Risky Business

It’s well known that the banking industry has faced significant challenges as of late.

“My sense is anyone, unless they’ve been under a rock for the last two years, would know that the financial sector has had some very troubling times,” said Mary Slaughter, senior vice president at SunTrust Banks Inc. and chief learning officer for SunTrust University.

She described how hair-raising it was to watch the financial meltdown begin in fall 2008 and how it’s felt to work in banking since then.

“All of us every day reading the front page of the paper a year and a half ago were wondering, ‘What next?’” Slaughter said. “We have been, as an industry, swimming in a sea of ambiguity and uncertainty, unbelievable levels of public and regulatory scrutiny, and some fundamentally bad press where the image of the industry is not positive.”

According to Slaughter, this has meant fundamental shifts toward distrust in how SunTrust’s clients view the banking industry. “The impact that that has on leaders is unbelievable,” she said.

SunTrust’s response to this crisis has been a renewed push toward leadership development centered on gaining an outside perspective on the nature of such a challenging situation. “We’ll bring in analysts from Goldman Sachs to talk to us about how we are viewed [and] how our competitors are viewed, to have some financial sense of that from an analyst’s perspective,” Slaughter said. “We’ll bring large clients in to have conversations with us. We’ll bring CEOs of other companies in to talk to our leadership team about when they’ve found themselves dealing with really challenging times, where perhaps public confidence has been shaken.”

SunTrust also has reviewed its learning and development efforts where they relate to risk and credit. “The perception in the marketplace is people losing their homes, bad loans being made,” Slaughter said. “No bank wants to foreclose on a piece of property — it’s the last thing they want to do — but in the media, the phrase ‘toxic assets’ became kind of common. So now you have the public feeling like they’re the ones that are toxic, their loans are the ones that are toxic.”