SunTrust Banks Chief Learning Officer Mary Slaughter helped guide the company out of the financial meltdown with a better sense of itself and its industry.

"We've 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," Slaughter said. "The impact that that has on leaders is unbelievable."

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 related to risk and credit. According to Slaughter, SunTrust as an institution has always prided itself on being conservative relative to credit risk, managing its portfolio closely. But faced with a whole new definition of risk and how to mitigate and manage it, the bank has revisited its competency models, best practices and compensation plans on risk management processes such as evaluating creditworthiness and underwriting. "[It’s] helping people really understand [risk management] at a level that we thought we were already good at, but the market dynamics have forced us to be even better and smarter and ask ourselves what were we not doing that we should have been doing," she said.

And Slaughter arrived in the midst of financial meltdown. In her first 100 days she assessed the state of learning in the company and reported on it to the company’s president and CEO. She told them: "It’s as if someone put a pause button on learning and development in the corporation for the last eight to 10 years. If this had been 10 years ago and you had asked me to come in and assess where you are, I would tell you [that] you were going great guns. But what’s happened is the marketplace had moved on, best practices have moved on, and you have not."

SunTrust’s senior leadership was determined to increase its L&D efforts. William H. Rogers Jr., president of SunTrust Banks Inc. said, "SunTrust has made investment in learning and development a business imperative," Rogers said. "The past few years have brought unprecedented change to our industry, and we are positioned to take advantage of some of the most exciting and challenging opportunities that I’ve seen in my career — all of which require a focus on preparing our teammates to be better than the competition."

So what has SunTrust done toward that end? 
1st - it's selected a new LMS supplier, with plans to roll this out in 2011, increasing the technology-based learning delivery choices available to SunTrust University.

2nd - it's revisited its client-facing curriculum. "We’ve done it in a way that for the first time ever in the history of the company, it was actually a decision process that crossed over multiple business units," Slaughter said, explaining that in the past, retail banking, commercial banking, and private wealth and mortgage management training within the company were handled separately. "So as a client, you might go in and experience a certain style, flavor, methodology or approach in one line of business but feel something entirely different in another. The whole sales enablement in aligning our behaviors with what we want to demonstrate in the marketplace was huge for us."

3rd - SunTrust revamped its leadership development. "All ships rise at high tide," Slaughter said. "When you’re doing really well, you have the sense that your leadership is probably doing really well, too. We needed to stop and think about how we were enabling leaders in the company." SunTrust did just that, quadrupling its investment in leadership development, partnering with Emory University to launch a three-week program for the top 150 leaders in the company.

4th - SunTrust reapproached employee engagement, in particular looking at tuition assistance as a way to accomplish this. "We had tuition reminbursement but it wasn't part of a strategy, ie 'why do we have that, what does that mean for us, and what are we enabling?’. So we’re re-engineering that under the umbrella of teammate engagement."

Next step - will be tackling best practices within SunTrust, with a mind toward getting business leaders involved in the process. "Right now, I do a lot of that work myself and then bring things forward to people," she said. "That’s OK, because the business is so focused on restoring itself in the marketplace. But one of the bigger issues for me is to engage the leadership in the best-practices thinking so that they can help me formulate strategies. That’s where we’re going to start having conversations about things like mobile learning or around what we want to do in terms of our approach to social networking. I would rather do things with the leadership of the company [than] to the leadership of the company. I actually want to get them further upstream in helping me define the priorities and requirements for the business in a much more strategic way."

excerpted from Profile article "Risky Business" by Daniel Margolis, September 2010