The Focus Advantage: How Financial Leaders Design Systems for Strategic Work

Speakers/Moderators/Panelists: Jenna Piché

Description: 

Join us for a FENG Career Development Session!

FENG Members, prospective Members, and guests are welcome.

Financial leaders face a unique paradox: the higher you climb, the more your time fragments. Strategic thinking gets crowded out by urgent requests, your calendar fills with meetings about meetings, and you end most days wondering where your time actually went. The problem isn't your schedule; it's the system.

This session reveals how high-performing finance teams redesign their work environments to protect the cognitive bandwidth necessary for complex analysis, strategic planning, and the deep thinking that drives business value. Drawing from organizational psychology and workplace focus research showing that 92% of employers identify lost focus as an alarming problem, you'll discover the operational changes that distinguish teams who do high-value work from teams who stay perpetually busy.

Whether you're leading a finance function or managing your own career transition, you'll walk away with practical frameworks for reclaiming your attention, establishing team agreements that protect focused work time, and creating the conditions where strategic thinking can actually happen.

CPE Learning Objectives:

1. Identify the systemic factors that fragment executive attention and explain how these factors undermine strategic thinking, deep analysis, and high‑value financial leadership.
2. Analyze research‑backed focus and workflow design principles to determine which operational changes help finance teams protect cognitive bandwidth and reduce low‑value busyness.
3. Apply practical frameworks for designing team agreements and work systems that safeguard focused work time, improve strategic capacity, and enable finance leaders to consistently prioritize high‑impact work.

Earn 1 CPE credit while exploring timely, relevant content designed for today’s finance professionals

Details:

Date: 10/13/26

Time:  8 am – 9:30 am

Location:  West End Office Plaza 1660 Highway 100 S Main Floor Conference Room Saint Louis Park, MN 55416-1506

Free parking

Light pastries and coffee are provided

Bio:

Jenna Piché is a productivity researcher, focus consultant, and professional speaker who helps financial leaders and their teams do meaningful work without burning out. Her research studying 750+ working professionals identified the five behaviors that separate genuinely productive people from those who just feel busy. She's worked with FEI chapters across Wisconsin, Vistage CEO groups, and organizations including American Family Insurance and The Ohio State University. Jenna holds certifications as a Full Focus Pro and Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner, and hosts The Other Side of Busy podcast.