Climbing the Corporate Lattice

This time last year, Mary Tuuk was at the top of her game as chief risk officer of Fifth Third Bancorp. She already had helped to steer the Cincinnati-based regional through the worst of the financial crisis, when it was an early mover in raising capital and recognizing problem loans. More recently she had guided the company in its repayment of Troubled Asset Relief Program money.

She had maintained the trust of Wall Street, and of Fifth Third CEO Kevin Kabat.

Yet for all of her accomplishments, Tuuk was facing a roadblock in her career path.

Had she been content with the idea of staying in risk management, she might never have noticed a problem. But it was clear to her that if she ever intended to take on a broader leadership role with the $114 billion-asset company, she was going to need some P&L experience.

A common knock on women in financial services is that they are prone to concentrating themselves in functional roles, landing in cost centers like marketing and human resources instead of taking on revenue-producing roles-the kind that come with oversight of profit and loss statements, or P&L; the kind that can accelerate people into the highest leadership posts at a bank.

Risk management arguably is different from other functional roles. It is intertwined, or at least it should be, with every line of business, and demand for people with experience in the field certainly has risen in recent years. All the same, when was the last time you heard about a sizeable financial institution plucking its next CEO from the ranks of risk management?

"In my experience, individuals who are great at the risk and control side of our business-that's usually where their careers begin and end," says LeeAnne Linderman, executive vice president for retail banking at Zions First National Bank, explaining, "It's such a specialty."

That's how she knew Fifth Third must have had something bigger in store for Tuuk when she read last December that Tuuk had been reassigned to run the Western Michigan market.

"Being president of an affiliate takes more generalist skills," Linderman says. "You've got to understand how to grow deposits and loans and how to manage a very large and diverse group of employees-diverse in terms of all the specialties they represent. You've got to be fantastic as a community leader and fantastic at economic development."

For Tuuk to have been put in a role like that, she says, Fifth Third "had to believe she had enormous leadership capability."

Kabat, who has helped guide Tuuk's career ever since she entered the banking industry 16 years ago, confirms this interpretation of events.

"The industry today is more complex and broad than a stack-ranked, single path to the top, especially when you're talking about gaining experience and developing a career," Kabat says, adding, "This is a very, very good move for Mary."

It's also a homecoming for her. Tuuk, a 48-year-old native of Kalamazoo, Mich., has a law degree from Indiana University and started her career with a law firm in Chicago. But she moved back to Michigan and in 1996 joined Old Kent Financial as senior vice president, secretary and legal counsel. It was Kabat, then an executive with Grand Rapids-based Old Kent, who hired her for the role. Old Kent was sold to Fifth Third in 2001 and became the backbone of the company's Western Michigan affiliate, which today has more than $6 billion in asset and $8 billion in deposits.