• Focusing the corporate vision and mission
• Managing organizational change
• Developing employees to effect retention and productivity 
• Fostering collaboration, teamwork and operational coordination

Let's look at each one. 

Focusing the corporate vision and mission. Establishing the culture and character of a company is the central responsibility of CEOs and their leadership lieutenants. For service professionals, it's necessary to understand clients' vision, defined as the desirable image of the company's future and its fundamental reason-for-being; and its mission, the specific tactics being deployed to achieve their strategic goals. Evolving market needs and changes in the competitive landscape, however, drive shifts in corporate strategies and character. Importantly, course corrections in clients' vision and mission generate finance-related issues. Regardless of their nature or composition, these fiscal challenges are often the ones that determine the success or failure of clients' evolving organizational aspirations.

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Managing organizational change. The cliché is true; the only constant today is change. This points up another crucial leadership challenge: managing continual corporate change. Here again financial issues are at the heart of large-scale organizational shifts as wrought by acquisitions, spin-offs, and a host of other business restructuring scenarios. Fiscally focused business advisors counsel clients on successfully maneuvering through strategic change. They proactively anticipate and address the financial critical success factors that pervade all major organizational change situations.

Developing employees to effect retention and productivity. All companies ultimately succeed or fail based on employee performance. Ongoing development of an organization's employee base is essential. Leaders contend with the challenge of retaining employees while maximizing their productivity, commitment and loyalty. Meeting employees' needs -– both professional and personal -– is necessary to effect retention and to realize optimal ROI on human capital outlays. Leadership thinking by accounting and financial professionals helps them render important insights, for instance, on benefits and compensation issues. These are central considerations in helping clients forge productive bonds with their employees in the most fiscally conscientious manner possible.

Fostering collaboration, teamwork and operational coordination. This age-old management challenge is increasingly significant today. As business becomes more global in scope, companies become more complex. Operational coordination is a formidable challenge for the leaders of diversified businesses that are geographically dispersed, have virtually-aligned workforces, or which have extended operations through alliances and strategic partnerships. Operational coordination engenders sustainable growth and profitability. Business advisors consider the financial factors implicit in coordinating complex organizational systems -– whether those factors are technological, people-related or strategic in nature.

Clearly, there are many other issues confronting C-level leaders. The foregoing are among the most important. That's why it's incumbent upon business advisors to periodically ask their clients about emerging issues in each area. Key questions include:

• What marketplace developments may be influencing or prompting shifts in the corporate mission?
• What large-scale organizational change initiatives may be in the offing … and why?
• What human capital challenges are creating new needs relative to the enterprise's collective employee skill base? 
• In general, what obstacles are getting in the way of attaining strategic goals?

Major shifts in any of the aforementioned areas will spawn financial challenges. Those challenges generate client needs that can be met by you, or by colleagues within your firm, thus enabling you to cross-sell services and bolster the client relationship.

But unless you ask about leadership issues, you'll never be able to help your clients address them. Unless you probe into high-level client problems, you'll never be the valued advisor your clients need you to be.