First day jitters. They don’t seem to go away, whether it’s your first day of second grade or your first day as a member of the C-suite.
But just as your first day seatmate might be your new best friend for the year, the connections you make on day one as a CFO can be critical for future success in the position. It feels natural to immediately seek out connections when you’re starting at an entirely new org, but it’s a whole different ball game when you’ve been promoted internally.
Just ask Nicolette Turner, who stepped into the CFO role at Headspace this October after serving as SVP of finance for the meditation app.
Before joining Headspace, Turner held finance roles at Cardinal Health and medical device company Hillrom—and those healthcare roles are also what made Turner an appealing candidate when she first joined as SVP.
She told CFO Brew that early conversations with Headspace centered around the company’s intention to “bring somebody in who had a deeper level of healthcare experience” so Headspace could “take that journey from being only a consumer wellness company into a true healthcare company.”
Within 10 months at Headspace, Turner had helped the meditation company start the merger of video-based therapy provider Ginger, eventually leading to a $3 billion merger in 2021.
Now, her key task as CFO is pushing Headspace in its next phase of growth—and her first day laid the groundwork.
Key meetings. Leading up to her first day, plenty of people outside of her team and the board had already been informed that she’d be stepping into the CFO role, Turner explained. That made her first day “all about establishing new ways of working [with] people who are very familiar with me, but in a very different type of role,” she said.
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To do that successfully, she prioritized listening sessions right away. Turner said on Day One she sat down with key stakeholders “who I’d worked with previously, but just not in the same capacity” and asked them to tell her “what they need out of me in this role going forward,” she remembered. “A lot of that is just ground setting, [and] also to just figure out how we work together in a new capacity,” she continued.
But as much as she was there to listen, she was also prepared to share her own vision for the company’s next few years, the ways in which she might differ from past CFOs, and how she wanted to approach the CFO role in general.
Unwind. While her first day as CFO was packed with back-to-back listening sessions, Turner’s time at the end of the work day was just as indicative of how she’ll approach her new post.
Turner had been using Headspace as part of her previous employer’s benefits when the company first reached out about the role. “I was pregnant during the pandemic, and [I] started using [Headspace] to really just unwind and manage stress and anxiety during a particularly vulnerable time of my life,” she explained.
After her first day as CFO, she followed her normal nightly routine, which just so happens to include some meditation exercises from the very company where she’s now finance chief.
“I have a toddler—three years old—and he’s absolutely obsessed with the Headspace Sesame Street series. There’s one we literally do every single night.” she said. “Honestly, what helps me unwind at the end of the day is staying grounded with my family.”