Kristin Lesher of Truist on strategy, purpose, and dealing with uncertainty

Lesher discusses how she thinks about running her division, recruiting new bankers, and the connection between leadership and purpose.

Transcription:
Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio for the authoritative record.

Chana Schoenberger (00:09):
I am Chana Schoenberger. I'm the editor-in-Chief of American Banker, and I have with me here today Kristin Lesher, who is the Chief Wholesale Banking Officer at Truist .
Welcome. Thank you and congratulations. Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here. So fun. So just to start, what's the biggest challenge that you face in your role today, and how are you handling it?

Kristin Lesher (00:30):
Gosh, what a great question. So I would say the biggest challenge we're facing right now is really looking around the corner and trying to figure out how to play all the disruption that's out there in the industry. So everything from all the changes in technology and AI to the stable coin, to just changes in the market dynamics with private credit and trying to make sure that I'm keeping an eye on everything we need to be preparing for the future, but also keeping our teams focused on what they can control right now, which is going out and giving the best advice they can possibly give to their clients. What

Chana Schoenberger (01:13):
Have you learned about leadership in your time as a senior executive that nobody told you about when you were junior?

Kristin Lesher (01:20):
Well, I've learned a lot of things over the years that I've been doing this, but one of the biggest lessons I'd say that I really think about is that a lot of times it's better to get promoted when you're ready for the promotion versus getting promoted fast. And so I think when you start out in banking, there's this natural desire to be on a track that you can see and get promoted at all the right gate gates along the way, and you want to make sure you're doing that as fast as possible. And what I've seen over my career is that it's actually a lot better to make sure that you're prepared for the next promotion. And I've been really fortunate to work for leaders who have given me opportunities to learn parts of the job before I get the next promotion and or help me make sure that I'm in a place to succeed when I get that promotion.

(02:18):
And I've seen in many cases where sometimes people get promoted too quickly and to jobs they're not ready for, and it just doesn't turn out setting them out for success. So for me, the lesson I've really learned is follow leaders who will invest in you, teach you the skills that you need for the next role, help you navigate whether the next best move is up, sideways, backwards, forwards, and just round out your skillset in a way that's going to make you as agile and as effective of a leader as you can be. I always tell young people, go into the first job, but then keep your eyes open, keep your options flexible, and be willing to follow someone who you think is a great leader, and they'll probably take you somewhere that's going to be an exciting place for you to be. So how do you do that as the leader in this scenario?

(03:10):
So I really try to focus on providing people with an open dialogue around what opportunities there are, especially across a company with as many businesses as a place like Truist has, and trying to understand what are the skill sets that they really want to add to their repertoire, and then finding ways to move them into those roles. I also try to focus on what are skills that people have that are absolutely transferable and think beyond the, oh, you have to come up vertically in one organization and you have to have checked every single box along the way in order to meet all the qualifications for that role. Sometimes the people who are going to be the best in that role have a variety of skills they've gathered from a variety of different places, and there are going to be some things they need to learn, and that's okay. They can do that by putting a great team around them.

Chana Schoenberger (04:05):
One of the issues that Wall Street is facing now is trying to attract the next generation of employees, especially people who will be leaders one day. What's your pitch for why this is a career filled with purpose?

Kristin Lesher (04:20):
So at Truist, which is a purpose-driven company, we talk a lot to teammates and to the people that we're trying to recruit into be teammates about how working in our company enables you to inspire and build better lives in communities. And so you're part of something bigger than just a financial institution where you're getting a set of skills. We really focus on the fact that we want to invest in developing people who can be leaders over time, both within a company like Truist, and actually go out into the communities. We foster an environment where we encourage people to live their purpose in many different ways, and that is in driving really high performance within our companies and for our clients, but also in what they do outside of our company in the world that we live in and the areas that they choose to invest their time in. So what are the big

Chana Schoenberger (05:18):
Issues that your sector of the industry is facing right now, and how are banks dealing with them?

Kristin Lesher (05:26):
So I would categorize that in a couple of ways. So you've got sort of the immediate issues, the near term issues. So obviously this year we're dealing with lots of uncertainty as it relates to tariffs, as it relates to market shocks that we've experienced in the first half of the year as it relates to the companies that we serve, being unable to sort of have certainty about what are the rules of the game going to be and how should they make decisions about how they want to grow their business, how they want to invest in it, whether or not they want to pursue acquisitions. So those are all immediate issues that we're facing, and the way we're handling that is to focus on what we do best, which is provide the right advice to the companies. And sometimes that advice is maybe wait, maybe don't do anything right now.

(06:16):
Maybe wait until the rules of the game become a little bit more clear. And that's a hard thing to advise on in a business where you're really trying to traffic in transactions and activity. But we're really clear with our teams that our job is to give the best advice to our clients with respect to what's happening in the market environment today. So that's the way we're focusing with respect to the longer term issues. So how will AI transform the industry? How will we do things differently in our industry two years from now versus what we're doing today? I would say what we're doing is we are interfacing with as many people in the industry as we can. So to think about A, how should banks broadly respond to some of those challenges? And then B, what's the right approach for truist? And in that way, what we're starting to do is just test some things in places where it's safe for us to do that, where we're making sure that we've got control of our client information and our data, but we're able to utilize AI and other tools to try to do things differently, more efficiently, more effectively.

(07:30):
And that's been a great way to start that experience. I think that we'll continue to do that on a larger scale as we go forward, but the approach is really learn everything you can about how these changes may impact the industry. Talk to as many of your peers at other banks as I've been able to do today and during this experience that you have provided me, and then apply that in a way that makes the most sense for your institution and your set of clients.

Chana Schoenberger (08:00):
Great. Great. Okay.

Kristin Lesher (08:01):
So what keeps you up at night right

Chana Schoenberger (08:04):
Now?

Kristin Lesher (08:06):
So I would say I'm new to Truist. So I came in about a year and a half ago, and in doing that, we really are a growth story. And so what keeps me up at night is honestly the excitement I have about accelerating the performance of our company. So we've made a lot of clear statements to our team about what our strategy is, how we're trying to grow the business within wholesale, the division that I run, we've made a lot of exciting changes. We've brought in some exceptional teammates and talent to our team to join the already exceptional talent that we had. And we are really on a growth mission. And so what keeps me up at night is running through my head, or are we running that strategy enough? Is there something we could be doing to enable our teams to be more successful in this way? Is there a technology that we need to be investing in order to provide a differentiated service to our client base? So it's really all about, are we doing everything we can do in order to achieve the growth ambition that we have?

Chana Schoenberger (09:16):
Great. Wonderful. Well, thank you very much and congratulations again.

Kristin Lesher (09:20):
Thank you.