Interview With Harlan Parrish:
Proven Leadership Techniques
1. What executive leadership traits are most critical in today’s banking environment? Why?
These are certainly no ordinary times in our industry, so several traits come to mind. The first is focus. Focus means figuring out, and building on what the company does best. It means identifying the evolving needs of your customers, then developing the key skills --- often called the core competencies --- critical to serving them. It means setting a clear, realistic mission and then working tirelessly to make sure everyone --- from the CEO to the middle manager to the hourly employee --- understands it. Another is flexibility. Flexibility means sketching through rough scenarios of the future, what former General Electric Chairman Jack Welch called “bands of possibilities,” then being ready to pounce on opportunities as they arise. It often takes a crisis to jar companies into thinking realistically about the future.
I also think that in today’s turbulent financial industry, a leader needs to be visible and communicate intensely. I practice MBWA, management by wandering around.” Employees deserve your candor. Intranet letters, department meetings, and town hall type gatherings. The form does not matter; the frequency and honesty of the communication does. Outline the challenges. Explain your plans. Ask for advice. Listen. You will be amazed how much good will such simple courtesies can create.
2. How has the role of an executive changed during your years in banking?
Today an effective leader must be a strong coach. This has evolved over time because I have grown up in retail and was once a Branch Manager. I tell our people all the time that the future is in Sales Management and Coaching Management, not in Branch Management. Today’s executive must be a coach. Why? Coaching-style management helps people improve their performance every day through the process of getting the work done. It helps them to work smarter, faster and better. We need our people to strive for continuous improvement by focusing on behaviors that affect accomplishments that ultimately drive outcomes.
3. What leadership traits seem to have the greatest impact on your employee team and on your customers?
What works for me is keeping our entire team informed about our strategy and our vision. It’s keeping them involved in the “big picture.” People without information cannot act responsibility, but people with information are compelled to act responsibly.
As for our customers, I guess I would have to say showing appreciation for their business, compassion and listening to their concerns, suggestions and ideas. I’ve tried to establish a philosophy that if a client has a problem then I have a problem. I want to take ownership of the issue, and expect our employees to do the same thing, until the issue is resolved. God gave us two ears and one mouth so we should listen twice as much as we speak.
4. Who do you use as a model for your leadership style? Why?
I can’t say that I gravitate to any single individual. I’ve developed my style by observing and reading about various leaders over the years. I have been blessed to have three outstanding mentors during my 24 plus year career with Colonial Bank. One of those happens to be my present boss, Mr. Robert E. Lowder, Chairman, President and CEO of Colonial BancGroup. I’ve learned to appreciate and respect the autonomy that he has given me to successfully manage and grow my market. This “freedom within a framework” has allowed me to develop self-confidence and I have tried to emulate this style with my direct reports. For instance, I don’t need to tell a .400 hitter where he needs to stand in the batter’s box to hit a ball. He knows how to do that --- I just need to be there to support, encourage and motivate him/her if they get in a slump.
5. How do you know if/when you need to adjust your leadership style?
I subscribe to the theory that there are six basic leadership styles: Directive, Visionary, Affiliate, Participatory, Pacesetting and Coaching. Ideally, an executive should use the one that is most effective in a particular situation, but most people have one style and they use it all the time. Well, that style is effective in certain situations and less effective in others.
For me it’s all about understanding what it is you’re trying to achieve in terms of work climate, what the situation is and what the most effective style to use is in that situation which gives me so much more knowledge and ability to be able to affect the work climate. The visionary style, for example, moves people toward shared dreams, and articulates a direction for the organization. The visionary executive sees selling the visions as part of the job. This is a great style to use when you are trying to set a new direction and I have used this when I have transferred to a new market or when we have acquired another institution in our market.
6. How do you mentor or encourage leadership in others?
As I mentioned previously, I have been blessed to have several mentors in my career. One of them told me many years ago that if you do well in this business, it is your obligation to spend a fair amount of your time sending the elevator back down. To that end I regularly spend time mentoring and developing our Management Trainees and junior management personnel. I hold leadership and time management classes and I give them access to me so they can ask me questions. I want them to develop their own style, but it’s important to give them perspective. We are a build-from-within company so I’m a firm believer in talent management. A good organization has a strong leader at the top, but a great organization has strong leaders throughout the company.
7. What is the most important lesson that you’ve learned about effective leadership?” How did you learn that lesson?
Early in my career I was given responsibility for a market and I spent months developing a breakout strategy for our teams only to learn then that I did not have the proper people to deliver the results. The Holy Grail in retail banking is employee execution at the front-line. What distinguishes a great bank from a mediocre one is execution, not the blinding brilliance of its strategy. If you are looking to differentiate yourself from the competition, it won’t be strategy and it won’t be price --- it will be execution. The primary driver of execution is leadership.
So for me, the lesson learned was that it doesn’t matter what your strategy is --- it matters more that you align your organization to execute your strategy.
8. What is the greatest mistake that leaders make today, in your opinion? How can those mistakes be avoided or overcome?
It’s bad execution. As simple as that: not getting things done, being indecisive and not delivering on commitments. In today’s world of free markets, open economies and the advent of e-commerce that have made virtually every business far more brutally competitive, getting execution right will only become more crucial. Institutional investors now own more than half the equities in U.S. corporations and relentlessly demand results.
The mistakes can be avoided by having the executive simply put the right people in the right jobs and if a personnel problem is recognized to fix it immediately. I have noticed that failed executives are often unable to deal with a few key subordinates whose sustained poor performance deeply harms the company.
Another common mistake that I have seen is that executives have a belief that leadership comes simply from having a position or title. They erroneously think leadership is position, when in reality, leadership is influence. A person may be appointed to a position of authority, but he or she must earn the right to lead. The position doesn’t make the leader, the leader makes the position
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Mr. Harlan Parrish has been employed with Colonial Bank since 1984, and has held numerous management and executive positions. Harlan is presently Colonial’s President and CEO of the Retail Bank, West Coast Florida Region.
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