MOTM EP10: David Popwell/Lynne Walker First Horizon

Stephanie, thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here today and talk about what's going on at our company. We're proud to be headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee, and to all of your viewers, thank you for supporting us and thank you for the trust that you give to our company.

Total employees in our company is approximately 5,000 employees. 2,000 of those employees live and work here in Memphis, Tennessee, Shelby County. In the bank, we have 3,000 employees. Our footprint starts in the South and Key West, it goes north and as far east as Raleigh, North Carolina, and it goes as far west as Houston, Texas. We have approximately 25 markets where we do business, and within those markets we have a market president and a leadership team. In addition, we have nine specialty businesses that do lending and deposit work essentially nationwide. And then overall, we have a head of consumer retail banking and a head of all commercial wholesale banking. So it's a big organization and a big operation.

In 1999, our president John Kelly, working with a group of women at the company, started our first employee resource group, which was our Women's Initiative. Susan Springfield, who is our very talented senior credit officer today, was there 20 years ago when they started the group, and she is still a leader in that organization today. But that's where we started. In 2005, we started a diversity banking group in Memphis. It was a group of African American bankers that wanted to focus on what I would call end-to-end or full-service banking for African American business owners, both on the business side and personally. And what we learned over time was that diversity and inclusion and affinity banking really should target many cultures, and so we morphed that strategy, and we'll talk about that in a second. In 2008, we started a Diversity Council within the company. We have generally two senior leaders today: myself as President of the Bank and John Daniel, our Head of Human Resources, lead that council. And what we do is we work with people throughout the company and we talk about diversity issues and we talk about how to improve the organization, particularly awareness from a diversity and inclusion standpoint. In 2009, we created a permanent role within Human Resources around diversity and inclusion. And then I think the really great piece, and you're going to talk about this later, is 2015 when we started the affinity banking strategy. Lynn Walker stepped up and leads that for us, and that's where we view this as a 360 business initiative: workplace, marketplace, and workforce. And I look forward to talking about that in our conversation.

I would rather go to the mountains.

Comedy, for sure.

I love a good action film.

Night owl.

Burgers.

Football.

Pancakes.

Yes, I had a kidney transplant at Methodist.

Well, as we were talking about a second ago, in 1999 we started the Women's Initiative. And if I look at the leadership team of the bank today, Carol Yocum, our President of Middle Tennessee, female; Yolanda Greene, Murfreesboro, female; the head of all consumer banking at First Tennessee, Tammy LoCascio, a wonderful job, a key leader in the company; Tammy Crenshaw runs retail for Florida. And then I look at the senior leadership team of the company: Susan Springfield, Senior Credit Officer; Lynn Walker, Affinity Strategy; Dawn Morris runs marketing, digital, customer experience; Candace Steele, communications; Maria Giusto runs lending operations and fulfillment; Amy Shrieve runs deposit operations and fulfillment. And these are members of the senior team. I've left off a number of individuals, but throughout our organization, from the front office to the back office, we have very talented women in very senior key roles in our company.

We run this like a business. My bank management team meets at a minimum quarterly as a team, and we work one-on-one with key leaders on their diversity strategy, diversity and inclusion strategies. We give our leaders data on their workforce as it relates to the current composition of their workforce, the trends, and also what's going on in the posting and interviewing and things like that. Our key leaders have talent pipelines where we talk about who they're out in the community talking with. And we run it like a business, as I said: data, accountability, and collaboration. Once a quarter, we have a talent management meeting with my direct reports, and we get a lot of innovation and creativity out of that meeting.

The biggest challenge, and in 2015 when we reassessed the way that we approached diversity and inclusion, we call it the affinity strategy again. We said to ourselves, again, we need to run this like a business. And where we are least successful is with customer-facing roles. And we want our workforce to look like the markets that we serve so that we can connect with those markets and better grow revenue. And so that's the goal: to have a workforce that reflects the marketplace so that we can grow revenue and foster creativity. You know, I like to tell my direct reports, if everybody looks like me, goes to church where I go to church, went to school where I went to school, we're going to have meetings and everybody is going to agree to everything, and we're all going to walk out and nothing is going to change. And so we want diversity of thought to spur creativity.

The most impressionable lesson that I have learned is that bankers really do have the ability to impact people's lives. Every time I go on a customer or prospect call, somewhere in the conversation I like to ask the business owner how they started their business. And invariably, they talk about a banker, someone who was willing to give them credit that really changed the trajectory of their business. Maybe it enabled them to start the business. There's a very wealthy real estate developer here in town who will tell you that the first loan he ever got was a $3,000 loan to buy a Volkswagen, and it put him in business. And today he's fabulously successful. We have a customer in Houston, Texas, who's the largest developer of retail space in Texas, and our president of that bank made him his first loan when he was a student in Austin, Texas. He loaned him the money to build or buy a duplex, his first piece of rental property. I could just go on and on about entrepreneurs, people who left a job, started a business, and got that first loan and went out there and made it happen. And when I go home at night and I think about what we do for our customers and the trust and loyalty that our customers show to us, it really makes me feel good about our company, what our people do every day, and what we try to do in our communities.