How the country head of a major asset manager used diplomacy and continuous learning to climb the career ladder

When you're young, you probably think that you have all the time in the world. But that's not necessarily true. You need to think about what are the goals you want to achieve. It's just about putting yourself into something that you want to be good at. 

I was 26 years old managing a multidisciplinary team. People who were in charge of payments, making very complicated calculations. I was somewhat skeptical about my ability to deal with 12 people at the same time with a multitask approach because they were not doing the same things. 

Learning from that was listening to people and adapting to what people's needs were because people don't come with technical specifications. I moved from investment banking to wealth management to have a broader role in the organization. The senior management was highly educated, highly skilled. So for me it was like, oh, this is an ambition. 

Part of my learning was related to the fact that I need to keep moving, and I need to keep focus on closing the gaps between the senior management and myself. 

To my younger me, I would say diplomacy is really important.  It's not about being right, it's about doing the right thing. The financial industry, it's a trust business. Being ethical in any profession is quite important because building your credibility, building your, let's say, mark takes time to get there. Things need to be done, projects need to be delivered. If it needs to take another hour or a day to get people engaged, do it, rather than push it. 

It takes time for you to trust people and the financial services is trust-based. My focus has always been solving the problem, not blaming others. You need to walk also with people who have high standards, so you can really learn that certain things that don't look like a problem, sometimes they are.