Successful Career Progression in Treasury with Chris McConnachie

Foreign firstly, having good guidance and counsel from those around you. Our treasurer at the time and assistant treasurer were very instrumental and just helped me think through career choices and those experiences that I may want to consider depending on what future path I went down. You know, I had in my mind at the time that I was absolutely going to go down the treasury path and I had a view to be group treasurer and wanted to follow that kind of trajectory over the next kind of five to 10 years. But I also, I think coming from Northern Rock and seeing I'd say the level of opportunity and experience I was able to get there and how it can disappear very quickly. I did take a very, I'd say long term view of my career opportunities, but also the experiences that I wanted to get along the way. So that was probably one of the reasons why I stepped out to do treasury systems implementation. A lot of people at the time and I'm sure a lot of people today would probably say I was crazy. Why do you want to move out of the world of glamorous capital markets and step into the world of slugging it out with it and the business on putting in a software application? But the long term view of it for me was over my career, the likelihood is I'm going to work on a systems project, I'm possibly going to lead a systems project and I'm probably going to fail on at least one systems project over the 20, 30 years that I'm going to be working. More often than not you'll come from an accounting background, controllership and then move over to a more specialist Corp Finance treasury role. But the opportunity at the time obviously was going to be a stretch for me. Coming from a non accounting background, obviously I had strong enough and good enough depth to be able to perform in the role, but was absolutely going to be relying on the SMEs and team around me. But the view at the time was the organization wanting somebody to come in and kind of transform the elements of the controllership and really move the function forward. Not just be kind of a books and records, but how do we drive the business forward? Also from a performance standpoint. So I'd say I had a couple of people who believed in me and were willing to offer me the opportunity. And I probably got to the point within the treasury world where I had an aspiration to build a broader skill set and I had an aspiration to access the business through other channels. So I was keen to gather experiences that were both group treasurer positive but also CFO positive. At the same time I knew that encompassed treasury, corporate finance, FP and a controllership. There's an inherent bias at different points in your career to kind of signal a landing spot. And what I mean by that is somebody said, well, what do you want to be when you grow up? Do you want to be a chief exec, a cfo, a chief procurement officer? And I think probably through the first 10 years of your career, I think a lot of people go through a, probably a bit of a dilemma, which is, I don't know that answer, but I feel like I'm being forced into it. I went through some of that, but I also had great guidance along the way from many folks who are still at national grade, which is you don't necessarily have to pick a destination, but you need to be clear on the type of work you want to be doing and the type of value you want to be delivering. And then what are those experiences that you need along the way to help you be successful in that? And, and if you can think about it that way, you tend to be probably more role agnostic and a bit more biased towards the experience. And the reality is the type of experience you want and the type of work you want to do will then lead you to a role. But don't feel like you need to pick a role too early on.