It’s an abnormal start to the year at Metropolitan National Bank.
Officials are coming off the high of national recognition they say signifies a cultural and financial turnaround and the low of losing the bank’s founder.
In November, Metropolitan National Bank was recognized by American Banker as one of the best banks to work for based on policies and practices, as well as employee surveys. A month later, the bank lost its founder and chairman emeritus, Bill Magers, who died Dec. 6 at the age of 91.
Today, internal celebrations are intertwined with brainstorming on how to retain Magers’ legacy. Structurally, the Magers’ name lives on through his two sons: board Chairman Randy and Vice Chairman Bryan. Staff members and 10 board directors – Hal Higdon is the most recent addition in April – are now charged with retaining and instituting the values Magers held in high regard.
To hear longtime friend and 10-year bank board member John Moore tell it, Magers’ legacy rests on one word: gentleman. Out of the old-school mold, Moore describes Magers as gracious, fair and considerate. His leadership style was low key but productive as he chaired the monthly bank board meetings into his late 80s.
“He wasn’t a guy who had a great big ego and had to be out front, yet he was always there,” Moore says of Magers.
That’s the long history officials are working to respectfully retain. They go back just a few years for the history officials are working to erase.
That’s when President Sterling Huff abruptly left the bank under cloudy circumstances and in his wake were $7 million in operating losses. With Huff at the helm, the bank shed $56 million, or 10 percent, in assets.
In stepped Mark McFatridge, who had bounced between four banks since entering the market in 2006 from Indianapolis. During his two years at Metropolitan National Bank, officials are reporting a cultural and financial turnaround. In 2012, the bank quashed the net loss and barely broke even, according to Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. data. Bank officials say 2013 is sizing up to be $650,000 in the black.
The financial swing started with a discovery.
McFatridge says he spent his first 45 days meeting personnel and learned two things: They had pride in their work, but it was suppressed, and they had passion but needed purpose. He quickly structured workgroups under the banner of the Pride, Passion and Culture team and appointed 20 PPC leaders.
I recently sat in on a PPC meeting led by McFatridge at the bank’s operations center at U.S. Highway 65 and Cherry Street.
His style, too, is low key, giving freedom to staff leaders to make decisions and take action. The direction is guided through PPC team leaders, who drafted about half of the bank’s 180 staff members to voluntarily tackle projects that typically nobody wants to and have the tendency to snowball in organizations – for example, developing a customer service boot camp and revising the mission statement.
During the meeting, McFatridge instills trust by asking, “What do you think?” – and it’s a foreign and uncomfortable place to be for some. At the same time, there’s relief from a work environment one executive described a few years ago as hamsters spinning the wheel but going nowhere. Words such as fragmented and oppressive are substituted with energy and engagement.
“It’s just not that way anymore,” says Norm Bownds, chief technology officer and a PPC team leader.
Welcoming disagreement, the PPC team debated at length the approval process for some $36,000 in healthy living payouts through the bank’s employee stock ownership plan, which comprises about a third of the staff. McFatridge settles a financial concern, quantifying it as “a rounding error” after calculating the numbers.
Renee Jenkins, a loan administration manager and PPC team leader, appreciates the dialogue. “I’ve got a voice in it,” she says.
That’s the team culture board members want to see.
“It doesn’t mean you don’t disagree and you don’t wrestle issues around,” Moore says. “But you’ve got people in harness, pulling in about the same direction.”
For their part, board members shake hands with each new employee at quarterly orientation days, which include skits by team members with raps, dances and even executive roasts.
“It’s now become a competition,” McFatridge says of the fun among colleagues. “In the banking industry, we are so black and white. In other places, we want to be more than gray. It works for us.”
From all accounts, the bank is entering 2014 with a new culture and a valuable legacy. Now, the question is how they’ll merge the two and make it sustainable for the next chapter.
Springfield Business Journal Editor Eric Olson can be reached at eolson@sbj.net.
