I have helped lead growth inside a multibillion-dollar financial institution with more than 8,500 employees.
I have also helped build an international investment and operating platform with a much smaller team.
Those experiences taught me very different lessons about growth.
At GreenPoint, I had the benefit of an established organization around me. We had Human Resources, Training, Technology, Marketing, Operations, Wealth Management, Business Banking and experienced leaders across a 257-location banking franchise. When we launched The Client Journey, the challenge was enormous, but so was the infrastructure supporting us.
Together, we contributed to 24% core deposit growth. GreenPoint ultimately reported $36.62 billion in deposits, $37.59 billion in gross loans and more than 8,500 associates.
Years later, Aurora InvestCo gave me a very different assignment.
The initial growth mandate was $100 million. Today, Aurora’s cross-border investment and operating platform has surpassed $700 million in aggregate scale across investments, operating businesses and real assets in the United States, Latin America and Europe.
The number matters. But the biggest lesson was not about money.
It was about people.
What You Take for Granted Inside a Large Company
When you lead inside a large established organization, it is easy to forget how much infrastructure is working around you.
You need training? There is a training organization. You need recruiting support? Human Resources has systems, recruiters and established processes. You need technology? There is an IT organization. You need marketing? There are people who specialize in it.
That does not make leadership easy. At GreenPoint, aligning 257 locations and multiple functions around one client experience required enormous coordination. Strategy had to travel through layers of leadership and reach thousands of employees without losing its meaning.
But the infrastructure existed.
When you are building a growing international organization, sometimes you are creating the infrastructure at the same time you are using it. There is no department down the hall for every problem. Sometimes the playbook does not exist yet. Sometimes the person sitting across from you has never done the assignment you are about to give them. And sometimes neither of you speaks the other person’s first language.
International Growth Made Me a Better Listener
Working across countries taught me very quickly that communication is about much more than translating words.
Language matters, of course. But culture also affects how people interpret urgency, disagreement, authority, feedback, relationships and trust.
I learned not to assume that because I communicated something, it was understood the way I intended. Ask another question. Listen longer. Have someone explain the decision back in their own words. Understand the local market before deciding that the American way is automatically the right way.
At the same time, global leadership cannot mean lowering standards every time something becomes culturally uncomfortable. Financial discipline matters everywhere. Integrity matters everywhere. Accountability matters everywhere. The client experience matters everywhere.
The leader’s job is to make the standard clear while allowing intelligent differences in how teams reach it.
You Can Teach Skills. You Have to Hire the Attitude.
The biggest lesson, however, has been about talent.
I have always believed that people can learn far more than their résumé suggests.
You can teach someone a process. You can teach financial skills, technology, operating routines, presentation skills and management techniques. You can expose someone to a new market. You can give them experience they did not have before. You can coach judgment over time.
What is much harder to teach is attitude.
I cannot make someone ambitious. I cannot make someone care. I cannot make someone curious. I cannot make someone take ownership when nobody is watching. I cannot manufacture the determination to figure something out after the first answer is no.
You have to hire for those things from the beginning.
Sometimes I saw talent, drive and ambition in someone before they saw the next role in themselves. My job was to challenge them: give them an assignment a little bigger than the one they had already mastered, put them in a room they had not been in before, ask them to solve a problem they had never seen, let them make a decision, coach them when they got it wrong, then give them another opportunity.
That is how people grow. It is also how organizations grow.
If I only hired people who had already done every assignment I needed, I would be hiring for yesterday’s organization. I needed people capable of becoming what tomorrow’s organization would require.
Stretch People Without Setting Them Up to Fail
There is an important distinction between developing someone and simply throwing them into a job they are not prepared to handle.
A stretch assignment should stretch. It should not break.
When I give someone greater responsibility, I still owe them clarity: What does success look like? What decisions can they make? What requires escalation? What resources are available? Where are the non-negotiable standards? When will we review progress?
Then I have to give them enough room to actually lead.
If I solve every difficult problem, I may get through today efficiently while making the organization weaker tomorrow.
The Best People Do Not Need to Think Like You
Building internationally reinforced another lesson: diversity of thought is an operating advantage when the team shares the same destination.
I do not want a team of people who agree with me because I am the senior executive. I want people who see something I missed. I want the local expert who tells me why an idea that works in New York will not work the same way in Brazil. I want the person in Human Resources who sees an organizational risk before it becomes a performance problem. I want the operating leader who tells me the process looks good on paper but will fail in the field. I want the finance person who asks the uncomfortable question about the economics.
A strong team does not need to think alike. It needs to care about the same outcome.
From Leading Scale to Building the Capability to Scale
GreenPoint and Aurora gave me two very different leadership laboratories.
GreenPoint taught me what becomes possible when a mature institution aligns thousands of people, strong systems and significant resources behind a clear strategy.
Aurora taught me what it takes to build organizational capability while pursuing growth at the same time.
One experience was not harder or better than the other. They required different muscles.
Both experiences led me to the same conclusion: Growth follows people.
Capital matters. Strategy matters. Technology matters. Processes matter. But none of them execute themselves.
The $1 Billion Question
Crossing $700 million is a milestone I am proud of. But it is not the destination.
Our next challenge is not simply asking how we get from $700 million to $1 billion.
The better question is: What kind of organization do we have to become to responsibly support $1 billion?
That means stronger leaders. More people capable of making good decisions without waiting for me. Better systems where systems add value. Clearer accountability. Deeper local expertise. Stronger communication across countries and cultures. And a continued willingness to find ambitious people, teach them what can be taught and challenge them to grow into responsibilities they may not have imagined for themselves yet.
Hire for attitude. Teach the skills. Challenge talented people before they think they are ready. Give them room to grow. Hold them accountable. And build an organization that becomes less dependent on you as it becomes more successful.
We have crossed $700 million.
Now the challenge is building the organization capable of crossing $1 billion.
Discussion question: When you hire for a growing organization, which qualities do you believe can be taught — and which ones have to be there from the beginning?
Related Reading
Performance Improvement Plans Fix Problems. Career Development Plans Build Leaders.
A Productive Store Visit Starts With the Client Journey, Not the Checklist.
