Managing Your Professional Brand in Treasury

An impactful professional brand can drive the career momentum of any treasury professional, and a lack of commitment to investing in it or even knowing and carrying about it can create an inherent barrier to career success.  In today’s world of all things AI and technology treasury professionals need to stand out amongst their peers and demonstrate they have skills that matter no matter where technology takes the finance profession.

This is the initial blog in the Managing Your Professional Brand in Treasury blog series. This series will give you actionable advice to build and manage an impactful professional brand that will set you apart from your treasury peers, and empower you to control your career. In this blog we will introduce the key components of a professional brand.

A professional brand consists of many components. The components need to align as that alignment amplifies the impact of a professional brand within a finance team, beyond a finance team to work colleagues, and to professional peers and current and potential new employers.

Five key components of any professional brand are:

  • Your Professional Value Proposition
  • Your LinkedIn Profile                                                  
  • Your Resume
  • Your Skillset
  • Your Network                                                                  
Figure 1. Professional Brand Components                                                                                                        

Your professional value proposition demonstrates the value that you deliver to your employer, colleagues, and professional peers. It is what many people used to call your “elevator pitch”. The task of crafting a professional value proposition can seem daunting to any finance professional regardless of the stage a person is at in his or her career. I have come up with questions that each person wanting to craft a professional value proposition can asak of themselves to illuminate the key pillars of that value proposition.

  • What good things do your current or previous boss(es) have to say about you?
  • What good things would your current or previous colleagues have to say about you?
  • What good things would people that work for you or used to work for you have to say about you?
  • What good things would your connections at your Fintech/bank partners have to say about you?

Your LinkedIn profile serves as the foundation of your online brand. If you do a Google search on your own name, the link to your LinkedIn profile will be the first result. Your LinkedIn profile is the first impression you will make on thousands if not tens of thousands of people who are interested in learning more about you including current and potential new employers, colleagues, and professional peers. As the saying goes “there s nothing more important than making a good first impression” in any relationship, so finance professionals need to invest in creating and managing an impactful LinkedIn profile. Each section of a

LinkedIn profile is important. In a future blog we will share how to build and manage an impactful LinkedIn profile.

Even in today’s digital world resumes matter. Your resume should reflect your professional value proposition and align with your LinkedIn profile. Creating a top-notch resume is as much about what to avoid as it is about what to include in your resume.

Your skillset is critical to job success at any stage of your career. Investing in new skills as well as updating and upgrading existing skills is important. Given the explosion of AI and automation soft/human skills are more important than ever for every finance professional. In future blogs we will dive into which skills are most important in the evolving treasury landscape. This will include sharing how to develop your human skills ranging in areas from effective listening to negotiating with purpose to telling the story beyond the numbers.

A powerful professional network has many components and needs to be managed in order for it to deliver value. You need to have it in addition to knowing how and when to leverage it. In developing each dimension of your network, it is important to keep the following questions in mind:

  • Who Do You Want to Know?
  • Who Do You Need to Know?
  • Who Do You Already Know?
  • Who Know Who You Want to Know?
  • Who Knows Who You Need to Know?

A robust network has people from these groups of people from a professional life:

  • Finance Departmental Colleagues
  • Colleagues Beyond Finance
  • Service & Tech Providers
  • Your Company’s Customer & Suppliers
  • Treasury Professional Peers

In future blogs I will share how to develop your professional network within your treasury department, beyond your treasury department at work, with your treasury peers across the globe, and with your banking and technology partners.

Treasury professionals need to invest in their professional brands and do so with the mindset of continuous improvement. A great brand can drive the career success of any Treasury professional.

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