One of the great business ironies this recession is beginning to expose across numerous finance organizations is that the very talent CFOs have sorely depended on to bring costs down – and in effect save their companies – is now at risk.

It’s a development that once again reveals the bifurcated brain that serves as a talent blueprint for too many finance organizations. That brain routinely divides finance professionals into two large buckets: left brains (linear and literal thinking) and right brains (creativity and innovation).

It’s perhaps no surprise that it’s the left brains who have been receiving kudos from their CFOs these last few years. Having helped strengthen their company’s internal controls and partner with operations managers to slash costs, left brains have been living life large as finance’s go-to guys. Meanwhile, the right brains (think decision support, new growth) have been keeping themselves under wraps or simply masquerading as left brains as they wait for the economic haze to lift.

In certain finance departments, that haze has already lifted, allowing CFOs to begin evaluating their people under a stark new light. The recession apparently helped to accelerate the adoption of a new low-cost finance model, where the left brains are suddenly at risk of being eliminated or relocated to low-cost locations. With this in mind, here are three things (gleaned from recent CFO interviews) that left brains can do to better reveal their right brains.

• Take a business manager out to lunch. Convince them you know as much about growing a business as you do about taking costs out of it.

• Be Big Picture: Look for ways to demonstrate that you understand product management, customer profitability, revenue management. Consider performing reverse reviews of new product strategies and M&A.

• Reveal to business managers that you know how to best summarize the performance of their business, allowing their business to surpass or be in line with management expectations. ###