Huntington exec learns from parenting
Sue Zazon’s hiring last year to head the central Ohio region for Huntington National Bank was a return engagement 30 years in the making. The Grove City native credits Huntington for her start in banking.
As a new graduate of Miami University juggling a trio of possibilities to begin her career, she chose Huntington for the flexibility it offered her as a management trainee. She eventually moved on and held the top local positions with KeyBank and FirstMerit Bank before returning to Huntington. She discussed her professional journey and lessons learned with Columbus CEO.
Q: What drew you to banking?
A: I was very fortunate to have three different job offers. One was with an insurance company, one was with GE doing some marketing, and the other was with Huntington, and Huntington was the only one that didn’t have me making a choice right away.
Q: How has being an executive with six children influenced your leadership style?
A: We have a blended family … we had four children together, and then we had one and now we have another one. … When I’m the mom, and I say, ‘Don’t do that,’ and I have the direct line, that’s a very direct conversation. When you’re a stepparent, or you don’t run the segment, but you’re in charge of it, it’s a dotted line. So matrix management at its finest is blended parenting. … I have learned a ton. I have made a lot of mistakes, I’ve done a lot of things well, but I applied so many of the things that I’d learned from getting divorced, getting remarried, having kids together and then having another one, it is like growing a business.
Q: Where do you look for strength?
A: A lot of my strength, like I talked about with my leadership style, so much of it comes from who I am as an entire person. I would say that strength comes, one of the parallels I can draw, is (my) breast cancer. When you think about leadership in uncertain times, I make a lot of parallels or analogies from being a leader of my family in uncertain times — when you look your kids in the eye and you say, ‘This is what’s going on. We’re going to confront this. We’re going to figure this out. We have faith, we have each other, and here we go.’
Q: How has banking changed in the last 30 years?
A: Right now, it’s really still important that we provide personal interaction at key moments in people’s lives, but that’s going to evolve, too. We call it omnichannel, meaning you have the bank, you have the retail offices, you have your phones. There’s Venmo and Quick Pay and different things out there where you can exchange money. We have to look at all those different channels constantly and be a resource versus just a service provider. … It’s going to be more automated, but there’s still going to be a role for people; there always is. It’s a matter of not thinking about today but thinking about what it is going to be like as we move forward and being nimble enough and flexible enough to make those changes.
Q: What is the biggest challenge for banking?
A: For a long time, regulation was the biggest risk or took up a lot of space in bank leadership minds — the regulatory environment. I think now it has shifted to cybersecurity, and one of the things we’ve done, Chris Inglis is on our board of directors, and he was a retired deputy director of NSA (the National Security Agency), so we have a board member now that handled national security for the country. That’s a change. You wouldn’t have had a board member that had that level of expertise (in the past).
Q: How has the banking workforce changed?
A: There are definitely more women, more diversity. … As a company, we are 51 percent female total; that includes everyone. We have goals, all our region, to make sure we’re looking at diversity and inclusion, and there are several things we look at, and one of the things is the upper-management workforce. We are currently at 41 percent diversity — and that could be gender, ethnicity,
Huntington Bancshares Inc. Address: 41 S. High St.
About: A full-service financial institution headquartered in Columbus and providing consumer, small-business and commercial services including treasury and wealth management and insurance in eight Midwestern states with 996 branches and 1,855 ATMs. Founded: 1866
Assets: $100 billion
Employees (central Ohio region): 5,850
Website: huntington.com all different kinds of things — and we want to go to 43 percent. Two percent doesn’t sound like a lot, but there’s a lot fewer positions. The point is all of us in the company know that we want to go from 41 to 43; we’re on a journey.