Purpose, Performance, And Connection: Bank Of America’s Cathy Bessant On Leading Through COVID-19 And Beyond

For our series on leading high-engagement virtual teams, we sat down with Bank of America’s Chief Operations and Technology Officer Cathy Bessant to ask her what the shift to working from home has meant for her organization. Bessant leads a team of 95,000 employees working in over 35 countries. Here’s what she had to say.  

Volatility and rapid change

We’re a company with a very strong human engagement foundation; we’re a company that believes also, very strongly, in the notion of co-location. Co-location doesn’t mean we don’t have virtual teams. People work on teams spread all over the world; we’ve depended on connectivity for a long time. Yet, literally in a span of 2 weeks, we went from a very small percentage of our company working remotely to 90% or more. My organization went to 97% working remotely, and it happened literally in the space of two weeks.

If you’d asked me 2 months before if we could have accomplished it smoothly while maintaining a high degree of customer service in an almost flawless way, I would have said “No way.” Too disruptive. Too much of a jolt to the system.

And yet, faced with no other option, we did what great companies and leaders do. Necessity became the mother of invention. Even in India with 20,000 employees, where people say remote work isn’t possible, we went to full work from home mode and enabled and established full connectivity.

It was a sea change in work location

At the same time, we were being hit with the intensity of the need for great work: so much market volatility and incredible uncertainty that makes our customers understandably focus on their resources and money and its safety. There was heightened stress all the way around.

My team and I slept very little.

One of the challenges of a remote working environment in a time of crisis is that immediately, all boundaries drop. On a Saturday night at 1 am in the morning, I’d be talking with people to get things done. That’s unheard of in my career. But that kind of time sensitivity is really important and essential to getting the immediate job done.

That period of market volatility and volume was pretty extended. It was a two- or three-month process before we could begin to think we were in a period of reliable stasis. Then the extraordinary “fight the fire” mentality has to give away to a reasonable, orderly, sustainable execution mentality. That is a very big leadership challenge.

Connecting purpose to work

How you rally a team in times of incredible stress and make the transition to sustainability relies on how people understand their purpose, their ability to connect themselves and their work to the larger vision.

We worked to be very clear. Our larger vision is to be true to our clients and customers and communities. Answer our clients’ questions every day. Keep every ATM machine full, every day. If you have a values-based, purpose-based north star, which is in service of clients and customers, then how we make decisions becomes clearly directed.  

In uncertainty and when you’re looking for connectivity, no one wants to get on the phone and talk for 4 hours about transactions. They want to get on the phone and talk for 4 hours because they believe they’re making the world a better place.

It’s also relevant to think about in terms of the next generation. The next generation takes as table stakes that purpose and profitability have to go hand in hand. Otherwise they will reject profitability in exchange for purpose. The best performing and most extraordinary leaders in our generation do that, and we bring our employees with us. The next generation won’t accept anything but that.

People are connected to purpose. They aren’t engaged in a transaction.

Lessons learned

What lessons have I learned? First is that necessity is a legitimate mother of invention. When we’ve had to do things, the teams are creative, thoughtful, they’re energetic, and we’ve gotten them done. Don’t underestimate the power of necessity as a motivator.

As an example, prior to Covid, our internal hiring rate, the jobs that were open and filled internally, was about 39%. Since Covid, our internal hiring rate has been 80% and in some cases over 90%. In the moment where we had to redeploy people with agility, reskill them immediately, where they had to want to be reskilled without reservation, those things all came together to produce a sea change result that is incredibly impactful to the morale of the firm and the ability to tap into institutional knowledge.

Another learning is that engagement and communication cannot be haphazard. I can see among my team that successful leaders are the ones that say, “I’m going to touch these five people today, these five tomorrow. I’m going to send this written communication.” The people who have a deliberate thought process and strategy find that engagement can in fact transcend location. That’s a very important learning as well.

The third learning is that words become more important when you can’t see or can’t come in direct contact with the people you’re working with.

Effective leaders climb out of their comfort zones to inject humanity into the conversation. When I’m on a conference call and someone’s dog barks, the best thing I can do is tell them about the time my cat meowed into the conference line with our CEO. If I as a leader fail to inject humanity, I’ve missed the learning, which is that words matter and human connectivity has to be enhanced and heightened in times of trauma when we are remote.

I will forever be a better leader because of what I’ve experienced the last six months. If I were going to encapsulate it, it’s not just that purpose and values matter. It’s that with them performance is possible and without them nothing happens. 

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This article is part of our September series on remote work. Find more insights in our new eBook on leading high-performing, high-engagement virtual teams. We’ll also host an executive education webinar on the same topic, on September 24.