A corporate treasurer shares three career essentials: stay curious and ask questions without shame, automate routine work to free up mental space for strategy, and build strong relationships inside your company and with banks. Relationships matter most when you're handling major deals or navigating business stress.
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Look, I think there's a few things and none of this should come as a surprise. You need to be curious. I think if you're not curious, you won't progress in your career. You need to be asking questions, you need to be taking an interest in things. No one's going to spoon feed you through your career. I think the other thing is, and I'm a firm believer of this, there's no such thing as a stupid question, right? You need to ask questions as you're going through and make sure that you have a thorough understanding of of what it is you're doing. Because ultimately if you try and blag it, at some point you will get. I think it's important that you invest in automating mundane tasks and manual tasks because only then when you get the headspace to do what I just mentioned about being curious and asking questions, if 90% of your day is involved in doing operational stuff, by the time you've got the last 10% of your quality headspace, you won't do any of that. And then finally investing in your network. Treasury is a relationship business and it's really important that you spend time with internal stakeholders for sure, but certainly the external stakeholders, your banks, having people who can help you for your projects if there's a significant change in your business, if you're doing a big M and a transaction, knowing who to pick up the phone to, having had conversations previously about how you might structure a deal, these are all absolutely critical. But by the same token, if business isn't going so well, if you made investment in the relationships with your banking contacts, you can have those grown up conversations as well. And that will be helpful in the context of ongoing support when things perhaps aren't going so well. So those key things I would probably call out.
