SouthState CEO John Corbett on Leadership, Culture, and Why Community Banking Matters

speaker-1 (00:06.414)
Helping community bankers grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is the Community Bank Podcast.

speaker-2 (00:20.184)
Way everybody and welcome back to the Community Bank Podcast. This is the podcast by Bankers for Bankers. I’m Caleb Stevens with South State Bank’s Capital Markets Division. It is great to be back with you for another episode. Thanks for making us part of your day. And making his podcast debut on our show is Mr. BJ Green from our Atlanta Banking Group here at South State. So BJ, how are you?

speaker-1 (00:40.758)
I’m great, Caleb. Thanks so much for having me on. Well

speaker-2 (00:43.446)
you have never been on the show before, but you have been at South State with us for about was it two and a half years? Tell us quickly about yourself and what you do here at the bank.

speaker-1 (00:49.068)
Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Yeah, so I’ve been with South State for about two and a half years. I started December of 2023, and I feel like I have two jobs. One job is kind of helping build out the Atlanta market. So you think about our bank in Atlanta, we are about four billion in assets. We have divisions that include commercial real estate, CI, middle market. We have a non-for-profit group, we have a private banking group, and a nine retail location spread throughout the city. So half of my responsibility.

Or, what I’m trying to do is kind of build and grow the Atlanta market. And then the other thing that I’m responsible for is corporate banking. So we have middle market teams across our nine-state footprint. Asset-based lending, headquartered here in Atlanta, but it’s a national footprint business. Franchise finance. So think about McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Genuine Parch franchisees. That business is slightly less than a billion dollars. And then we also have sponsor coverage and syndicate.

speaker-2 (01:56.45)
Well this show is for community bankers. Everything we do on the show is all about adding value to the community banks that we get to serve as part of South State’s correspondent division. but BJ, we’ve been working on a new project together, which is helping your group launch a podcast, which is exciting. So tell us about your show and who your first guest was.

speaker-1 (02:14.216)
Yeah, yeah, glad to. So first of all, thank you and your team so much for helping me get this started. I have been studying leadership for maybe my whole life, but certainly for the last probably 30 to 35 years pretty seriously. and I don’t care if you’re trying to build the best little league team, you know, that you’re coaching or a great church or a family or a good organization. I believe that leadership is everything, that organizations rise and fall based on the

Based on the talent and the quality of the leader. and I was so fortunate to have John Corbett, our CEO, be my first guest. So he is a he’s a thoughtful leader, he’s a very substantive person.

And so it was great to just talk to him about his leadership philosophy, how he’s approached it. he started, you know, this bank on a de novo basis back in nineteen ninety-nine. I think that’s when they were raising money. It was just really incredible to sit down with him and hear his story and and to think that that bank that he started with one branch and ten million in capital has grown to you know, sixty-eight billion in assets today is just remarkable.

speaker-2 (03:25.262)
Yeah, it’s hard to believe. Well, BJ, we are grateful that you’ve given us the permission to replay that conversation on our show here. your show, Leadership Is Everything, I think, is launching sometime in July. So, folks, if you’re looking for a great podcast to add to your lineup on leadership, check out Leadership Is Everything on Apple and on Spotify. We had John Corbett, you had John Corbett as your first guest, and we are grateful that you let us replay that conversation for our listeners on the community bank side as well. So your show is for the Atlanta business community.

our shows for community bankers, but I can’t think of a better guest to have on for our show than our own CEO John. I’ve known him a long time since two thousand nine, I want to say, and just a remarkable leader and someone who we’re grateful to be leading the helm here at South State and someone who we’re excited that they can share he can share his wisdom with our bank executives here.

speaker-1 (04:16.015)
Well again, thanks so much for your help and I hope people find it informative. Thank you.

speaker-2 (04:20.386)
Let’s jump into it right now.

speaker-1 (04:30.37)
Welcome to the Leadership Is Everything podcast. I’m BJ Green and I’ve spent my entire career in banking. I wanted to create this show for one reason: to sit down with people who lead organizations and build teams, who take real risk and carry the weight of a decision, and try to pull out what makes them effective, the habits, the principles, and the hard-won lessons you can use on Monday morning. And I couldn’t have scripted a better person to start with. My guest today didn’t inherit a bank.

He built one. He came up at First Union in Central Florida, mentored early by a banker named Ernie Penner, and instead of climbing someone else’s ladder, the two of them went out and started their own bank, a small de novo community bank in Winter Haven, Florida. The bank is now South State, with approximately sixty eight billion in assets, hundreds of branches from Virginia through the Cl Carolinas and Georgia, down through Florida, and now into Texas and Colorado, some of the fastest growing markets in the country.

Along the way, it’s been named one of the best banks in America, and he’s been called one of the most respected CEOs in the entire industry. What I find most interesting is how he leads. He’s known for a philosophy he calls thinking big but acting small, running a $68 billion company with local market leadership, an ownership philosophy that combines high autonomy with high accountability, and focuses on long-term relationships and consistent credit discipline.

He is the chief executive officer of South State, John Corbett. John, welcome to the podcast.

speaker-0 (06:03.15)
Well thank you so much for having me, BJ.

speaker-1 (06:05.4)
First of all, thank you for being our first guest. Before we get into the leadership content, would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself, where you grew up, and how you ended up in back?

speaker-0 (06:14.542)
Sure. I’m a fourth generation Floridian, born in Miami, but I moved to Winterhaven in Central Florida when I was 12 years old. I grew up in an entrepreneurial family. My father never really had a real job. He started a busbench company in Miami at a high school where he’d throw together a few two by fours in plywood and sell advertising. He then started a billboard business. He developed a marina. So that was the kind of risk-taking environment that I grew up with.

And after college, I just assumed I’d do the same thing that he did, but I I didn’t have two cents to rub together and I didn’t have any good ideas. So I was very, very fortunate. I went to church with the most respected man in our town, who was the local bank president named Ernie Penner, and he gave me a chance to work at the bank. And so I thought, you know, I’ll spend a couple years there, make a little money, learn about business, and then go out and do my own thing. But, you know, I learned to love the business.

Rather than being an entrepreneur, I I got to partner with other entrepreneurs. But after 10 years, I was about 30 years old, Ernie came to me with a crazy idea to start our own bank. And candidly, I didn’t even know you could do that. he said, Don’t worry, John, it’ll be easy. We’ll gather a board of directors, we’ll get a license from the state, and we need to round up about five million dollars of capital. I said, gosh, I I don’t have five million dollars of capital. How about you? He said, No, but we can just pass the hat in town, and that’s what we did.

And we did that in nineteen ninety-nine and opened Center State Bank on April Fool’s Day in two thousand. And we’ve been at it ever since for twenty-seven years.

speaker-1 (07:48.066)
Got it. and if you had to define leadership in one or two sentences, what would it be and has that definition changed over your career?

speaker-0 (07:57.378)
Yeah, so I’m gonna plagiarize a very influential bank investor, probably the biggest bank investor in the country. I was in a room full of bank CEOs from publicly traded companies a few years ago. And the moderator asked this investor, he said, What kind of banks do you invest in? And he said, I don’t invest in banks.

And everyone around the room looked around at each other, he goes, Well, he owns four percent of me. I know he owns seven percent of you. So the moderator kind of dumbfounded, said, Well, what do you mean you don’t invest in banks? What do you what do you mean? He says, I don’t invest in banks, I invest in in leadership. He said, Okay, well, what kind of leadership do you invest in? He says, I invest in triple A leadership. Okay, what what’s that? He says, I invest in leaders that can drive alignment around a shared project.

That can foster accountability amongst the team members and that create an affinity for a cause, something special, something unique. and I thought to myself, gosh, that’s exactly what I come to work trying to do every day. So I thought that was the essence of it. But as far as how it’s changed, I don’t know that it has changed. I just know that as the company has gotten bigger, the alignment part is much, much harder when you move from 10 employees initially to roughly 6,500 today.

speaker-1 (09:18.098)
you’ve talked about thinking big while acting small. So as the numbers increase and the employee base gets bigger, how do you put that in practice? How do you manage the organization as it grows?

speaker-0 (09:30.926)
Yeah, let me take you back before we started Center State Bank. I worked at a very large national bank right out of college. Really was a great experience. They invested a lot into leadership development. It was an exciting place to work, great people, but the company was really probably growing faster than they could handle the organizational structure. So I I think they made a vital mistake. Rather than going to the employee base and figuring out how to restructure the company, they outsourced their thinking to consultants.

And the consultants came in and they said, We’re gonna reorganize this thing, we’re gonna do it around silos. And they broke apart the fabric of these local communities and this geographic leadership. And when they did it, all of us that were there just

Felt like we didn’t matter. We just felt like a number. It felt like a very big organization. So when we started Center State, it was kind of like we were big bank refugees. And our organizing theory was that the structure of the company is going to be built around a family of banks, decentralized under one umbrella, recognizing that every market’s different, and they needed different leaders to lead different markets. So one of the things I I’ve learned is that there is a common characteristic in

in human nature and it doesn’t matter whether it’s the first year intern or the bank CEO, everyone wants to be seen, everyone wants their story heard, and everyone wants to feel like their work matters. And that’s the job of the leader to make sure that happens. There’s a principle called Dunbar’s number, which is the number is 150. About that is the maximum number of very close, meaningful relationships that a person can have.

And it’s just easier to develop those relationships with a local market leadership structure. One one last thing. we have a leadership development program in our company called Remarkable Leader. And one of the things we’re studying is this concept of team of teams. And this was kind of brought to light by General Stanley McChrystal in a book he wrote. He was head of the Joint Special Operations Command in the early 2000s when we were fighting Al Qaeda.

speaker-0 (11:40.034)
And at the early part of the war, McChrystal would acknowledge that we were losing to Al-Qaeda. There’s a ragtab group of terrorists that were beating the most powerful organization in the world, the United States military. And the thesis of McChrystal’s approach was that the rigid command and control hierarchy doesn’t work anymore. The world’s moving way too fast to have information flow up a hierarchy five levels and then flow back down to.

respond quickly enough. So defeat to defeat a network like I Al Qaeda, the United States military had to become a decentralized network, a team of teams. And as we think about our business, the pace of competition is moving so fast that the traditional assumption in a big company is that subordinates work to gather information, present it to the leader to make a decision. And what McChrystal said, what if the what if the it was turned on its head? The the triangle was turned upside down.

What if the leader’s job was to assimilate information to pass it down so that others can make faster decisions in a decentralized network type of organization?

speaker-1 (12:47.734)
It and I think it sounds like as you’ve you know, developed in your own leadership career and moved on, there are things that you’ve matured into or thought differently about from a leadership perspective. But are there things that you did when you were younger that you kind of employed or you said, look, this isn’t the right way of do it and and so you’ve kind of changed how you approach the leadership?

speaker-0 (13:07.246)
Yeah, you know, you start an organization, you’re very naive. You just assume that the leader is like the wizard of Oz, this omniscient, omnipotent person that makes decrees and everybody follows the decrees. the longer you do this, the more leaders you meet, you realize that every one of them puts their pants on in the morning just the same way that you and I do. And you learn how fallible they are and how reliant they are on other people to make good judgment and good wise decisions. So I I think the best leaders

lead through an iterative process with a team of people and it’s not just one man on an island. you the best leaders I think lead by asking the best questions. It’s more of a Socratic method. And when you do that, you’re really distributing ownership for the decision. You’re driving critical thinking with the team and you’re building trust. Got it.

speaker-1 (13:59.598)
let’s move on to maybe how you approach leadership. you have to make a lot of decisions as the bank grows and gets bigger, those decisions get bigger, the stakes I think arguably are higher. And I would suggest you probably don’t have perfect information when you’re making big decisions. One of them might be a large acquisition. how do you make those decisions that are high stakes when there is uncertainty or there’s risk?

speaker-0 (14:27.662)
Yeah, so probably the most impactful decisions I’m involved with are bank acquisitions or mergers. And I think we’ve been involved with 25 or 30. It’s been a lot. But the process is the same. And typically the process is a long period of dating with the other CEO and lots of dinners. In fact, the dating piece, the last bank we acquired in Texas and Colorado, David Brooks was a CEO, and the one of the only nights we could meet was Valentine’s Day. So we went to a steakhouse and they brought us a rose to our table.

So anyway, the dating thing is a real thing. But that goes out over a long period of time and then things heat up and the board starts to get interested and you you move towards a letter of intent and an exchange ratio. Once that happens, you move into a very tight window of due diligence. And that window can be two, three, four weeks. And it’s the job of your diligence team.

sometimes hundreds of people to go in and review every loan, every contract, every piece of litigation that’s meaningful, and create a recommendation for for me and others and the board, whether they want to move forward or not. And inevitably, no matter how good of a job they do, the the most information I could get you is maybe 70, 80 percent of the way there. There’s always a gap of 20, 25% that it is imperfect information. So ultimately

That comes down to a gut call to fill that gap of that missing 20 or 30 percent. And the gut call goes back to the dating period with that CEO and the reputation of that CEO. And you know, as I built a rapport with the CEO, you know, one of the things I try to do is be very candid about our organization’s weaknesses and faults. And I’m trying to disarm that CEO so that they’ll be candid with their own weaknesses and faults.

And if they are, and if I feel like they’re candid, we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on that twenty or thirty percent of missing information. But if they come across where everything’s perfect and they’re not candid, they’re not vulnerable, they’re not transparent, that’s when a judgment call comes in that maybe you maybe you don’t you don’t close the deal.

speaker-1 (16:36.822)
Right. And and you think about the independent Bank of Texas acquisition, so those new markets, Texas and Colorado, I know that you spent a lot of time, and we as an organization spent a lot of time on getting the cultural piece right. So keeping that cultural side intact and living up to those core values of local market leadership. So talk about that a little bit, just the importance of culture and how you think about the local market leadership.

speaker-0 (17:02.622)
Well, I talked about the big bank refugee moment when we kind of left and started a bank, and it was a very exciting and liberating thing. We had about 10 team members, and we built a building, we raised the capital, and all the employees worked together in that same building. So if anything broke in the bank, it was our fault, but we could fix it. There was this control inside those four four walls. And I remember after a year or two, I I had an idea to add a branch.

One branch about three or four miles from our office in a town of Auburnale, and it was like a revolt in the bank that everybody said, you know, where do you think what do you think you’re doing? You’re gonna grow into this big company just like the one that we left. And there was a real fear there. So what we did is we took that group of 10 people off site, we spent a weekend together.

And we documented what were the things that we really admired from our past experience, what were the things we really wanted to avoid. And that got crystallized into the core values of the bank that we still have today. And that was a unifying process. And it really gave us permission to grow since we all agreed on what was valuable and important to us. Roy Disney is famous for quote says it’s easy to make decisions.

when you know what your values are. And that that was a defining moment. But I do worry about the natural life cycle as a company gets bigger, it’s decentralize everything. Okay. So there there’s a there’s a British historian by the name of Arnold Tornby, I think is how you pronounce his name. And in the 1930s and 40s he wrote a work called A Study of History. And he chronicled the rise and fall of 21 civilizations.

And there was a pattern. Sixty years later, in 1990, a gentleman by the name of Lawrence Miller took Tornby’s work and applied it to corporations, the to the corporate life cycles. And he wrote a book called Barbarian Barbarians to Bureaucrats. Okay. And the thesis is that whether it’s a civilization or corporation, they don’t die from they die from suicide, they don’t get murdered, okay? And they pr follow a predictable life cycle.

speaker-0 (19:13.76)
Every organization starts with the prophet that’s a visionary and that has great inspiration. And that leader is followed by a barbarian, that that is the aggressive individual that that just pushes the organization into conquest. And they’re typically followed by a builder, explorer, someone that can build systems and scale the company and expand the company. But here’s the issue: when they’re successful, they typically hire lawyers and accountants to help them get organized.

And when they do, the the lawyers and accountants and other administrators, they like order. They want to protect the organization and they’re more interested in protecting sometimes. Not our lawyers and accountants. Right. They’re more interested in protecting sometimes than they are building. And that’s when you can have the tipping point. And that’s when you get into a bureaucratic mindset and this tight grip of control. I heard a story in South State recently where there was a thirty-five hundred dollar invoice that was sent around to be approved.

And there was a hundred and sixteen emails in the process to get this approved. Now the issue was of the money, it had something to do with protecting client confidentiality, but still a hundred and sixteen emails. So I think it’s real important that that we create a framework where we’re self-aware when we start to see the creative minority in the organization stifled by some domineering minority.

speaker-1 (20:37.046)
That’s that’s really good. And I think as organizations grow, you’ve got the different challenges you face. And how do you as a leader, you know, think about those different parts of the life cycle and and manage? maybe you you know you’ve got a talented person in the organization, they’re doing a good job, or maybe they need some help. How do you decide when you’re gonna step in versus step back and let that person maybe grow on their own?

speaker-0 (20:59.598)
Well, I think it starts with the principle that the leader’s job is to hire great people that are smarter than the leader, to give them direction, align their incentives, and then get the heck out of the way. Okay. talented people need room to maneuver and not be micromanaged. It’s it’s okay to experiment and fail as long as it’s proportionate to the company and the risk you’re taking. But but that doesn’t mean there’s not accountability. Okay. And so

We think the more appropriate response rather than micromanagement is eyes on and hands off. And the way you can do that is with data. Okay. In our organization, we create something for our 21 bank presidents called the share and compare report. And we stack rank everything from you know one way up to one way down, whether it’s your profitability, the growth metrics, the quality metrics, and I want

these division presidents to feel like they’re the CEO, to that they’re the owner and that they have to compete for capital. And when you incent people right and give them the right data, you can be eyes on, hands off. And you find that the data keeps everybody humble.

speaker-1 (22:15.052)
Right. how do you think about humility in a CEO’s daily decisions, not maybe as a virtue as you talk about, but something you practice?

speaker-0 (22:26.414)
Yeah, maybe maybe to start to clarify, I don’t think humility should be confused with weakness or a lack of conviction or a lack of grit. I think it’s the opposite. Okay. Humility is a choice. And a leader can lead with curiosity or they can lead with control. Okay. What I’ve found is that people that lead with control are typically insecure people.

they don’t want to admit what they don’t know, so they kind of just fake it. And because they’re insecure, they tend to hoard information, information’s power, and that’s the way they lead. They lead out of control. A a more humble leader leads with curiosity, and that that typically is the more secure individual. They’re the ones that ask the best questions and they allow their team members to be part of the strategy. And it goes back to what I mentioned earlier about.

Having information flow down so that your team can make great decisions rather than have it always flow up. The the most important question a leader can ask a team member is what do you think? Okay. That’s the question that inspires ownership.

speaker-1 (23:36.8)
Let’s pivot a little bit to just how you’ve grown as a leader personally. you took Center State from a de novo community bank in Central Florida to a Southeast Regional Force. What did the early version did you get right? And then what would you say today’s version, you know, you’d do differently?

speaker-0 (23:55.522)
Yeah, I know what I got right. And the thing I did right was I had the right partner and Ernie Penner. Okay. I mentioned we had to raise five million dollars of capital. I was 30 years old. I think he was 50, 55 years old, something like that. And when we started, we rented this old run-down office building. You could hear the mice running up in the ceiling, and we got two cafeteria fold-out desks that we put side by side, and those were our partner desks.

And two telephones. And we’d meet every morning for coffee and we’d go our separate ways to raise capital. We had a stack of blue cards that were subscription cards for people to see if they’d invest twenty five thousand or fifty thousand to start the bank. And he and I’d split up in the mornings and I would tell the story as a thirty year old and people were thinking, you know

You you want me to invest in you in a startup bank? And I could tell they were leaving the checkbook in the drawer, but once I mentioned Ernie’s name that I was with him, I saw him reach for the checkbook and and and and were willing to write a check. We I get back together with Ernie at the end of the day and he’d say, Well, John, how much capital did you raise? I said, Ernie, I got $150,000. I said, How much you get, Ernie? He said, I got a million, you know. So he was the guy that I was writing his coattails. That’s what we got right.

again, the core values, documenting that. That was the North Star. That was important that we got right. You know, what I do different today, you know, I I don’t know. I I when you start, you don’t know what you don’t know, and you’re just feeling your way through the dark. You know so much more now, probably probably would have had a bigger vision, probably would have raised more capital. you know, we never thought the company would have grown to where it has today.

speaker-1 (25:36.978)
fair enough. And you know, you led through this the 2008 financial crisis. Obviously you were able to make deals and be acquisitive. Well, I think other banks were hoping to survive or not survive. you obviously it was you tested your leadership a little bit. What what did that period teach you about leading under pressure?

speaker-0 (25:55.936)
The the financial crisis was the crucible for anyone in the banking but you’re in my generation of bankers. I think most people forget how scary it was in two thousand eight. You know, Lehman was the largest bank failure in the history of America. You know, you had Bear Stearns, you had Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack, these huge governmental organizations collapse. three quarters roughly of banks that existed in Florida at that time and Georgia, they’re gone. Okay. So it was a defining

moment, that crucible of that time. And so we had a choice to make. Do we want to go in the bunker and just try to ride this thing out? Or is there an opportunity to take the hill? And we had a lot of young people that didn’t know what they didn’t know and they wanted to take the hill. I see on the back of your shelf, BJ, you’ve got that book by Jim Collins, Good to Great. Right. there’s a section in there where he talks about the Stockdale paradox. You remember this? Mm-hmm. I do. And James Stockdale was the

Admiral in the Vietnam War that was the highest ranking military official in the Hanoi Hilton. And he was there for like eight years. And when Jim Collins was interviewing him, he talked about the prisoner syndrome, and he said, What which prisoners were the ones that failed to survive? And it surprised him with the answer: it was the blind optimist. They’re the ones that didn’t make it. And the Stockdale paradox was this psychological concept of a dual focus.

The ability to confront the brutal facts of what was gone going on in 2008, but yet an unwavering belief in your ultimate success. So I th as I think about that time period of 2008 when banks were failing left and right, it it would have been a disservice to our team to be Pollyanna at that time. We had to confront the fact that we were having the same loan losses that other folks were, but there was a path through it, and we used that through the FDIC acquisition piece. So

Anyway, that was a moment in time where a lot of the members of this team were in the foxhole together and we built some of the strongest relationships of my lifetime.

speaker-1 (28:01.684)
who shaped you most as a leader and what did you specifically learn or take from them?

speaker-0 (28:09.026)
Well I I talked about my father being this entrepreneur and his work ethic was unbelievable, which meant that my work ethic got attached to his. I mean, every morning I woke up and there was a yellow pad of paper with ten things to do on it, and most of it involved me and a shovel. so definitely learned that the work ethic from him and that work is something that that c you can enjoy. I mean, we did it as a family and it was something we took pride in.

All these projects we did were family projects. the other person clearly was Ernie Pinner and and learned very different things from Ernie. And surprisingly, the thing that I learned that probably made him the most successful was how pliable and open-minded he was as a leader. I, as his subordinate, could direct him. I could change the path where he the direction he was going because he was curious and he asked my advice.

But when he took my advice, guess what? The pressure was on me to deliver. So it was a psychological game I think he was playing. He was teaching me confidence. He he was taking teaching me to take ownership and to be responsible. And because he did that, and because he was pliable, I worked twice as hard for him than I would have if I was just following his instructions.

speaker-1 (29:29.086)
Yeah, that’s interesting. I think that that whole concept if you do a really good job for somebody you work for, you’ll earn their trust and they’ll always kind of, you know, lean in and help you when when you need it. is Ernie still alive today? He is. hardest leadership lesson you’ve had to learn and you know, usually those are the ones that you got wrong first or mistakes you’ve made.

speaker-0 (29:41.26)
Yeah. Very vibrant.

speaker-0 (29:53.324)
Yeah, so I I talked about probably the most impactful judgment calls I make is in the realm of mergers and acquisitions. In the lens I look at that through, I just to make it simple, called it the three M’s. The map, the management, and the math. Are we making our company better by investing in great communities? That’s the map. Do we have a cultural alignment with the management team?

And is the math good? Is the currency exchange good? Is the return for shareholders good? And the math is important. You’ve got to do all three. So the wisdom and judgment is how to balance the tension between all three of those. And I will tell you that that through 25 or more acquisitions, there are times I got enamored with the map. And I got enamored.

with the math. And sometimes the management piece wasn’t as good as I I had rose-colored glasses. Okay. And and you know, we did the deal, the the the culture ultimately prevails and survives, but sometimes that integration period instead of lasting a year or two may last two or three years and can slow the organization down. And ultimately that’s those are judgment calls and you learn from making mistakes as you as you grow.

speaker-1 (31:07.978)
you know, we we talked about this a lot. I I’m a big reader. I love to, you know, explore and get into some of the different books on leadership or whatever the different topics are, you know, from a business perspective. and a quip that I’ve always been fond of, it’s it’s that readers lead and leaders read. so books that you’re reading today that you’re interested in, or ones that you’ve read in the past that have really shaped your leadership style.

speaker-0 (31:36.174)
Yeah, a of times people send me management leadership books and I I read through them. I cursory do. Sure. What I really like is books about the human spirit and the grit that it takes for people to overcome obstacles. I I’ll give you I’ll give you two philosophy books. These are old, dense books that I’m not recommending that anyone read, but they are books that challenged my thinking, and they’re totally opposite philosophies. Okay. and there’s things in there that I sharp

Agree and disagree. One was Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, and the other, a totally different philosophy, is The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Again, things in those books that I fiercely agreed with, and then I fiercely disagreed with both of them, but it did make the both of them made me think, okay, philosophically. My favorite book, and I I told you I was a multi-generation Floridian here, there’s a book that all Floridians read called The Land Remembered by Patrick Smith.

And it’s about a family from the eighteen sixties after the Civil War to the nineteen sixties. And it’s the story of this dirt poor family, the McKibveys, and they they barely surviving

eating swamp cabbage and possums and then they start rustling up cattle and they get in big in the cattle business and then the citrus business and then the real estate business and then the banking business at the end in Miami. So anyway, it’s it’s a great character development story. I encourage anybody to read it, especially if you’re from Florida.

speaker-1 (33:04.298)
Okay. Really good. I’ll have to check that one out. I’ve read the first two that you mentioned, but not that last one. let’s talk and and maybe shift gears for our final segment. So growth, people and legacy. So you obviously meet a lot of people, you look at people and say they might be future leaders in the organization. you know, how do you how do you do that? How do you spot potential leadership in someone before maybe they’ve even had the title to prove it or the position to prove it?

speaker-0 (33:32.974)
To begin with, we downplay titles. Okay. I’m a big believer in giving someone responsibility before you give them a title. And in fact, you know, I would encourage most of our senior leaders, don’t even put titles on your emails, don’t even talk about your title. Right. Let your influence do your talking for you. but I I do believe that authority flows to the people that take responsibility. So normally people want to.

prove themselves by the responsibility they take before they get the authority. And then responsibility flows to those that ask for it. Okay. So that that’s typically before we’re promoting somebody, it’s somebody that’s asked for responsibility and then they’ve taken the responsibility and then they get the authority and the title and money come afterwards. Okay. Okay. but I I come back to this thing about reputation. Reputation and chemistry. And I don’t want to embarrass you here, but when we’re hiring people,

Reputation and chemistry matter more than anything else. we purchased a bank in Atlanta, Atlanta Capital Bank. The CEO Doug Williams built the bank as a de novo just as I had early on, and Doug was nearing retirement.

And we needed a leader to lead Atlanta for us. We had a four billion dollar bank in Atlanta, and we really weren’t sure where that leadership was going to come from. And we started working our network of contacts. one of our directors, Doug Hertz, offered to help me. We started calling around a very influential people that we respected, and we told them about the position. It’s a four billion dollar bank. You have any ideas?

And this name, BJ Green, came up. We said, Great, okay, well, that’s one person’s opinion. And then we called somebody else, totally different, that we respected, totally unrelated to the first person, and said, Here’s our deal. We got a four billion dollar bank in Atlanta. We’re looking for a leader that fit our culture. They go, I got the guy. It’s BJ Green. So that that I knew that you were our guy before I ever met you, because your reputation proceeded.

speaker-1 (35:32.634)
Okay, that’s amazing. Well, it was been an honor and a privilege to kind of go through that process with you and get to know you and the and the team, and it’s been a thrill to be a part of this for the past two and a half years. So thank you for for those compliments. There’s a part in the seven habits of highly successful people, and it talks about sharpening the saw. Yes. So taking time off, doing things that you personally either like or enjoy to stay sharp. So what are your sharpen the saw

Types of things that you do.

speaker-0 (36:03.798)
Yeah, I’m not a country club guy. I didn’t grow up on the tennis court or the golf course. again, I go back to my life with a shovel in my hand. So I I take pride in hard work. So I I live on a farm in Florida and my happy place is on the tractor. I upgraded to a tractor with an air conditioner and a radio. Now I really like it a lot. Okay. And our family has a camp up in North Carolina, so every summer I get the chainsaws out and cut trees and that’s the way I I touch grass and get connected again.

speaker-1 (36:29.954)
Got process amazing. the you’re probably on the unique side of what you do to to kind of spend time to to relax. two more questions. One is just your faith and a sense of calling, I think have been a thread through your entire career. How’s that shaped you and how you lead?

speaker-0 (36:50.562)
Yeah, so in in my my faith tradition, there are two great commandments. And the first is to love God, and the second is to love your neighbor as yourself. So I I get up in the morning and look at myself in the mirror every day and say, How am I going to love my neighbor as myself? Because that’s a tall order because I love myself a lot. So, as we all do. And so you know, it starts with my family. You know, they’re the priority for me. My wife and I will be married 35 years this summer.

we got four grown kids out of the house and now we’ve got five grandkids. So that’s that’s the priority, that’s where it starts. But then I look around at the company when I come to work and I look at my executive team, the operating committee. I mean, these are some of my closest friends. I want to make sure they feel seen, heard, and that their work matters.

And and want to be there to serve them. And then investors, you know, we’re running a company here. I want to provide them a good return. That’s a way to love my neighbor. And then finally, the community that we serve. you know, banking is a noble profession. if you want to make a difference in your community, be a banker. I mean, what other profession can you are you empowered at a young age to allocate capital, to help people buy their first home, to help finance the construction of a medical clinic or a hospital.

to build churches, to build schools, to build factories. you know, I think about as I drive through my hometown and think about all the the businesses I’ve been able to partner with and and provide them the capital they needed to grow, I I don’t know what can be better than that.

speaker-1 (38:23.746)
Yeah, I d I agree. I think it’s been an honor and a thrill, even in Atlanta, to drive past buildings or organizations where you’ve helped finance or be a part of their process or decisions to grow and build. And I always take a lot of personal pride to be involved in things like that. last question. So when you eventually hand off the keys, what do you want people to say about South State, its leadership culture, and kind of that legacy?

speaker-0 (38:49.87)
So the the board approached me a few years ago and they said, John, you know, not to be short-sighted here or anything, but we’d like to you to write a job description of yourself so that if you get hit by a bus, we we know what you think about who to look for in a in a leader and what those traits are. So I gave that some thought and I came up with a little cute thing about aiming high for the board. And the high is look for a leader that expresses humility, integrity.

even in the small things, has grit to get through the tough times and and is made up, you know, is hustles. You know, so that humility, integrity, grit, and hustle. The the Ritz Carlton has a motto that they are ladies and gentlemen, serving ladies and gentlemen, I kinda like for us to be thought of as scrappy entrepreneurs, serving scrappy entrepreneurs.

speaker-1 (39:41.035)
That’s great. John, I can’t thank you enough for your time and for be a part of the first podcast of Leadership is everything, and look forward to working with you for the next several years. So thanks for being on the program.

speaker-0 (39:52.8)
Likewise.