Pub. 8 2018 Issue 1

24 www.azbankers.org WHAT IS THE EMERGING LEADERS PROGRAM? About a year or so ago, the American Bankers Association identified the lack of “next-gen” leaders as one of the most pressing issues in the banking industry. As an industry, banking really doesn’t have a pool of “ready to lead” talent. The Emerging Leaders program is AzBA’s response to the ABA’s initiative to develop leadership within our local market. WHEN WAS IT STARTED, AND WHAT SPARKED THE INTEREST IN STARTING IT? We started our local program a year ago, and we’re graduating the first class, if you will. We started with 26 individuals, whose supervisors felt that they were promising leaders with high-potential within their respective banks. Here locally, many bank presidents and are in their 70’s, wanting to retire, but, there is no one ready to lead. We’re feeling the talent pinch, just like markets across the country. Paul Hickman, AzBA’s president met with his board, and together they started identifying specific skills they would like to see in the next generation of leaders, and the Emerging Leaders program evolved. Paul Hickman gave me a call and asked if I would be interested in facilitating. My interest was immediately sparked, and here we are. Ready for the next class, a year later. WHY DO YOU THINK THIS IS SUCH AN IMPORTANT PROGRAM? I think we can all agree that people skills are a much needed, and somewhat lacking talent in many industries today. I find the lack of upcoming leadership in banking interesting. My company deals with banks on a regular basis, so it’s close to home for me. But, banking is one of the few industries where we literally lost a whole decade in leadership development. If you think about it, during the recent recession, the focus on banks was to promote products and services, and the only training that was being done was sales training. For the past 10 years, the focus of the industry was to stay alive, conse - quently, any people skill and leadership development had to happen outside of the industry, which really didn’t happen. As a result, we have an industry that is completely underinvested in leadership. Now to its credit, the industry as a whole is recognizing the deficien- cy and is very motivated to do something about it. We have a lot of support from the higher level of bank management in training and developing “next-gen” talent. TELL US A LITTLE BIT ABOUT HOW THE PROGRAM WORKS. Banks nominate who they consider to be promising leaders. As I’ve mentioned, our first year we had 26 participants, and they ranged in age from mid-20’s to late 50’s. The participants are emerging lead- ers, not to be confused with specifically “young” leaders. Basically the premise is for these promising leaders to take a ½ day a month, for 6 months, away from working “in” their bank, to work “on” their bank. The program is all about personal development. Everyone that is involved is technically proficient at banking. SHARE SOME OF THE SUCCESSES OF THE PROGRAM WITH US? We continue to hear good things from the participants and their su- pervisors. For instance, one of the first classes focused on work-life balance, which interestingly enough was one of the hottest topics A Q&A with Mikey Maynard About the AzBA Emerging Leaders Program