They know how to communicate, they double down on context and “the why”

💡 They are part of the solution, not the problem (when supporting the business)

💡 They are very passionate about tax, I mean really nerdy about tax

💡 They get the order right: people > process > data > tech…

By the way, I recently shared a list of 11 traits of highly effective tax teams, see it here.