This is a YouTube video titled "Career Advice from the President of the ACT with Ian Chisholm" containing a monologue by Ian Chisholm recorded in January 2019. Ian discusses leadership principles, the importance of shared vision, curiosity in treasury roles, and the value of professional qualifications in treasury and finance.
My approach to leadership is that one of the things that Shell talks about, when it talks about leadership is about building shared vision. An overarching phrase for just trying to say, making sure that we're all talking from the same hymn sheet. Right. So you, as the leader, are there to articulate the strategy, tell people where they're going, making sure that you've got the right resources in place and that the tasks are allocated out correctly within the team, and developing and empowering that team to actually go and deliver against that strategy. One of the things that I always talk about or try to identify in interview is curiosity. And by that what I mean is not just kind of cognitive ability or analytical abilities and saying, well, I can run the spreadsheets and churn the model and whatever, but actually, the big question that you always ask yourself in treasury is, what does this mean? What do the numbers mean for us? What's the effect of it? What is the effect of it? If markets move, what will happen to us? And if this happens, what does that look like for the company? Or, conversely, if the company decides to go and do this, what does that do to Treasury? It's really important that as an individual in treasury, you're in a specialist function and you need to be the expert in that function and understand how to do an FX deal, how to run cash management or how to manage pension risk or whatever. But you need to understand the business drivers. And why are you bothering to do it. Yeah, and why you're bothering to do it. Trading doesn't exist in kind of an isolation. It exists to service the business and you need to understand what the business drivers are, what the business risks are, the business exposures are, and how the business generates cash and what might change that. I studied the ACT, the AMCT in 98 and then MCT exams in 2000, and I found them not only interesting, but actually extremely useful for my job. And it really taught me the value of the technical qualifications that the act did. And to me, as I said previously, you know, treasury is a very technical, specialist, technical area of finance, which requires proper professional training and qualifications. And it's extremely important, I think, that we've got people who work in treasury who've got those qualifications. So I've always been a very strong supporter of people doing those ACT exams.
