Alan Goldblatt explains why treasury professionals need strong networks and mentors. He argues that long-term relationships, knowledge sharing across teams, and open communication are what actually build skills and advance careers in the field.
Foreign what really is important for everyone is networking and mentoring, mentoring folks, you know, if you're in the treasury field today, you know, mentoring, you know, the junior treasury team members or people who are not necessarily, you know, in your organization, but establishing the context, contacts through networking and maintaining those contacts over the course of one's career is truly, truly important. From my perspective, it's really helpful through networking to understand what else is going on in your field. And I don't specifically mean about what jobs are available, rather it's more of what are you working on and what someone else is working on. Being inquisitive about, you know, the things that, you know, folks are, are focused on at various points, you know, in one's career. And you know, so, so to me it's very helpful. And also, you know, through your, you know, through your networks, when you run into a challenging issue or one that you need, need to, you know, talk with people in other, at other firms or even other industries just to, you know, try to understand best practices. You know, it's great to be able to reach out to that network, established network that you have to get some advice from people that you know and trust. It's a lot easier to get those conversations going with folks that you've established a long term relationship with than the many cold calls that people would get. And it's also the same. Oftentimes you only hear from someone when they're looking for, for a job, that's okay, but at the same time, building that longer term relationship is key. My role as treasurer is one in which I am involved in many of the strategies that the business is undertaking or planning to undertake. And it's my role to make sure it gets disseminated in an appropriate manner to my team members so that they are aware of what's happening. But it doesn't always come top down. A lot of times because the treasury team members, at least on my team, are also working side by side remotely of course, with many of the members of other teams within the company, not just finance, they are learning about things too. And it's this dialogue and this openness where if something new is happening, it's not necessarily only impacting their area, it may be impacting others. So I encourage my teams to bring it up to talk about it so that because of what may be impacting one area of treasury may also be a big impact on another area or finance that we're not aware of. So it's having that engagement with one's team to make sure on a regular basis to make sure that they're aware of the things I'm seeing, but at the same time, the rest of the team is aware of what others are seeing.
