Episode 126 - Amey Sgrignoli - Leaders on Leadership
The best leaders understand that leadership, beyond the ego and pride associated with it, is a humbling experience. It asks you to see people where they are at so you can guide them better towards the overall goal of the business or organization. Taking this to heart is Amey Sgrignoli, the President and CEO of Belco Community Credit Union. With a career in financial services that spans 25 years, Amey has the wisdom and experience to tell us the price she had to pay for leadership. She shares all of those with Dr. Tracey Jones in this episode, letting us in on what she thinks about loneliness, weariness, abandonment, and vision. Amey then talks about the lessons she learned during this pandemic and how it reminds us of what truly matters, especially as leaders in business.
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Amey Sgrignoli - Leaders on Leadership
I am excited to introduce our guest, Amey Sgrignoli. She is the President and CEO of Belco Community Credit Union and has a career in financial services that spans 25 years. She is passionate about learning, leadership and believing in people. Amey has found that leadership is a humbling experience and feels blessed to lead an outstanding organization with an amazing team of leaders. Amey, thank you for being here.
Thanks for inviting me to have the conversation. This timeline being that it's at the end of November, it's a great time to talk about gratitude. I'm grateful for you, for your insights and you always bring interesting topics to the people. Thanks for sharing your father's leadership lessons with me once again.
You are so welcome. For our readers, I always like to tell people how we connected. Amey's one of my dear friends, a role model for me and an amazing female leader in the Central PA region. We've known each other for many years and I'm President of her Enola Fan Club branch. I'm excited because she has quite a career. She has a real servant's heart and she has paid the price. I'm excited to hear especially from an emerging well-known female leader in the financial services industry. Amey, what you have to say about the price of leadership? Thank you.
My father wrote this speech called The Price of Leadership. He wrote it decades ago. He loved leadership and he was well-known for his speeches on leadership but he was pragmatic about it. What he mentioned is that you're going to have to pay the price of leadership. Leadership is not about a title, it's about getting in and doing the work. There's a lot of tough stuff required for that and I'm sure Amey's going to share with us. One of the prices of leadership that my father talked about in his book called The Price of Leadership, he says, “Leadership is going to be lonely and there's going to be loneliness that you experience as a leader.” We've all heard that well, it's lonely at the top but can you share for me what loneliness means to you as a leader and maybe a word for our leaders that may be in a season of loneliness?
I forgot how much I love this little read. It's a short read. It's a quick read. Charlie speaks from a place of being a student of leadership, not being an authority on leadership. I think that's one of the things that resonates the most with me. It's a lifelong journey. Even though I'm 25 years into this career, I feel like I'm still learning different and new ways to lead. Part of that, as you've said, you're going to from time to time go through these periods where you might experience loneliness. It's true. You need to be an independent and confident leader but you also need to understand that you're going to have to step outside of the pack. Sometimes you're going to have to go it alone to try to achieve what it is that you want to get done or what you're trying to get done as the leader of your organization. In this context, loneliness, for me is doing the right thing because it's the right time to do it and the right thing to do, not necessarily because it's the popular thing to do because it isn't always the popular route to take.
You, as a leader, are going to see things that other people don't see. You're going to have to be the one sometimes to lead the pack. It's funny you mentioned that because it is what you were talking about reminded me of a quote he said. He said, “You’ll never see a monument in a park dedicated to a committee.” I always laughed at that. Sometimes you are going to have to step outside the pack. I love that. How do you combat that when you're dealing with that?
You have to be sensitive to others and be willing to ask the tough questions but also be willing to listen to people and to what they have to say. If you're going to take the road less traveled and assume some level of risk, you want to be willing to do that in a way that you're bringing others along with you, not alien.
You hit the nail on the head. We do sometimes have to step out apart from the pack but the pack has to eventually come back with us. Otherwise, you're not a leader because you're not leading anybody. I truly appreciate that insight.
One of my mentors along the way shared with me, “Amey, if you're not feeling a little discomfort, a little bit of a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, then you're not stretching yourself. You're not growing. If you feel that way, that's okay because it's a sign that you're learning to lead.” I have felt that feeling in the pit of my stomach on more than one occasion. Part of this idea of loneliness too is where you feel a little bit uncomfortable and different. You're not complying with the norm. You're not going along to get along but you're trying to make a difference.
That's why a lot of people shy away from leadership or when they get in the role, they realize there's some itchiness that I don't want to. I always go back to The Office. I love The Office. I think about Michael Scott and how he wants to be everybody's friend, which is funny but that's not leadership.
I guess my advice to anybody going through loneliness now is to learn to lean into it and grow into it. Eventually, you become accustomed to thinking differently or being a little different and having a little different mindset but learning how you're wired differently and how you can use that to motivate your team and get your desired results.
I appreciate that word for our leaders out there because you are different. You have a different title and you have a different mantle that you wear. I'm glad somebody said that to you when you were early on that, “You're going to feel this and don't be surprised when you do.” My dad did that too. He's like, “You're going to feel sometimes loneliness. It's okay if you don't. You're probably not doing it.” I'm glad somebody let you know that too because it is unsettling and you wonder, “Am I doing this wrong?” There's a lot of leadership things out there that talk about, “If you feel this then you are doing it wrong.” It's like, “Not necessarily.”
How many times have you heard, “It's lonely at the top?” To a degree, it is but that's not your destination. That's part of the journey. It's not lonely at the top. If you can look around you and you've got a peer group or a team of people that come around you when you need them the most, I don't necessarily think it's lonely all the time. It's a period, a season or part of the journey.
Can you talk to that as the CEO because you're in a unique position? I know you have your co-leaders. I've met many of them and they got your back but can you talk to me about the importance of a peer group at the C-Level and what that does for you to combat? There are times when you can't talk to anybody within the organization and you don't want to have pillow talk. Can you share how? It is because you hit on that topic the importance of that for you in dealing with loneliness. ‘
Leaders on Leadership: It's not lonely at the top if you can look around you and you've got a peer group or a team of people that come around when you need them the most.
I am glad you asked that question because there's this small group for me. It's less than five people. They're going to be your go-to people and the time of need. It's a core group that I can go to for advice. They're outside of my organization. They're outside of my Belco team. They are the personal board of directors and they're the people that we share similar roles. I feel fortunate as a credit union CEO to have a strong peer group of other credit union CEOs that we come together, we serve on boards together and we collaborate on business. It's a little different than what you might find in some other industries but it's fantastic because I can go to them with a problem or an issue that I'm trying to wade through. I get ideas from them on best practices or you get to run things by them. It's a way for you to re-energize and re-engage to get a different perspective but you haven't damaged any of your credibility with your own team or revealed your hand with your own team.
That's a great insight. I love that last point. In the military, we'd say that, “Loose lips, sink ships.” There are times when you need to keep stuff very close to the vest. You hit on something there, where you talked about the replenishment. The second price my father talked about was weariness. It's tough especially what you have gone through the credit union, which is community-based interaction. With COVID and stuff like that, how do you combat weariness? How do you stay refreshed and replenished not only as a person but as a leader when your entire organization has shifted?
I go to that core group of people and one of the questions that I ask in the middle of this 2020 season that we're waiting through is, “Does anybody else, besides me feel like you have told everyone that you interacted that, ‘It's going to be okay. We got this.’” We're in this together but yet you're looking around like, “Who's going to tell me that it's going to be okay? Who's going to tell me that we're going to get through this and it's going to be all right?” There are some days where you feel that way but going to that core group of people is one thing but this is going to sound cliche and maybe a worn-out thing but exercise. Get outside of your four walls.
I know we're all supposed to be quarantining and staying away from each other but go for a walk. One of those people on my board I have to say is probably going to be Albert, my four-legged friend because he's a great listener. We go for long walks. We talk through things and we work it out. I feel like getting outside, getting engaged with the out of doors, being strong in my faith and taking it to those core groups of people is what I do day in and day out. I started doing yoga again too and I forgot how much that makes me just feel physically better when I'm done. It's that breathing, meditation and taking it to the Lord in prayer as I owed him. That is true and important at this time that we're in.
I know you’re cliché but almost every leader that I have on here and the greatest leaders of all said, “If you don't take care of yourself, forget it because it is toxic and you have to do the self-care.” The faith, the family, everybody talks about fitness but say I never thought about asking my dog what they think about stuff. How strange. I think that talking that out with them, not just walking because I'm not talking about business with them. Amey, you're onto something here.
Here are all my secrets.
I'm sure by the look he can tell you, “Don't worry about it. We might need to talk more about this.” I love that but that's true that you need to stay at the top of your game physically because we're mere mortals. It does take a toll. I think about that with COVID. I'm like, “If I'm struggling, think about the less resilient people, how they're struggling?” It's wonderful to monitor that so thank you for that.
I know during COVID too, we've had to cut out all the extra. All those little nice things that we used to do together to meet up and have coffee or meet up and have drinks or go, “Let's go to lunch.” All of that has been taken away from us because we are trying to be distanced and trying to keep each other safe that it does allow you to focus on what's important. I think maybe COVID forced that but it's something that we should maybe think about carrying forward. Be more deliberate, be more present and focus on what's important. It's always important to be willing to go that extra mile but you've also got to make sure you can go that extra mile and not get yourself uber-extended.
You have this community with the credit union. I've been a member credit union since my Air Force Academy days. It is a community. Are you finding that with your members too that they see you guys because you know how much that interaction means?
It's huge. We hear from our members all the time that they're happy and satisfied with our service. They love our people. They're happy that we're keeping everybody safe but the biggest number one thing for them is that, “I didn't get to go in to see my favorite teller Jenny or my favorite loan person that I always go to to talk about my loan and needs. We wanted to drop by and say, ‘Hello,’ because we miss seeing them.” I think that our members are our biggest supporters and they let us know what we're doing is hitting the mark. “We're able to get our transactions done. We're able to move our money around. We got what we need but we miss you guys.” That's our message to them. We miss them too and we're looking forward to the day where we can throw the doors back open and do business as we used to.
I can't wait either. It's going to be exciting. No one's going to complain about standing in lines ever again. That’s loneliness and weariness. The next price my dad talked about was abandonment. That typically has a negative connotation but his concept of abandonment was we need to abandon what we like and want to think about in favor of what we ought and need to think about. It was much more of a hyper-focus that, “If you're serious about success, you got to get serious about eliminating the things out of your life that does not contribute to your success or even pull you away.” Can you share with me how you hone in on abandonment as a leader?
I started getting into this one. The last one I must've been working ahead here in my thought process. It's interesting because I started on this one thinking about, “How do you create a space in your time, in your world or in your mind for what matters?” Leaving things behind has to become a part of it. Over time, you get many invitations to participate on a board, to contribute to a committee, to have a mentor relationship, mentor-mentee type of thing. All of these things are things that you have to be able to commit to for a season but then you have to be able to say, “My work here is done and move on because if you don't, you then become logged, jammed and backlogged that you're not able to continue to grow and recharge yourself and refresh.”
That idea of abandonment, while it might have a negative connotation is necessary to be successful as a leader because of the volume of information that comes your way and then the relationships that you have along the way. You are naturally going to outgrow and outpace some of them. They're not all going to stick with you for a lifetime. They're with you for a season that makes sense for you. It's not to feel bad about it, it's to say, “That was a great experience. I took a lot from it. I was able to give a lot to it but maybe it's not part of who I am now, where I'm at in my life or the direction that I want to go or get to.”
I call abandonment is a great pruning. If you want to explode with new growth, you got to look at it. As you have shifted how you do business, is there anything that you were doing before that, all of a sudden, you look at and say, “Do we need to be doing the new normal or our future?” COVID change made what was going to happen the business of fifteen years in the future happened now. Anything that you looked at, I, like you, was thankful. Remember in April or March 2020, when it shut down, April is the month where there's an event every night including yours and I was looking forward to it but in a sense, it was like, “Now that I don't have all that stuff to go to, I can focus on this.” How did that work for you and running Belco?
Leaders on Leadership: The idea of being able to reject apathy is where you're willing to step out, initiate change, and not keep the status quo going.
We have sat down here to say, “Look at all these meetings. We're in meetings all day, every day. We need to sit down and take inventory of what we're meeting about. Does this meeting still even needs to exist?” We're finding that we're in this COVID environment, in this pandemic environment, we're all meeting by video and video chat that some of our meetings aren't necessary anymore. As much as we want to try to hold on to getting back to our structure and getting back to where we were, we also recognize when we get back to doing the business in a more normal way, we're going to keep some of the changes that we've made.
We're all doing daily huddles now with our team. It's a quick hit fifteen minutes in the morning of, “What do you got going on? Do you have any bottlenecks that you're experiencing? What can I do to help you to alleviate that bottleneck?” We've been doing that for years but in the pandemic environment, we picked up the pace and doing them every day and more teams are doing them. Everyone's seen a huge value in a benefit from it. We continue to look at what are we doing now that's making a difference that we want to keep? What is it that we can jettison to kind of clear up the clutter and be able to focus and have clarity as we get into 2021?
That's the good side. Everything has a good and a bad side. I love that you've been able to look at that and say, “What is the highest use of my energy and resources in nowadays context?” I love that you've been able to share that and I think a lot of our leaders will be anxious to hear you say that because you're in a big organization. For a lot of us entrepreneurs, it's like, “What process? Every day, it's what happens,” but for somebody like you, you still have to maintain that creative future, which takes me to the next point of vision. How do you craft your vision for seeing what needs to be done and then executing a plan to make it happen?
Periodically, carving out some time to look at the strategic direction and say, “What did we accomplish? What have we done? Where are we at?” Understanding the current environment and then taking that opportunity then to say, “Where do we want to get to? How are we going to get there? Are we on the right path? Do we need to make some course adjustments in what we're doing?” One of the things that I was thinking about here is the idea of being able to reject apathy, where you're willing to step out initiate change and not keep the status quo going because that's what we've always done. I think we have an opportunity now because of this environment where we've been forced to change things that we didn't want to change. We never thought we'd be able to work from home the way we're working from home now.
We want to reject the idea that, “We can't work from home,” and start to embrace the idea that some people can work from home if we support them with the right equipment, with the right types of meetings and the right software. That setting direction and vision takes every now and then for you to upset the apple cart and rebuild things back and see what you have and get that feeling for, “Why are we here?” Understanding your why and then building out your structure in your organization to be able to support that so that you don't keep doing what you've always done. You have to watch so that you don't get caught up in the idea of growing for the sake of growth that, “We need to get bigger. We need to get stronger. We need to get fast.” Maybe you need to get better. Maybe you need to go back and reflect on, what's my why? What are we trying to do here? Are we doing it well? What could I change? What little things could I tweak to make it easier, make it more efficient and make it more meaningful?
I feel like you're speaking a word of prophecy to me. I love that. Do you need to get bigger or better? That's the tension. I always thought that was because you're always with entrepreneurs and they were like, “You need to grow.” I am like, “Do I? How do I grow? I already have so much stuff. Do I need to keep buying more stuff to help me get bigger? Do you need to focus in and hone in?” That's getting clear. The clearer you get on your vision, you get fine-tuned about, “This is exactly who I want to be and how I want to meet my members,” and the rest is good but it's not going to cut.
I think too that we need to get good at focusing on strengths. I'm a big proponent of that idea of strengths-based leadership where I don't have to be the expert. I don't have to know everything. I just need to know who to go to and that's building your strong team, building your army around you, building your peer group or your board of directors so that you know who to go to in a time of crisis and a time of need. That takes some planning, time and some commitment to building that over the years. It doesn't happen overnight.
I love that you said reject apathy. I did a show and somebody said something about knowing what your kryptonite is like. What are your triggers? I forget what his was. It wasn't apathy but it was kind of apathy. I tell people I'm Slacktose intolerant. I figure out a way to do it, stop complaining about it. That drives me crazy. What do you do? You're a leader. You get all kinds of people. You get people that when the world could turn upside down and they're there, like, “We'll figure it out, boss,” and other people that apathy seems to be as part of their DNA. As a leader, when you see the vision, how do you build that in?
Pick Up the Gum Wrapper: How to Create a Workplace That Increases Performance While Improving Lives
What you have to do is ask a lot of questions and try to identify who are your leaders and who are going to be the individuals that are going to do something with their idea, their thought and what they see. We're in the middle of reading and doing a group book study on Pick Up the Gum Wrapper by Joe Bertotto. Joe talks a lot about strength-based leadership in there but he also talks about finding the people who are willing to pick up the gum wrapper, not pitch the gum wrapper down, not walk past the gum wrapper but be willing to pick up the gum wrapper because it's the right thing to do and it needs to be done. Those are the people that you want to seek out and find to be a part of your team, recognize and reward those individuals and try to avoid apathy in the organization. Coach it up and out would be the best thing to do.
I love to coach it up and out. That's one of the other things. Another retired rear admiral said that to me, “If they insist on that then you withdraw responsibility and trust until eventually, they're outed from the organization because they put themselves in that.” I appreciate your authenticity and your transparency in that because anybody that's run people know that there are some people that are in and some people you could pay him a million dollars a day and it's not going to work. Thank you for that. Amey, we've covered the four things on leadership paying the price of leadership. I thank you for your insights on each of them. Anything else that you would like to share from your leadership journey with our audience?
I would just say that you've got to continue to learn, grow, evolve and don't allow yourself to get stagnant. Don't allow yourself to, “I'm the CEO now. I've arrived.” Leadership is not like a GPS. It's not going to say, “You've arrived at your destination.” You'll never arrive if you're a true leader. You will continue to grow, evolve and move past where you ever thought it was possible to go. I guess I would leave everybody with that is be a lifelong learner. Be willing to adapt and be willing to put the work in because that's what it takes to be a great.
As my dad always said, “If he had it to do over again, he wouldn't be Charlie Tremendous Jones.” You'll love this based on how you started. He said, “I'd be Charlie Thankful Jones or Charlie Learning Jones,” because as much as he was known for leadership, he’s like, “Every time I talk about it, I realized how little I truly know.” That's what makes the best leaders. Amey, how can people get in touch with you?
They can reach out to my email, which is SgrignoliA@Belco.org or they can give me a call at (717) 654-8205. Either one of those would be great.
Amey, I want to thank you for being a part of our show, for inspiring leaders and for pouring into me and our readers.
Thank you, Tracey. It's always great to talk with you. It's always a pleasure to spend time with you and this is no exception.
Thank you, Amey. If you like what you read, please be sure to ring that bell, hit the subscribe button wherever you read. Also, we'd be honored if you would do us the solid of a five-star review. Leave us a note. We answer all our comments. If you go over to TremendousLeadership.com, you can download a free copy of The Price of Leadership, where you can get that little life-changing classic that will change your life. It's a little gem and it's a quick and powerful read. To our tremendous family out there, thank you for being a part of our tribe. Thank you for being the leader many people need to see. Thank you for paying the price of leadership. Have a tremendous rest of the day.
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About Amey Sgrignoli
Experienced Chief Executive Officer with a demonstrated history of working in financial services. Skilled in Strategic Planning, Organizational Development, Human Resource Management, Consumer Lending, Mortgage Lending, Commercial Lending.
A strong business development professional with a Master's Degree focused in Organizational Development and Leadership from Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania.