Tor Stian Kjøllesdal talks about building skills and leadership in treasury teams. He covers coaching strategies, empowering people, and how competencies evolve in financial operations roles.
I was very happy and keen to go on when I was asked to take up the leadership position for the team. Moving from being a colleague to leader was of course one of the big question marks for me. How will that work? I think that also went well. Again, utilizing both my personal skills, making sure that you build the necessary trust with people, that you communicate in an open and transparent way and that you care about people, and also utilizing your professional knowledge to be a good discussion partner, but not always give the answers. I think that's also an important balance to sometimes coach people to take their own decisions, even though you know the answer yourself. So I continued that role for three years. Then I was asked to take another challenge which was to take one step further in the ranks and head off a bigger area where the central payment unit was part of it. Now we also included accounts payable, accounts receivable, our internal bank operations and our back office activities for Treasury. So then I was starting to be leaders to leaders to who run their own teams. That again creates a new dynamic. As a leader, you need to be even more focused on coaching. You need to make sure that you empower the leader below you to take their role and to grow and also accept and hope and encourage them to kind of come forward with more qualities and better decisions than you would have taken and not be afraid of hiring the best people also there to really challenge and to grow. The function for me, it has been to give those people working with me on our scope the empowerment to take the responsibility that we have been given to develop the solutions to run treasury the way we want. Of course, when you have organizations, people are very different. So for me it's been very important to accept those differences, focus on the different strengths that people have, treat everyone with the same respect, and also try to spend time on people. In the role I had in the corporate area, of course, the number of people were much more limited, so it was maybe around 10, 12 people. So then you also have more time to spend time with your people and get to know them even better, the full organization. But for me it is to build the necessary trust to empower your people and to be available. The main goal is to first increase the flexibility with our resources to assign people to the prioritized tasks, to move quicker, to respond to different business needs. So that's from in a way the company and the business perspective equally important or maybe even more important. This is also a new setup that should enable people development in a new way. You can get short term assignments, you can rotate without changing your position in a more flexible way, you can get exposure to different areas within treasury and Tax in a short time frame. So we believe that this is a good step of taking the people development and also the overall competence focus, which will become more and more important. We see that competencies are developing and changing from more basic traditional treasury competence, which is still the core and very important, more into new competencies as well. How to manage data, how to make sure that you can utilize technology in a good way, and also different business competencies that you need to support the business in a better way.
