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Learning Agility
The advantage that experienced bankers have over less experienced ones was on full display at Bank Director’s Bank Board Training Forum this week in Nashville, Tennessee. Pinnacle Financial Partners’ CEO Terry Turner said on stage that part of the bank’s philosophy is to hire almost exclusively seasoned bankers, usually people with at least 10 years of experience. And Western Alliance Bancorp.’s CEO Kenneth Vecchione credited his bank’s success in surviving a deposit run in the spring of 2023 with the board and management team’s experience at larger banks.
Experience is undoubtedly important. But there’s another trait that boards can use when assessing the strengths of senior executives, “learning agility,” according to Peter Thies, managing director at the consulting firm Pearl Meyer, who spoke on stage at the JW Marriott Nashville. “Learning agility is the ability to take your prior experience, and apply it to a new and challenging situation,” he said. “You can actually measure somebody’s strength at that.”
According to a champion of the term who developed an assessment tool for it while an executive at Korn Ferry, Kenneth De Meuse, learning agility doesn’t equate with book smarts. It’s the ability to learn from experience, which De Meuse believes is critical for managers and executive leaders of all industries. “You know what to do when you don’t know,” De Meuse says.
“I would think it would be impossible to be successful in the C-suite without being learning agile,” De Meuse says. “Intelligence doesn’t differentiate successful executives. People aren’t fired because they lack intelligence at the executive level. They get fired because they lack social skills, or emotional intelligence or learning agility.”
Not everyone needs to be learning agile. Many jobs in banking, for example, require a diligent and repetitive adherence to policies and procedures. But it’s a basic quality for leaders, De Meuse argues. Learning agile people can figure out how to handle novel situations. That must have been on display inside the Western Alliance management meetings last year as the team reacted to the crisis that was unfolding as billions in deposits walked out of the bank’s doors. The management team and board pivoted and came up with new ideas to calm depositors and investors.
And that made all the difference.
• Naomi Snyder, editor-in-chief for Bank Director
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