Meet the Mentor: Emily Rees

Introducing Emily Rees, CFO at Cyberfort Group and Potentia Mentor!

Emily is an experienced C-suite finance and HR leader across a wide scope of businesses and sectors, including listed businesses (FTSE 100 and AIM), as well as private equity. Emily brings a wealth of experience to Potentia’s mentorship programme and hopes to help set her mentee up to achieve their career goals.

Why do you think it is important to have mentors?

It's important to have female mentors as it’s through working together that we can impact change and support women during all stages of their career and life to pursue the best opportunities for their own development. Through building a strong network we can ensure that more women are supported to put their best foot forward as they enter the next stage of their careers, especially when women still bear many of the responsibilities outside of the workplace too.

Throughout all stages of my career I have had mentors, both formally and informally, and not always specifically finance focussed. These mentors have not only been role models to me, but have also helped me to maintain a sharp and clear focus on what I want to achieve and how I can deliver on these goals.

What qualities do you value in a mentee?

Above all I value people with the passion and drive to do the right thing. There can be many ways to move through the finance career ladder, but whatever way you have, it’s important for someone to be ambitious for progression and have the desire to do a great job in every role. I can add a lot of value to a mentee that perhaps might struggle to get the balance on perfectionism vs. delivery, or the strategic vs. the operational. It is always a fine balance between these objectives, especially with stakeholders that will drag you either direction! It’s also important that there is an open dialogue between a mentee and a mentor so that we can truly understand one another in order to provide the best advice.

What do you hope to achieve through mentoring a woman in finance?

I want to support my mentee to reach her career goals. I have learnt numerous lessons throughout my finance journey, and I hope through sharing my own experiences that I can smooth my mentee’s journey through their own career path. I have found it extremely useful in my career to have a view from senior leaders on what went well and what they would have done differently; I want to provide this for my mentee to support their development and maximise performance.

Through Potentia I also want to gain a connection to strong financial talent across all industries and understand the key concerns of the next financial leaders.

If you are interesting in joining Potentia, please register via https://www.potentianetworking.com/register