Leading Through Banking's Next Normal

[Music Playing]

Jim Marous (00:11):

I have done 600 podcasts for Banking Transformed and this is a fun gig, because it's our third year of doing these, doing either four or eight podcasts while at The Financial Brand Forum.

Jim Marous (00:26):

Number one, it's great to be able to go a different direction for content but just as interestingly, it creates a really good post-event thing you can look at and learn what we are learning, and everybody who didn't make it to the session knows they can pick it up afterwards. So, thank you very much for being here. We appreciate your applause at the end if we do well.

Jim Marous (00:49):

Our first guest this afternoon is a — I can't ever say old friend because he's not that old, not like me, but Liz Wolverton came from Synovus Bank, and she is a person who impressed me the first time I met her as being a person that really understood people.

Jim Marous (01:08):

That's not her primary role, but it's the way she communicates, and I think one of the things we take for granted is the communication aspect to everything we do, and the success or failure it determines.

Jim Marous (01:22):

Pinnacle Financial Partners, they're combining with Synovus and her role is still pretty close to the same, but what's interesting is when we first got together and said, “Hey, do you want to do this thing on employee management during times of disruption?” Neither one of us knew how disruptive mergers can be just in the employee's mind. So, join me as I welcome Liz Wolverton.

Jim Marous (01:46):

So, Liz, we had you on the podcast before, and what's interesting is when we had you on the show earlier, we didn't start this way, but we touched on some of the same subjects. And the thing that really moved me towards you is how much of a cheerleader you were for Synovus in an area that dealt with virtually everything digital at Synovus.

Jim Marous (02:14):

So, it wasn't a human resource position, but you made it that because you realized that there was an uphill battle. So, can you talk a little bit about your background and what areas of the financial institution you work with?

Liz Wolverton (02:27):

Sure. I have a very interesting background for somebody who runs digital. So, I started my career out of school as an accountant, as an auditor, CPA with Ernst & Young, and that's really what my progression was in industry and when I came to Synovus Financial, my first job was to implement Sarbanes-Oxley. So, really exciting stuff, control environment.

Liz Wolverton (02:53):

But over time, through kind of a progression and a company like many people work for that provides opportunity for those who kind of get in and ask questions, you start asking questions and they say, “Okay, well, I'm going to let you do that.” So, that really kicked me out of accounting into the strategic side of things.

Liz Wolverton (03:11):

And ultimately, as the bank strategy grew into things like digital, I just sort of fell in the lap of digital. But it wasn't a natural progression, I wasn't from technology. And so, I do think that's why I may think a little bit differently. The technologists who I partner with remind me that I think a little bit differently.

Jim Marous (03:30):

I'm sure they do.

Liz Wolverton (03:31):

Sometimes that's not as good but yeah, absolutely. So, it's been a very interesting progression for me.

Jim Marous (03:39):

So, your title says digital, your role has been transformation efforts, but you could very easily be the Chief Human Resource Officer. How do you see these as in ways the same role?

Liz Wolverton (03:53):

So, I don't know if I could be Chief Human Resources Officer, they have a lot of very specific things they do. But I think for me, banking, if you all filled in the gap in your head, banking is all about. And for me, it's about human outcomes, and that's what we're trying to do for our clients.

Liz Wolverton (04:11):

I mean, we are at the heart of the most important thing within their lives, which is money and financial security, and our job is to drive human outcomes. And so, you can't take the human out of anything we do. So, digital, great as a technology, but to the extent that it can't drive human outcomes, it's not very valuable to us in banking.

Liz Wolverton (04:34):

And so, whether that's the design or whether that's mobilizing people around how to help your clients adapt, adopt, it's all about the human psyche at the end of the day, because that's what's going to drive the human outcomes.

Jim Marous (04:51):

So, human psyche, great starting point for this part, is that when you close a branch, when you go through a merger, when you implement new digital solutions that whether or not the employees will outwardly say it to you or not-

Liz Wolverton (05:07):

Well, they will.

Jim Marous (05:08):

They feel like, “Okay, is this a replacement of me?” How do you deal with those aspects? And now I'm going to take it a step further with the reality that things you don't control in the financial institutions such as all the noise going around us every day to wake up in the middle of night at 3:45 or 4:15 in the morning going, “Okay, what's tomorrow going to be like for me?”

Jim Marous (05:30):

Because something's posted at that time of the night with regard to what's going on in the world, and it impacts people. How do you find out or how do you determine what the people are thinking when they're kind of, in many cases, ashamed of saying that they're insecure?

Liz Wolverton (05:47):

I think I'm blessed to work in an environment where people aren't very quiet about what they think. You definitely have to make sure that you're not so buried in the thing that you're doing that you forget about the people around you which could be hard.

Liz Wolverton (06:06):

I mean, we're going through a merger right now, so we have a lot of decisions to make and my job right now is conversion. And we have a conversion that's happening in March. Come hell or high water, that conversion is happening in March. So, there's a lot of tactical things to do.

Jim Marous (06:23):

That's a very quick conversion.

Liz Wolverton (06:24):

It's a fast conversion. I keep telling them that, but it's a fast conversion. But you get so caught up in the one million things that are so important that you have to literally intentionally take time to pull up and go, “But everything I'm talking about right now is going to affect somebody.”

Liz Wolverton (06:42):

And so, as soon as we turned down requirements in March, I got my leaders together and said, “By mid-May, we have to have our plan together in terms of teams and clients because there's so much that has to be done way before we get to March.”

Liz Wolverton (07:04):

So, what I would tell you is this: you have to be intentional. I mean, it is so easy to get caught up in the one, two, three, four, five tactical things that you have to do every day that you have to think about how people are going to receive it.

Liz Wolverton (07:18):

When I say people, certainly, you have to think about your team members but you have to think about the clients. You can't just think about what's happening and what the end state is, you have to think about where they are today and what it's going to take them to get to that finish line.

Liz Wolverton (07:34):

What it's going to take to get to the end, which is very different based on the different stakeholders. And so, some people are super excited about the change, and some people are just anxious because they know what it's going to take to get there.

Jim Marous (07:51):

So, going through all these transformations, these disruptions, so to speak, you have a lot of people. This merger, as I remember it from banking days, impacts people at all levels, all the way to the top of the organization, peers of yours, superiors of yours. Everybody's got that question: am I a survivor or am I not a survivor or is my job going to drastically change?

Jim Marous (08:17):

It's different when you're working, I think, with a teller line to a degree or with a person who works in a department that may be being changed by AI. How do you work with overall people that are at a higher level in the organization to get them on board mentally and to make sure that everybody around them knows that importance?

Liz Wolverton (08:39):

The importance of what's happening below us, is that what you mean?

Jim Marous (08:44):

And above us. Yeah, both. Because they personally may be directly impacted. So, they got to buy in the way a teller would be if you close a branch.

Liz Wolverton (08:52):

I think you say it just like it is. I mean, there's one thing about me, I'm very straightforward. I'm not going to pull many punches. So, we've been around — look, I remember, I was aware of the merger and all I could think about was the day I knew we were going to announce it, and you all know that you can't say anything to anybody until it's happening.

Liz Wolverton (09:17):

And so, I started this was probably June and I think the announcement was in July. I was reticent about going, okay, I'm going to have 24 hours maybe to tell 1,600 people that this is happening, and for the teams that I led, they were going to have to open the doors and be calm and steady and excited.

Liz Wolverton (09:45):

And so, everybody said, “We're going to have time to get people to digest this and here's what's going to happen the first week and the second week.” I said, “I've got six hours to have our team feel stable enough that they're excited about this,” because as soon as the clients come in, the first thing they're going to say is, “What do you think about this?” They're not asking me, I'm not out there in the branch, they're asking the people.

Liz Wolverton (10:11):

And I think when you tell it like that to the group that you're leading with, all of a sudden, the fact that there was a moratorium for me saying anything for 12 hours said, “Well, why don't we lift that? Why don't we let you do that a little bit earlier in order to get those folks prepared?”

Liz Wolverton (10:30):

So, you just have to be really honest, and you have to absolutely cannot put yourself in your shoes. You have to put yourself in the shoes of your teams and understand the jobs that they're going to have to do.

Jim Marous (10:43):

Is your role in the merger also in communicating to the company that you merged with? I mean, you have to communicate to those employees as well, or is that being handled by someone else that was from their organization?

Liz Wolverton (10:54):

So, prior to legal day one, we really did things separately in terms of communication for the team member basis. Now, from day one, we were very connected. Once the roles were announced in the GoForward company, we were connected at the top of the house.

Liz Wolverton (11:10):

And certainly, you want to make sure messaging is consistent. It's not, “Hey, we're hearing this and we're hearing that,” that really gets you off to a bad start. But now, subsequently, it's a collective messaging. I mean, legal day one was January one.

Jim Marous (11:29):

Your people at Synovus all know you. They've all come in contact with you one way or the other because change has impacted everybody in your organization. So, they kind of know that number one, you're truthful, you're trustworthy, you're going to tell it like it is even if it's painful, and that trust level and that brand of yours plays well. How have you found it to play at an organization that did not know you?

Liz Wolverton (11:58):

That's a really good question.

Jim Marous (12:01):

Finally.

Liz Wolverton (12:02):

Yeah, that's a really good question. Hopefully, it plays well. I think when you're in — look, anytime you're in this type of situation, you're always trying to figure out who can I trust, who can I not trust? And I don't know that day one that they know exactly what it means when you're that kind of straightforward, but I think when you evidence that I'm not going to say anything behind that stage that I'm not going to say right here, and I mean that. I mean, that's just me. I think it ends up playing well in terms of, look, I know what I'm going to get when I talk to that person.

Liz Wolverton (12:51):

And I think it's really important. I mean, in any situation, whether it's a merger or whether it's any kind of other change, just being straightforward, constructively, respectfully is the best way to be for a company. You're not going to move quickly and move in tandem if you can't just hash it out when you need to. Passive aggressive behavior is not helpful.

Jim Marous (13:15):

But you've seen it before and the reality is authenticity can be built in a nanosecond with some caution. It's swipe right, swipe left, I've never been on a dating app, but I've heard that's way worse. But the reality is to be able to do that, you have to find ways to do that almost instantaneously, so you don't end up with two different cultures, ending cultures.

Jim Marous (13:36):

I mean, I mentioned it on Monday, I don't know if it was in this room or somewhere else that we have some airlines out there that basically, they merged, but the cultures didn't, the people didn't. And it's not good when I step on a plane and I can instantaneously know which legacy organization that crew came from, that plane came from, and I just feel either comfortable or uncomfortable.

Jim Marous (13:59):

And there's certain cities I won't fly to because I know that that's entirely one side of the equation. But when you're dealing with AI, AI is like this nebulous beast that nobody really knows how it's going to move.

Liz Wolverton (14:12):

I love that.

Jim Marous (14:14):

But AI is always going to feel like it can replace me. I know I feel it, I know everybody around me feels it can. How do you motivate your teams to move beyond the fear factor and help guide them towards being an agent of change?

Jim Marous (14:31):

Because at the end of the day, you're not only in charge of the integration of the two organizations, but more importantly, you're in a daily job of saying the last thing I can afford because it's my day job is having the digital organization start to fall apart because of lack of cohesion or we're pulling on the same side of the rope. How do you make it so that the employee realizes that I won't even say they're part of the equation because it may not always be, how do you build that so that your initiatives succeed?

Liz Wolverton (15:10):

Let me just kind of talk about what I've seen at our enterprise level, and I can't attribute it all to myself, but I can look back now and go, I don't even know if we knew that that was kind of sharp, but it's worked well. One is to introduce forms of AI as something cool and helpful as opposed to something that's an opposition and something that's going to replace me.

Liz Wolverton (15:35):

And by the way, I would say that I would tell anybody (and we talk about this a lot), it's very difficult to assume, and I'm sure if somebody could come up with an example right now and prove me wrong, and that happens all the time — but it's very difficult to assume that AI is going to replace every component of everything I do every day.

Liz Wolverton (15:53):

So, I would tell people, know your worth, know your value. There are things that we want to do to take things off your plate, not take your place at the table. So, there are things that you do today that could be enabled by AI, but at the same time, look at the richness that provides you and everything else you can do and spend more time in that you can't. So, that’s one case.

Liz Wolverton (16:13):

But our COO for our new bank, who was our head of technology at Tech and Ops at Synovus, was very progressive about saying, “I want to bring Copilot into the bank.” And that was kind of a bold move because in a regulated environment, we don't like to introduce things that look at a lot of data.

Liz Wolverton (16:34):

And what he ended up doing was building (I'll represent it in correctly and he'll laugh if I try to explain this) basically a safe space. Like it was protected in terms of what it was looking at, what it was ingesting, and then what it was doing. So, it was kind of a quarantine space, but it does a lot.

Liz Wolverton (16:50):

And so, he made it very broadly open to people, and then gave some very simple use cases to very disorganized people with email like me that Jim Marous was like, “Where is that email from Jim Marous where he sent me those questions?” “I can't find it.”

Liz Wolverton (17:07):

So, I just type it into Copilot and I don't even say where's the email from Jim Marous on questions or questions. I say, “Hey, remind me of the things that I should be thinking about and any prior correspondence.” And it would summarize it. Obviously, I mean, everybody’s like, “Dah, we use it.”

Liz Wolverton (17:23):

But I mean, it was little things like that, and also, hey, how do I take X, Y, Z and put it into a concise presentation or research type points instead of every time the finance area had to do a presentation and go remember what Synovus financial reported three months — like just go out and ask, I want this data point five years in a row. It's an internal presentation, not external SEC auditable.

Liz Wolverton (17:49):

But introduced ways to leverage AI that guess what it did? First of all, it was fun, excited people but then they started thinking about how to use it in their jobs to make their jobs easier. And so, the idea started coming up, not being pushed out.

Liz Wolverton (18:08):

Now, we actually did just initiate at the first meeting this week of AI Executive Council to try to now corral that because we have so many ideas coming in in terms of where AI can help. So, I mean, I guess from the beginning, a smart thing was they built it more as a teammate as opposed to an adversary.

Jim Marous (18:32):

So, you're merging different cultures, merging different teams, and you're trying to merge different levels of AI and digital progressiveness.

Liz Wolverton (18:44):

We've used AI a lot in the merger, by the way.

Jim Marous (18:48):

And every day, we don't tell everybody how we're doing it but going I got this challenge, what do you think I should do? But you have two cars are moving at different speeds on the same track. Number one, how do you do that from a business digital standpoint, and how do you do that from a people standpoint?

Jim Marous (19:11):

Because it's not like you know exactly where everybody stands, you had to investigate that during the process. But more importantly, you got to quickly make it so this feels like one organization to your customers, and that's a people deal as much as it is a technology deal.

Jim Marous (19:27):

And I think only because I know you, that we could have easily made this about how do you make digital work during a merger, but this is bigger than that, because at the foundation, it's how do we make it so that the people can move quicker or slower, whatever it has to be.

Liz Wolverton (19:44):

I mean, I don't know that it's any different in a merger than any other situation, and you have to give some people something common to rally around. I mean, what brings people together? A common cause.

Liz Wolverton (19:56):

And so, I think our CEO’s done a great job of like this is our vision and we both have histories, and there's a lot in the middle there that you got to get through. And every decision has hard feelings or good feelings. But at the end of the day, you have to give everybody a shared mission to work towards and keep pointing them to that.

Liz Wolverton (20:22):

Maybe it's, well, guys, we honestly don't have time to wrestle over a lot of these decisions because we have a conversion day of March. And so, where we might soften the edges and consider more things, let's talk about the brass tacks that are going to help us get there and get our customers past that quicker.

Liz Wolverton (20:41):

And then that removes a lot of the things that you might debate. And so, I think rallying around a common mission, and then getting people on board that want to be on board with that. I mean, you've got to quickly decide who wants to go there and who's going to have a hard time moving forward.

Liz Wolverton (21:01):

I mean, I've done in every big … I didn't sign up for transformation. I should have thought about that. I didn't realize that when I got into banking. But because there's like a transformation, every other … I don't call it the new normal. I'm like, what's the next normal? That's my term (what's the next normal?) But you have to decide who's going to be able to do that. I'm very straightforward.

Liz Wolverton (21:26):

When we made some big changes in branches, I said, “Okay, here's where we're going to go. I'm super excited about this. Here's all the reasons I'm super excited about this. It's going to be really hard.” But it's going to be harder if you're not loving that place because getting to that place is going to take a lot of work. Getting to that place is going to take some cuts.

Liz Wolverton (21:44):

Now, when we get there, it's going to be great and we're all going to be excited to be there, but if you're not ready for the journey, I will show you a very nice, respectful way to get off at the next stop. And that's what you have to do with … so you have to decide who's going to be on board. Otherwise, you're dragging pain a long way.

Jim Marous (22:04):

Let's take a short break here and recognize the sponsor of this podcast.

[Music Playing]

Jim Marous (22:11):

So, you're one person, I know that, and the massiveness of what you're dealing with is like playing whack-a-mole. How do you personally, I’ll call it deputize people that can talk your talk and walk your walk, or how do you figure out who those people are going to be quickly because you have time limits on this.

Jim Marous (22:32):

And you had time limits on digital transformation efforts, you had timelines and implementation efforts. More than ever before, we no longer can say, “Oh, we'll get this done during this calendar year.” It's kind of like our annual plan knowing that if you missed it, you missed it.

Jim Marous (22:45):

Now, these deadlines are real because other things depend on those things happening if you have your other part of the organization … Pinnacle is behind on one area, they got to get up to speed on where you want to be because you're judged by your slowest partner. How do you deputize, again, for lack of a better term, other people that can preach on your behalf?

Liz Wolverton (23:11):

I just think you select leadership very carefully, which is not easy because sometimes you need to fill positions very quickly. So, I try to not be waiting until that moment to have to fill a role. I mean, you have a pipeline and that sort of thing.

Liz Wolverton (23:30):

But I'm hyper selective when it comes to the leadership style, probably less selective when it comes to the technical competency. I got a lot of people that … I mean, look, if you asked me to take a quiz on some of the stuff that I'm leading technically, I would fail all day long. But I can sniff out a problem in a second and I can bring people together and say, “We got to solve it.”

Liz Wolverton (23:55):

I was on the phone super early out here in Vegas, it was five o'clock this time and it was eight o'clock Georgia time this morning because something came up yesterday and I just said, “Look, I don't even know those terms that you all are talking about, but I can tell you that that is headed down a bad path. So, let's get on the phone tomorrow and let's talk about how we're prepared to come to the table with the folks we need to talk about what we need to talk about and solve it, because it sounds like it's spinning.”

Liz Wolverton (24:29):

So, I do think that leadership style is a very big thought process of what I have. And I'm very careful about my proxy, very careful about my proxy.

Jim Marous (24:42):

So, you build teams in every one of the initiatives you're working on. How important are these — that's a rhetorical question, because it's going to go right down. It's very important, not the answer I want. So, in building these teams, what are the advantages to bringing truly everybody to the table that gets impacted by a change, that we all found in certain ways people we'd like to not have around that table, but that’s not an option in many cases.

Jim Marous (25:13):

How do you bring people to the team and make them excited about what's going to happen around that table as opposed to be in major stress because it's being forced, the deadline’s being forced on them or even worse, that they're afraid of losing? Because I'm sorry, but old styles is if you win, then I lose, as opposed to we can all find a way. How do you broker that?

Liz Wolverton (25:39):

I mean, I think again, there's some core tenets of this that are going to sound so Captain Obvious, but sometimes we just don't do it. A, I don't think you can have everybody at the table. And when I say you can't have everybody, sometimes you have to slim down and have representative samples at the table, because if you get a room of 60 people, you're not going anywhere, anytime fast.

Jim Marous (26:02):

Probably not in our industry.

Liz Wolverton (26:04):

No, no, no, but we do a lot of outreach in terms of surveys and that sort of thing that get the populace at large, and you begin to understand, okay, what's the pulse here? And then you drill down with a manageable set of people that can have a constructive conversation. And you have to be very deliberate about what are the things that we want to achieve in this conversation?

Liz Wolverton (26:32):

At the end of the day, most of the time, we know where we're aiming, and then it's very important that you come into the room, not reading the room and you come into the room, always say, like, “I want to know what this person, this person and this person is unpacking before they get to that table, so we can speak to it.”

Liz Wolverton (26:52):

And I think people are much more receptive of the decision, even if it doesn't go their way. If you say, “I want you to understand that these are the four things I thought about. And maybe part of that is I thought about the fact that's going to be a lot of hard work on you and here's where we're thinking about supporting that.”

Liz Wolverton (27:08):

If you just say I'm doing X, Y, Z, it may be like, “Well, she has no idea what that's going to mean to me.” So, you actually have to talk out loud about what you know the impacts are, but why you made the decision anyway. People think it's the hardest thing to do, I think it's one of the most effective things to do.

Liz Wolverton (27:28):

I mean, when I first took over for consumer banking, I don't know if for 10 years they'd wanted those instant issue machines, but they thought they had a new victim and they were going to get the instant issue machines. What year is it right now? This is 2023, I said, “We missed that ship. I'm not spending $4 million that because we can go to digital instant issue.”

Liz Wolverton (27:52):

But I spoke to why I knew that they had wanted it, how we were trying to solve for it, and why it really wasn't a good decision to do it. So, you have to be able to think through as good as you can. I mean, one thing I've learned is never to anticipate that you know everything walking into that room.

Jim Marous (28:09):

Oh, you'll be proven wrong really quickly.

Liz Wolverton (28:11):

Yeah, you will.

Jim Marous (28:11):

Well, it's interesting because we've talked about it recently that generative AI and all the tools out there have trained us that having all the answers is going to make bad conclusions. Having a lot of questions is the way that AI works.

Jim Marous (28:27):

And if you ask a lot of questions, it's amazing how you realize the smartest person in the room is the person that asks the question, not the person that has all the answers because it looks like there's examples-

Liz Wolverton (28:40):

No, I mean, I do. I mean, I'm a question asker. That's me. I think that's where I get myself into trouble or maybe where I get myself into jobs, is that I ask a lot of questions or ask why or why wouldn't we look at it that way and not in an abrasive way. I can see people going, “Well, did you think about this?” I'm like, “Oh, gosh, why would we look at this?” And probably I'm laughing because that's probably why I love it.

Liz Wolverton (29:03):

My CEO told me one of the edicts that he had for all of us at the beginning of the year was to leverage AI, leverage Copilot in very deliberate ways. And I remember him saying, “You're one of the top three users.” I said, “I'm not surprised because every time I think of something, I'm in there asking it questions and amazed at sort of the content that it kind of pushes me to think into.”

Liz Wolverton (29:30):

Our head of technology was over at my house watching the end of the masters on Sunday and there are a number of us sitting on the couch and he looked up us and started laughing. He said, “I just took a picture of all of you and asked Claude to describe each one of your personalities when you go to bed tonight, which favorite drink is.”

Liz Wolverton (29:49):

And by the way, it thought I was underage, and I think it thought I was underage because I had a caddy outfit on and I was slouched down with my phone, and so it thought I was a teenager.

Jim Marous (29:58):

There you go. That’s good.

Liz Wolverton (29:59):

I was complimented until I saw the picture and realized it could see nothing of myself, just my hat, so.

Jim Marous (30:04):

So, you're up against a lot of challenges, what is the biggest challenge you have right now in the whole (lack of a cliché) digital transformation issue, but looking at the change that we're having to do in the industry to keep a humanized aspect of digital and to move forward.

Jim Marous (30:26):

What is your biggest challenge you have, I shouldn't say today, because you'll maybe take it literally — and so if it was today, it was that call at five o'clock. But overall, what's the thing that's the hardest to solve for right now?

Liz Wolverton (30:39):

I mean, let me just pick one because I don't know if there's a hardest to solve for right now. What I wake up at night thinking about all the time right now is not the decisions on the systems, not the capabilities, and I'm sorry, it's personally specific because it's merger-related, it's how do we get everybody ready? I've been through a big digital change before, I know what I did wrong last time, and that's another thing I'm not afraid to say. I know I was so naive-

Jim Marous (31:20):

You remember those more than you remember the successes.

Liz Wolverton (31:22):

I remember thinking that if we'd gone through all the FAQs, if the call center was ready, if we had our digital war rooms set up with our vendors that we were ready, like nothing can get us down. Do you know who I completely, woefully underprepared? Was the people in the branches. I mean, we did not educate them enough, and people-

Jim Marous (31:46):

And the questions they were going to get.

Liz Wolverton (31:48):

Yes, people were obviously calling the call center, but they were going into the branches. I didn't just not prepare them for (and I'll take it upon myself, I'll say I) how to walk with customers through certain things. We told them how to point them to FAQs and point them to the call center, but the great thing about our bank is it's very relationship-centered.

Liz Wolverton (32:12):

So, Liz, no, no, no, I want to sit with you and you tell me how to do that — but the biggest thing I didn't prepare them for is people are going to react viscerally to change. And when they did, the sort of fear I think our folks had in did we roll something out that wasn't good? Did we do this right? And the reality is, yeah, we did.

Liz Wolverton (32:40):

I mean, yeah, we messed up a couple of things, but in general, this is good. This is what you … no, the product is good and this is what you should expect. And so, to steal your team in the dynamics of change and how to handle that is something that I whiffed on the first time, and we will not whiff on this time.

Liz Wolverton (33:03):

But I feel like we've got to get to the end view quickly, tactically, so we can get out there and get people embracing that, you're telling them two things: this is going to be really awesome but people are going to be really upset and how do you marry those two things?

Jim Marous (33:24):

So, you have a very strict deadline on the conversion, the merger, but that's not unlike what most of us are up against right now for any transformation effort if we were implementing a new checking account opening process. And those things didn't used to exist. We were kind of nebulous on deadlines, but now because of the importance of speed in implementing things and the importance of getting to that next step and being able to implement it, deadlines become much more important.

Jim Marous (33:58):

Is that an asset or a liability, or how do you make it so it's an asset as opposed to liability? Because a deadline can be something you can work towards and it helps your message or it can destroy the message saying we're listening, but by the way, the one thing that's unbearable is at that date, how do you deal with that?

Liz Wolverton (34:16):

I mean, there's a balance. I mean, I'm a CPA by trade so deadlines are great. I love structure. I do think it forces you to know what's important and what's not. I mean, I could spend all day going, “Well, this system has a button that's round and this one has one that's square. And we think people like round things because it makes them feel soft and fuzzy.”

Liz Wolverton (34:38):

And so, we cannot be talking about buttons when we're making system decisions. And so, it takes all of that out of the room. So, I do think it forces you to say, “What are the most important things that should be driving this decision?” Because that's what we have time to spend time on. And then we got to move on, but it's how you manage it. I mean, you've got to manage it that way, otherwise, a deadline becomes deadly because you're never going to meet it.

Liz Wolverton (35:02):

And so, I'm not going to say that we've got this thing that we're doing it perfectly, nobody does it perfectly. And one of my peers said the other day, “Is every decision going to be perfect?” No, but it's going to be made and it's going to take us to the next place. And we are going to be ready for it. Otherwise, we make that perfect decision, we may not be ready when it's time to pull the trigger.

Jim Marous (35:28):

So, even though you're a teenager in your AI mold, you've been 20 plus years at the same financial institution, what's the biggest lesson you've learned about change?

Liz Wolverton (35:44):

That change is different depending on the change, that this is why I think you're having this discussion because change is very human. And that it is whether or not the end product is something that's fantastic, and you have to get from where you are to there to the other side of the change and knowing how to, first it's creating the right thing, but when it comes to change, it is appreciating.

Liz Wolverton (36:14):

And I'll say this a hundred times over — not the rainbows and unicorn, this is the end state, but appreciating where people are and understanding the very specific things it's going to take to get them from where they are today to the other side of the change. I mean, the worst thing you can do, and folks can have a tendency to do this in a merger. Well, this is the way it's going to be so we're just going to communicate that out.

Liz Wolverton (36:42):

Well, for some people, that's going to be fine because that's how they know it; for other people, that's not how they know it, that's not how they do it and that's really not the problem. It's not that their way didn't win, it's they don't know how to get there from where they are today.

Liz Wolverton (36:56):

So, when you say that, you have to be empathetic to say, “And we know this is not how you do it. And so, here's how we're going to get you there.” And whether that's a payday change, which is a pretty big deal or a policy change, which may be small, but be a big deal: “I used to do this, now I have to do that, well, I don't know what I'm going to do.” So, how am I going to get you there?

Jim Marous (37:21):

In the last year, maybe two years … you've been in this industry for a while, what's the biggest aha moment you've had that you go, “Wow, there's still learning to be done?”

Liz Wolverton (37:36):

Well, I mean, the merger wasn't on my bingo card so I would say that maybe that I don't know everything I think I know. Gosh, my biggest aha moment — I don't know that I've had just one aha moment, Jim, I really don't.

Liz Wolverton (37:59):

There's very little that shocks me anymore, very little that shocks me anymore. But I will say it's the sort of attachment that people have to things that really aren't that important at the end of the day, and we've had to just kind of cut to the chase on that sort of thing.

Jim Marous (38:23):

I think that's where a deadline maybe helps you a little bit.

Liz Wolverton (38:25):

It does.

Jim Marous (38:26):

I know you think it's really important, I know it impacts you personally, we don't have time right now.

Liz Wolverton (38:33):

And you have to keep focusing people on what the job we have to do is together, and at the end of the day, I come back to what I started with, it’s about human outcomes. It's about customer outcomes, and what is the best decision we can make to get to customer outcomes? And the best job we can make to get to customer outcomes in the near term is to have a conversion that is positive for everybody and not negative.

Jim Marous (39:03):

So, we were dealing with major changes. We deal with the before and afters of digital, we deal with the before and afters of a merger. How do you meld that North Star? Because I would hazard a guess when you're doing a digital transformation on a tactical level, that the beginning point and the end point doesn't necessarily have the same North Star.

Jim Marous (39:28):

You've adjusted it somewhat because of what you wanted the end point, and that end point was not the end point you had before you decided to move forward to something new. Mergers, you obviously don't have two institutions that had the exact same North Star. How are you melding that as a human and the people you touch, that's not all your responsibility — but how do you meld those north stars?

Liz Wolverton (39:53):

I mean, I think that fortunately, I'm in an environment where I feel like the vision from the top has been painted very clearly and one that everybody can buy into in terms of the premier financial institution and the country in terms of the growth model and the ambition, in terms of how we're going to go to market.

Liz Wolverton (40:23):

I think those things are things people can buy into at the top of the house, and then it's attaching everything to it. I mean, there's no magic to this. It's just centering and keeping/pointing everything to that purpose. And I didn't paint that vision. I mean, it's a great vision, so don't give me any credit, but it's a great vision, and it's one that folks have bought into.

Liz Wolverton (40:48):

And so, I would say that part of that too is once you decide where your vision is going to be, and I go back to this again, this is going to sound mean — but you got to get people on board that want to be on board with that.

Jim Marous (41:00):

And the ones you may have to leave some at the station.

Liz Wolverton (41:03):

The other thing that I would say is you talk about deadlines and you have to move with as much urgency as you can because the biggest thing for people in any transformation and any big change is uncertainty. And so, right or wrong, moving forward with urgency, not with negligence — can't be negligence; don't wait to make that decision if you're 80% there, make the decision.

Jim Marous (41:28):

Be tough when you have to be.

Liz Wolverton (41:29):

Be tough when you have to be tough.

Jim Marous (41:31):

It's interesting because the human aspect always feels like it's the soft aspect, but it probably has the biggest impact on the hardcore dollars and cents of success and failure. So, we have people here, we're going to have a lot of people watching it post-production: what's the one thing that you'd recommend that any leader needs to do to be successful in a world that has changed since the last time we talked on the podcast?

Liz Wolverton (42:05)

I mean, the one thing you need to do in change, I would say in transformation (and it's not one thing), I would say urgency and removing uncertainty is important. Stay centered, there's going to be a million things going on. You have to have, what is that destination we want to get to? When I say destination, it may be metrics, it may be a qualitative thing, but that thing has to be prevalent in all of your decisions.

Liz Wolverton (42:34):

Stay connected because the tide shifts every day. You think you know how your teams feel, but you don't always know how your team feel. Pull yourself up out of what you're doing and make sure that you know what the temperature is.

Liz Wolverton (42:48):

And then you got to reinforce yourself. I mean, as a leader, I have to have that person I go home and hug at the end of the night, and says it's going to be okay and the world is not on your shoulders. That's my human aspect.

Jim Marous (43:04):

As opposed to beating yourself up, which a lot of us take that. It depends on the personality but I think it's important to realize that if you ended the day and you've moved forward, it's a good day.

Liz Wolverton (43:15):

That's the other thing. I'm so glad you said that. Stop and look back. When everything ahead looks like, holy, how am I going to do all this? Look back at what you just did 30 days ago, 60 days ago, a year ago, and then tell your CEO when your last child is going to college and entering into an Army ROTC program, do not go through a merger at the same time because I almost emotionally fell apart. So, that's the other thing.

Jim Marous (43:41)

But you didn't jump, so that's good. And I'll add to this, the fact that as each of us are leaders in our own right, we have to be game for it. I'm going to keep on getting back to the fact that you don't have an option if change is going to happen, you have to embrace that and realize it's going to suck, it's going to feel terrible, it's going to happen with or without you. And that if you're not at an organization that has leadership, that's supportive as your leadership has been of yours for years, change your organization.

[Music Playing]

Liz Wolverton (44:16):

100%.

Jim Marous (44:16)

Because the definition of success and failure more today than ever, it's not going to be technology, it's not going to be investment level, it's not going to be asset size, not going to be all these tangible things — it's going to be whether or not your leadership has already jumped on board and say, “I'm willing to do things that I've never been comfortable with, and I'm going to count on you to help us get there,” because that trust factor and that ability to say, I'm not going to be held back by the people who have to make the final decision will destroy you.

Jim Marous (44:45):

That's why you've been at your organization for over 20 years, is because you've had leadership that gave you rope to hang yourself and gave you that pat on the back, but also was on board with you and it wasn't like, okay, go ahead and do it.

Jim Marous (44:58):

Thank you very much, Liz. As always, it's a joy and especially given all this going on in your world, I appreciate it.

Jim Marous (45:05):

Thanks for listening to Banking Transformed, the winner of three international awards for podcast excellence. If you enjoy what we're doing, we would really enjoy a positive review. Also, check out my recent articles on The Financial Brand, the research we're doing for the Digital Banking Report.

Jim Marous (45:20):

This has been a production of Evergreen Podcasts, a special thank you to our senior producer, Leah Haslage; audio engineer, Chris Fafalios, and video producer, Will Pritts.