‘You can’t write a memo on culture’: U.S. Bank’s Gunjan Kedia on returning to the office, our relationship with money, and what’s holding women back

Welcome to Human Capital, an open exploration of the ideas and people moving financial services forward. In each edition, we feature a leader or rising star who’s changing the game in his or her own way. “Finance is an apprentice business,” one often hears in this sector. Here are some of the teachers. Click Subscribe above to be notified of future editions.

Gunjan Kedia is on a mission — to bust myths, ground people in reality, and set them up for success.

The U.S. Bank vice chair, who leads 8,000 employees in wealth management and investment services, had to set herself up to succeed. When members of Kedia’s family left India for work and school in the U.S., it was up to her to do the same. After graduating business school with top honors, she struggled without a green card to quickly get a job. So, she sat in the reception area of PwC’s offices and effectively refused to leave without an interview. Her career began.

One of the reasons I was excited to speak with Kedia was her forward thinking on personal money matters, particularly her research and work on women’s relationship with money. In short: Women are leaving money, and therefore influence, on the table in several areas of their lives, Kedia and her team have concluded. Now, she’s on a mission to change that.

That kind of candor from Kedia, a member of the managing committee at U.S. Bank (a LinkedIn Top Companies 2021 honoree), was on display throughout our recent conversation. From her take on banks’ disconnect with technology to her assessment of a proper return-to-office strategy, I took a lot away from the hour we spent together. And while it was the first time I spoke with her, it certainly won’t be the last.

Below are excerpts from our conversation.

What did you learn from navigating your teams through the pandemic?

We’ve learned a lot. It’s been eye-opening in so many ways.

I can clearly remember early March of last year, I hosted a media event for about 50 journalists. COVID was raging in the country and we didn’t know it. I came back home and two days later, we moved 70,000 of our colleagues to our first plan, which was to have a third in the office to reduce density. Two days later, we said everyone who can work from home needs to work from home.

From that day onward, the executive team was on the phone multiple times a day every day — Saturdays and Sundays included.

There is a unique kind of closeness you start to feel when it’s seven in the morning on a Sunday, with your cup of coffee, and you’re talking to all your colleagues.

We were discussing technology and tools to enable people to work from home; policies; shift changes; change of controls to manage risk; employee communications. There were so many things to rethink in a very short period of time. That was our first quarter of settling in.

By summer, some of the urgent anxieties of the moment had given way to those of the team and their ongoing health. The anxiety was also about the financial health of our customers. At that point, there was a belief that there would be widespread stress in the economy. Twenty-two million jobs had been lost in two weeks. There would be defaults on loans. There would be evictions. Parts of the government relief package had not yet passed.

It was a time of intense uncertainty. There was a constant and pervasive sense that we needed to make decisions on behalf of a lot of people — 70,000 employees, 20 million clients, and all of their families.

The third and fourth quarters were difficult for the country. It was not just the COVID resurgence. It was the divisive politics in our country. It was the racial reckoning. We are headquartered in Minneapolis, very close to where George Floyd was murdered. It was deeply personal to us.

So, it took a lot of ingenuity to lead with focus and a calming influence.

What did you learn about leadership — and about yourself as a leader?

It’s been a very welcome challenging of our conventional wisdom. I had not expected that our people would adapt to change quite this rapidly, and bring so much humanity to getting the work done while dealing with personal anxieties. So, I was deeply grateful for the resilience in our teams.

There was a lot of human kindness, human courage, human ingenuity that came through to make things work in a flat, non-hierarchical way. That’s not traditionally how we think about bank management.

The second thing was the technology capabilities were so far ahead of our practices in using them. Despite all of the effort we put into leading from the front and being digitally forward, we were missing this whole capability that already existed and was not being used. That was a lesson in personal humility, to say there’s more technology available than we know.

I will tell you, as a leader it was initially quite uncomfortable for me to get into personal issues. I started my career in the ’90s, when, especially as a woman of color, it was viewed as such weakness to talk about emotion or humanity or people issues. We were sort of expected to be robots, to be tough at all times. So, this notion that your conversation with a work colleague would be less about a project and more about what’s happening with their spouse or their parents or their children — that was new.

We are often taught not to talk about personal issues of health, money, anxiety, mental health. But that’s what we’ve all done. There was no manual for this. I didn’t get a class on it in business school.

We learned that given the need, you learn to pivot to be the leader you need to be, not what you were taught to be.

You have an amazing front-row seat to people’s relationship with money. What stands out to you?

Traditionally, in almost every country, the money aspect of life has been managed by the man. So, our industry is a bit “by the men, for the men.” I don’t mean that as a criticism; it’s the way that social roles were set up. It was 1974 before banks would allow women to sign for a credit card, even if they had a job that was secure, like a tenured professor.

We wanted to explore not just what money means to everyone and how that is shifting, but also what it means to women and minorities. We are exploring the relationship of various communities with their money.

First: Money is very personal to people. We find that men and women would rather talk about any number of taboo subjects — politics, health, illness, sex, almost anything — before they talk about money. That is very surprising to us, because money is such a bedrock of how you plan your life. So, we came to the realization that we need to help people have conversations about money in an open, permissible way, which they’re not learning in school or even from their families.

Women in particular are not even encouraged to have this dialogue. What we found with women was that there was a deep under-appreciation of how much difference a lack of engagement on money matters can make to the outcomes of your life until it’s very late. Our research shows that women will engage professional advice 10 years later in their life than men will.

We have a lot more insights about women. We are also in the market to understand the relationship of the Black community with money, which is very distinct from how women or other individual communities think about money.

How do you go about gleaning — and then acting on — these insights?

We started by getting anecdotes to know what the hypothesis would be. I personally hosted breakfast gatherings across the country, and that was about 500 conversations in total. It turned very intimate very quickly.

We found that women lack advice not because they don’t want it. We heard stories, for example, from a woman who’s the chief operating officer of a publicly traded company. She would say that after the filings with executive pay came out, all the men would say, “Wow, the proxy is out and all the financial advisers are calling me.” She said she never got a call, because she had a female name.

We talked to a Black women who’s a third-generation owner of a company — very successful; often on magazine covers. She said that at black-tie fundraisers, as soon as a financial adviser made eye contact with her, they turned left or right to schmooze somebody else.

We heard from a CFO who was the primary breadwinner of the family, but after 10 years the financial adviser would still have the husband’s name as the primary in a tax return.

What I heard from women was a very deep-seated experience of being ignored.

And I wonder, “Why the disconnect?” Women right now are primary decision makers on more than half the personal wealth in the U.S. The reason is that women live longer. Divorce rates are still one in two, so a lot of women start their careers having husbands manage money, but end up managing it themselves.

In recent years, there were more women of marriageable age who were single than married. That’s a massive shift happening in our society, where women are primary decision makers of money. The question then is: Is the industry responding in kind?

What we’ve done is simply be responsive. We’ve trained all of our advisers to ask different kinds of questions, questions that are more open-ended. We’ve suggested one-on-one meetings with the woman of the house, instead of always doing it with the man. The nature of what they’re looking for from us is different, and we are simply being responsive to that.

I’m curious about your own path — looking back, to what do you attribute your success?

It’s some part talent, some part luck. And, if I had to be honest about it, a large dose of sheer tenacity and grit.

I was studying engineering in India when my father got an opportunity to come to the World Bank, and he and my mom left for D.C. My sister followed to go to NYU, so I was left alone in India. If I didn’t get into school in the U.S., I would have had to live by myself. So, a lot of my motivation came from sheer desperation to make it to the U.S. That’s how I came to Carnegie Mellon, where I graduated with top honors.

But it was very difficult then to get a job. I didn’t have a green card. I couldn’t get an interview at PricewaterhouseCoopers, so I walked into the reception area — this was before 9/11 — and literally sat there for seven hours asking for an interview. That’s how I got my first job.

Everyone looks at successful people and assumes that life just happens to them. But there’s a fair amount of hustling that comes with it, fueled by fire in the belly and support from mentors.

I know you take mentorship very seriously. What advice do you find yourself giving often?

To young people, and women in particular, my first message is for them to take care of themselves and their own future. There is so much weight that young people are putting on saving world issues, and they choose professions that are appealing to the value system. That’s important, but I try to give them some facts to balance that out with the need to earn a living.

We’ve celebrated as a society that 50% of college graduates are now women. That’s a fact worth celebrating. But what people don’t talk about is that two-thirds of the student debt is with women. Now what explains that? They paid the same amount of tuition. But they’re choosing professions that pay much less. Then they are faced with income inequality. Then they live longer than men. You add it all up, and they are on a path to an outcome that they may not be aware of today.

My goal is not to dictate to them what their life should be; my goal is to educate them on the consequences of their choices today and what that would mean for when they are 70 or 80 years old, then let them make their own choice. So, I always say to them, have shrewdness about how you decide to build your career.

There are many more ways — important ways — to socially engage than choosing a profession where you’re trading off financial stability with passion.

What’s on your radar now as the pandemic, at least in the U.S., begins to ease?

I’m feeling very good about the financial health of the country. I would say that that has really turned a corner. All you need is a little bit of time for employment, travel, and hospitality to come back with a more natural rhythm. There is optimism in the air and a real sense that there is light at the end of this long tunnel.

What’s really top of mind for me, though, is a thoughtful and balanced return-to-office approach. I think a year was long enough that people’s habits have permanently shifted. The combination of the convenience of staying at home, the anxiety that will last for a long time around infection and not wanting to be close to people — those are real.

We have a responsibility as leaders to strike a balance here, which is not to be unresponsive to what we have learned over the past year. Part of that is acknowledging that work can be done effectively remotely; people love not commuting; there’s a level of calmness that comes from not dealing with the logistical frictions of business travel.

But it’s also recognizing that in the long term, cultures are created by people who feel it. You can’t write a memo on culture. You’ve got to see your supervisor make day-to-day decisions that show you how a culture is created. We have a heartfelt belief that those things are not done mechanically.

Mentorship, learning how to do the job right, observing what’s effective and what isn’t — these do require some personal, unstructured time together.

So, how do we do that without appearing to be tone-deaf or out of touch with the reality of what our people are telling us? That’s the big, complex thing in front of us right now.

Our philosophy is not to assume that 70,000 employees will have a common point of view on this. So, our focus is less around what is a single policy, and more about what is a set of flexible choices, procedures, and processes that can accommodate a lot of personal circumstances.

We think that is a very viable solution, even if the approach is different from what we have been used to. Everything from the past year is different from what we have been used to.

Join the conversation with your own take on these topics in the comments below.