By Evan Sparks
The past three years have been a transformative time for banks. The recovery from the pandemic, the 2023 regional banking crisis, the dramatic run-up in rates—all of these have left bankers tossing out playbooks and writing new ones on the fly.
Amid this change, bankers continued to educate themselves at the ABA Stonier Graduate School of Banking—a program that goes beyond the banking nuts and bolts to develop leaders who can handle change and crisis. I recently caught up with four 2023 Stonier graduates to reflect on their experience and how their careers have been changed.
Leading through change
The 2023 Stonier graduates began their graduate school experience virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic—and ended it amid the regional banking crisis that saw Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank fail.
Jon Bridges, consumer lending COO at Virginia-based Atlantic Union Bank, says that Stonier prepared him for the latter moment. “I felt much more comfortable quickly seeing why we were not Silicon Valley Bank—how we were structurally different—and being able to explain that to anyone on my team who may have been concerned.
Megan Cassell is CFO at Builtwell Bank in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She points out that the pandemic dominated the start of her Stonier experience, including a virtual year in 2021. “We’ve all been leading banks or have been big part of the bank’s management,” she reflects. “And every piece of material we’ve gotten from Stonier has been current, up-to-date and has been real-time information to help us navigate these turbulent times.” She adds that her bank made an acquisition in the midst of the pandemic as well.
How did bankers tackle these challenges successfully? Lorna Elizabeth Crawford, CRCM, a VP and Community Reinvestment Act officer at Ameris Bank in Georgia, recalls a Stonier class on leading change that taught the framework of being a “ROCC” of trust—for reliable, open, competent and compassionate. “When it’s packaged like that, you realize that’s what we did to get our teams to work,” she says, adding that this mindset prepares her for “everything from here on out—expect change. That’s the only thing that is going to be constant.”
A global view of the business
As banking professionals develop their careers, it can be easier to build depth in subject-matter expertise and less to build the breadth of knowledge about the complex enterprise of a bank. That kind of development used to be more standard in large and regional banks, where management training programs rotated rising executives through several different areas of the bank—but the demands of a growing knowledge base make it harder for people to break into different areas. For example, Bridges notes that “mortgage banking is a very different business model than traditional banking,” so he used his Stonier time to take electives on core banking topics.
Meanwhile, for Cassell, “My world was bigger when I came back to Chattanooga. Even though I see the broad financials of every activity that goes on, I usually only see the end result.” But after her time at Stonier, “being able to expand my vision of the world, and our bank, is so critical in my role—because otherwise my decision making can just be based on the end results.
Stonier also educates students about how things work in different sizes of banks. “It’s great to hear different perspectives, but also to know that you have an opportunity as a smaller bank leader to truly invest in your team, and to give them exposure in different areas before advancing up,” says Youssi Farag, CFO at Citizens Bank of Edmond in Oklahoma.
Empowering self, empowering others
In addition to the banking nuts and bolts, the Stonier experience takes students beyond the balance sheet to focus on leadership—a learning process that starts inside. “I’ve learned a lot through this process with the self-awareness piece of it,” says Cassell. “The leadership classes have been phenomenal on focusing on how you can’t understand others until you understand yourself.”
Back home, building an inclusive culture on the team requires understanding herself and then “applying that to a team and welcoming them in is to understand them too, understand what makes them tick. It’s amazing how much you can accomplish together when you build on those strengths.”
Trusting bank professionals leads to improvements, Farag adds. “The people who are doing the work on a daily basis should be engaged to make your process a lot more efficient, a lot more productive and they can apply what they will learn today to actually get us through another pandemic, through another difficult time.”
Bridges notes that his first two years of Stonier stretched him and challenged him to grow in knowledge and skill. The leadership content in the third year helped him move even further. “While I think it’s still valuable for me to try to stretch myself, it’s unrealistic to try to be great at everything,” he reflects. “So I’m going to go back and really partner with the leaders on my team to empower them to step up. Together we will be more effective maximizing each of our strengths.” Not only will it improve their satisfaction and the team dynamic, “it will drive better results for the company.”
Bridges laughs for a moment. “It’s been a little transformative,” he deadpans. “Two years of trying to figure out how do I make myself something I’m not quite, and then all of a sudden realizing, ‘You know what, let me embrace it. I’m just going to leverage the people who are good at that and everyone wins!’”
Crawford expands on that point. “Stonier freed me of that,” she says. Now, “I work from my position of strength and I give others the permission to work from their position of strength. And then we get the job done with everybody giving their best.”
Continuous learning opportunities
It’s been an old chestnut in business for a long time that organizations should “fail fast” and embrace mistakes as a tool for learning. This makes for a great TED Talk or business school case, but for many workers—particularly middle and senior managers—there are few incentives to acknowledge, much less celebrate, failure.
In Cassell’s case, Stonier helped her reframe a difficult learning experience. “My capstone is actually born out of a failure that I had in 2020,” she recalls. “I brought in a consultant to do process improvement and realized that unless you have metrics, buy-in, and accountabilities in place, your scope creeps and then it quickly becomes impossible to align everyone. So I needed to begin with what I learned from that costly failure: We did not put the appropriate metrics and analytics in place.”
Cassell’s capstone project revisited the experience and built on the hard lessons. “After assessing where the holes were, I’ve found an inexpensive and more sustainable way to accomplish the same initiative. This time it includes using existing resources enhanced with more accountability, and the implementation risk is much lower.” She smiles. “However, ask me next year if I might learn another lesson between now and then.”
She’s taking this approach back to the bank, as is Farag. Rather than taking a punitive approach with her team, Farag says she “goes back and make sure that they have the tools that they needed. Were they missing a report that they didn’t know about? Did they know how this ratio is defined and what exactly it is supposed to measure?”
Bridges brings in the concept of minimum viable product to help reframe the question. “It’s not really a project failure; it’s a deviation from the path of getting to the result.” For him, “I actually don’t celebrate failure, but I also don’t dwell on failure.” Get up, brush yourself off, keep moving.
