Successfully Navigating Power, Politics, and Budgeting

Power politics is the "blind spot" in GFOA’s budgeting guidance for local governments, yet budgeting is an inherently political process. GFOA’s guidance has covered technical "GFOA Best Practices" and, more recently, how to shape incentives, manage relationships, and cultivate healthy power dynamics with GFOA’s Financial Foundations for Thriving Communities. However, none of these resources directly address how to handle power politics in budgeting.

Finance officers must not just survive, but must thrive in a political environment. This can be done without succumbing to the worst aspects of politics. In this webinar we will learn about common political power plays the finance officer might encounter, the sources of the finance officer's own political power, and how to ethically exercise that power and redirect potentially destructive political impulses to more productive outcomes from other finance officers and practitioners around the country.

Who Will Benefit: CFO/Finance Director, Budget Manager, Department Director

• Understand how power politics shape the budgeting process
• Learn what skills finance officers can use to exercise their own power
• Discover how other stakeholders in the budget process may use power politics