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Wisconsin Community Banker
January/February 2014
BOLT Leadership Summit Focuses on Building
Exceptional Leaders Through Involvement
Mary Lou Santovec
The FDIC
believes that the quality of management
is probably the single most important
element in the successful operation of
a bank,” said David Saber, director of
the strategic advisory service line in the
financial institutions practice at Wipfli
LLP. With regional banks gutting
their training programs, Wisconsin’s
community banks must focus on
getting their young employees into the
leadership pipeline to ensure the health
and future of the state’s community
banking industry.
In December 2013, CBW hosted
some 110 young bankers at its first
BOLT (Building Our Leaders of Tomor-
row) Leadership Summit. This day-long
series of seminars and networking
opportunities held in Wisconsin Dells
was the first in a series of talent recruit-
ment and retention events.
Starting off the day with a presenta-
tion on what separates high perform-
ers from the “rest of the pack,” Peter
Wilder and John Reichert of Godfrey
& Kahn, CBW’s outside legal counsel,
noted that the community banking
industry faces many of the same chal-
lenges that are bedeviling their indi-
vidual members.
A glimpse of the future reveals the
strategic transactions that community
banks will need to address in order to
remain viable: raising capital, redeem-
ing shares, buying and selling branches
or other assets, and mergers.
Even if your bank isn’t anticipating
engaging in strategic transactions, it
must excel to survive. “You don’t need
to be big, but you have to be good,”
Reichert said. “When you’re small,
there’s no margin for error.”
Essential core competencies for
community banks include a realistic
capital plan, a strategic plan, a succes-
sion plan, risk assessments, sound cor-
porate governance, and a sound credit
culture. The strategic plan needs to be
simple and a living document.
Your bank also needs a robust com-
pliance program that’s good enough
but not perfect because you’ll never get
perfection; you’ll waste valuable time
and energy trying to get it.
Your bank should be working on
developing a diverse revenue stream
where capital is king. “The sky’s the limit
when it comes to capital,” Reichert said.
“Few rules govern it.” Acquiring capital
before needing it allows the bank to pur-
sue opportunities.
Small community banks can survive;
they just have to run faster and harder.
If you’re not acquiring, you’ve become
a target.
Succession planning will determine
where the next leaders will come from.
Without a plan you risk having to sell
the bank because of lack of talent. Every
employee must be able to groom some-
one else to do their job in order to get
promoted.
That’s where BOLT comes in. BOLT
is a response to the industry’s call for
leadership and preparation.
Board composition is a critical factor
in high performing banks. Banks that are
really “crushing it” have diverse boards
“
BOLT: One Banker’s
Perspective
For Tom Jensen, president/CEO,
First National Bank of Berlin, bring-
ing 11 of his 76 FTEs
to the inaugural
BOLT Summit in
December was an
easy decision. “The
initiative of CBW
to build the bench
strength of the
next generation of bankers was an
absolutely critical move,” he said. “I
wanted to show my support for the
program.”
The 11 employees came from
across all departments including
marketing, finance, retail delivery,
and commercial lending. Following
the Summit, the 11 have become a
new leadership team at the bank.
Meeting regularly, the new team
has conducted a SWOT (strengths,
weaknesses, opportunities, threats)
analysis, reporting their findings to
the strategic planning team, allowing
that team to focus on other activities.
Jensen, who began his banking
career at Associated, is well aware
of the decline of the regional banks’
training programs. “There was a void
for community banks,” he said. BOLT
is CBW’s solution to that problem.
The only drawback in training
future community bank leaders is
the potential for losing them to other
banks. But, he said, “we’re addressing
that by creating an environment and
culture to keep these people.”
Apparently, the American Banker
agrees with Jensen’s perspec-
tive. With assets of $350 million,
First National Bank of Berlin was
voted the third best bank to work
for in the United States last year.
The honor was given for the bank’s
dedication to being both client- and
employee-centric.
Tom Jensen
