Johan Claudot, Winkie Choi, and Benoit Scholtissen discuss what makes a good treasury professional. They emphasize ownership, curiosity, soft skills, and rigor as essential qualities for the role and explore how treasury teams develop talent.
I think you have to try to be always positive because you can face some challenges in the treasury, that's for sure. But I think people need to be curious, they need to be willing to face new challenges. But in the team you need different skills because I need some colleagues also who are happy to do the day to day. You know, they don't all want to become project leader or be the next treasurer, but let's say is to find the right balance in your teams so that you can compose. But I definitely think they need to be taking ownership of what they do independent of the level or the type of job they are doing on day to day. Then basically, yeah, depending on where you are sitting, I think you should be curious on really taking ownership of what you are doing.
I do look for people with not just analytical skills, but communications, strategic role that they have done before because as I mentioned earlier, if you can do the checklist, cash management, et cetera, that's great, that's given. But what is above and beyond what is your capacity to do something we haven't done before? Getting something new, take risk. How do you deal with conflicts? Because you're going to be working with tax and legal and those are favorite words that we have that oftentimes we are in, we contradict with each other. How do you deal with those conflicts? Right, so those are the things that we look at in the skill sets. It's kind of like the soft skills that we're looking for rather than technical skills because those are actually already given. We do expect that. And that's what's above and beyond.
In Apparam. We did not hire so much, actually. We had a very good, strong and stable team for a long time until people wanted to evolve and some of them left, some of them changed inside Abraham, which is also a very good sign when people can move from treasury to another part of the Finance department, then something what I can add well, and it's part of the soft skill and it's something which is key in my opinion treasury, somebody must be absolutely rigorous and a certain ability to absorb some stress. We're in a very operational department. Every mistake can have tremendous consequences. So in that sense, being extremely rigorous, and this is a key point on which I insist all the time is key in my opinion in a Treasury position.
