Thoughts on What it Means to be a Lead in Tax Innovation

Before joining Unilever as the Lead for Tax Innovation, I thought a lot about what skills a future tax professional should have. It was based on my personal development journey. Looking back, it was mostly focused on the technical development needed to extend accountancy and tax advisory capabilities to data analytics and machine learning.

When I first became a manager, I always made it clear to junior team members that I trusted them to prioritise their time as long as they meet the agreed deadlines and required quality. In return, I would do my best to be a good listener, helpful, and approachable.

When it comes to appraisal time, the typical focus was on the value they contribute to the team. What were their achievements of the year, and how can they do more next year? I find a lot of review conversations tend to focus on the strengths and weaknesses of the individuals, and their specific work results.

When I started working at Unilever as the Lead of Tax Innovation, I found that approach becoming inadequate. The experience made me think further about what it means to “lead” in an emerging field such as tax technology, where the job specification is yet to be defined. Challenges I face at work are both technical and relational, where traditional tax team members may not fully understand what and why I do some work.

As a global lead of tax technology, the projects I started or stepped into all need to be scalable with some global impact, or at least to a regional level. The challenge was that for each project there is a big set of work, and you have to do it all. That includes the obvious work, like actually drawing up a UI design, writing some code, or building a prototype app, but it also includes identifying and defining a problem to be solved, finding the budget, discussing use cases, setting up support teams before and after the project, promoting the project to get upstream leadership and downstream users buy-in. It includes product management, change management, and project management, like building and tracking schedules. Frequently, it includes putting out a bunch of inevitable 🔥🧯.

In contrast, at the start of my management career in the well-established tax disciplines, direct tax, indirect tax or transfer pricing, my role was clear, easy to describe, and had a clean boundary. As I transition into a leadership role, I need to be able to fill all the spaces in a project and pick up the slack that few others can, so the boundaries start to blur. Of course, one person can’t achieve everything required in a project, but as a lead in this new field of tax innovation, I need to know not only the nitty-gritty technical details but also need to see the big picture and all the implied work that is associated with it. Any one missing piece of the jigsaw could result in the failure of the whole project. I am still developing such an intuition when it comes to global projects. The realisation of this transition is powerful. It prompts me to interact with leads in all related fields, working together and anticipating issues, as one mindset on what needs doing.