Part 1: Life, leadership, and happiness with Kelly King

Anna Slaydon: On today's episode we start a conversation with Kelly King, CEO of Truist Financial, reflecting on his life and what he's learned about leadership and happiness. Today Kelly tells us about his life growing up and the transition into management. His compelling story does include a few moments of tears and so we want to share a trigger warning to sensitive listeners. Kelly will be briefly touching on the topics of depression, domestic violence, and suicide and although the discretion is very brief and treated gently, if that might be upsetting to you we welcome you to skip this episode and join us for the next.

Kelly King: I grew up in a very challenged home environment. When I was born we lived in public housing. After that we had lived in different little shacks on farms and so most of my growing up years I'd say was on a farm. It was a very meager existence, typical small farm, you worked all day and you fell asleep at night and you know we learn of the things that people talk about and how hard banking is and I say well if you go back to those days in the middle of July and it's 95 degrees and you're out in the back fields 10 hours a day, banking is a piece of cake.

Anna Slaydon: Oh yeah.

Kelly King: But I had a real challenge with it because when I was planting tobacco I had some type of allergic reaction to it and so almost every day I would be throwing up sick and then people would say, "Well why did you keep doing that?" I'd say, "Well back then you had no choice." You got up the next day and you did it again because that's what you did and so it was – ours was a tiny, little, small farm and in those days there were a lot of little, small farms around so our neighbors would come and help us farm our crop 1 day and we'd go to another another day and so you did it 6 days a week; you just moved around to different farms.

Anna Slaydon: Yeah.

Kelly King: And so but it was a good experience in terms of learning to work hard, overcome obstacles, and you know it had some challenges along the way but it was overall I'd say looking back on it it was net more good than bad.

Anna Slaydon:  You're all kind of in it to help everyone succeed.

Kelly King: Yeah, there really was a strong community, supportive concept because you couldn't do it by yourself. You could only do it working together so that was a real good outcome for that. And the other thing that I reflect on now especially during the conversations around DE&I, back then we all worked on the farm and it was me and some of the White boys and some of their people of color and we didn't know the difference; we just worked. We were just buddies and I've thought about that a lot over the years in terms of my own view and we can talk about that later if you want to around DE&I but sometimes people say, "I don't see color," and they view that negatively but from my point of view I really didn't. I just viewed all of us out there working hard trying to do our job.

Anna Slaydon: Yeah.

Kelly King: The other thing about that childhood period was I learned a lot, I didn't realize it at the time, but I learned a lot of principles that have helped me in terms of leadership because of some of the experiences. So because ours was such a little farm my dad had to do a lot of other stuff, he had to do a lot of other jobs, and so 1 of the things he did was small construction jobs. So I remember this 1 time he was building – adding a room to a house and I was probably 12 or 13 so I was his helper and it was cold in the fall and he was over there laying the block and my job was to provide the materials so he wouldn't have to get up and down. So more often than not it was cold and he'd be up there working hard and I'd have my hands in my pockets trying to keep my hands warm and wouldn't go get to the block until he said, "Kelly, go get the block." And at 1 point he said something that just really stuck with me, he said, "You're never going to get anything done in life with your hands in your pocket," which really is a profound concept of responsibility because I was not being responsible. I was doing what I was told and only what I was told. Had I been responsible I would've understood the process and long before he needed the block I would've already had the block there but that helped me a lot later on just trying to think in terms of responsibility.

Anna Slaydon: Also purpose I would think. The purpose wasn't for you to just get the block; it was to help finish the project.

Kelly King: That's right. That's right. It's a broader thing. Are you laying brick or are you building a cathedral.

Anna Slaydon: Yeah, I love that.

Kelly King: Then I had another experience when I – just before I went to college I got my first public job, which was working at a grocery store. And so I'm just a small, little scrawny guy off the farm, I go into this interview, and it was Mr. Percy Parrish, I still remember, but his little office was way back at the back of the grocery store. So I go back there, scared to death to do this little interview, and he said, a very tough guy, he said, "I'll let you know," so I was – didn't think that was going to turn out very well. But anyway, so I left and started out the door. I got about three-fourths of the way out towards the door and he stopped me and called me back, I came back, and he said, "You got the job." I said, "Well that's great." He said, "Do you want to know why you got the job?" I said, "Yes sir." He said, "Because when I told you in a not too optimistic way, 'I'll let you know,' you still walked really fast and showed energy walking out that door. I need people working here that have got energy and drive and that don't let just what's going around them slow them down." So that's a lesson to learn and so that commitment to moving forward regardless of the obstacles was a lesson that I learned that's also very helpful in leadership.

Anna Slaydon: Oh absolutely. Now I know you've shared a little bit more about how your circumstances at home were a little bit rough.

Kelly King: Yeah.

Anna Slaydon: Could you share a little more about that?

Kelly King: Yeah and that – those circumstances I think in retrospect have really helped shape my view about purpose. So my mom was diagnosed with diabetes as a teenager and had of course diabetes her whole life and back then they didn't have nearly as good a treatment for it so she became depressed and was depressed her whole life.

Anna Slaydon: Oh wow.

Kelly King: And again they didn't have good treatments then and being on the farm I don't know that she even knew that there was treatments available. So all the time that I and my siblings were growing up she was constantly depressed, which was very sad for her but for us it was a very depressing, negative environment and our dad was a really bad alcoholic. Now I like to tell people to finish the story that I'm real proud of him because at about 45 he stopped cold turkey, became a strong Christian, active in his church, but when we were growing up it was tough.

Anna Slaydon: Yeah.

Kelly King: Mother was depressed, Dad was an alcoholic, there was almost never any food in the house, I remember it was literally hand-to-mouth, and when I was 13 or so we were still living in 1 of those little farm, shack houses that if you've never seen one it's kind of hard to believe but there's no insulation inside, no sheetrock, it was just plank board. You could see through the cracks, no running water, no central heat, all you had was a little pot-bellied stove in the middle of the house.

Anna Slaydon: So when I think of a shack it's literally what you grew up in.

Kelly King: It was a shack and so you know when you get up in January and it's 15 degrees outside and you go outside to an outhouse you kind of know what poverty is. So under all those conditions it's kind of amazing to me to be honest that I and my siblings have been blessed and done relatively well. All 4 of us have had really good, long-term careers and so – but I think back on it and a lot of those – of the difficulties, of the alcoholism, and the depression it was a lot of goodness and my dad when he was not drinking was a really hard worker, strong work ethic, very responsible, get the job done. And our mom, while she was depressed, but for us she was a very loving, very caring person and so she taught us love and caring, our dad taught us work and responsibility; that's a pretty good combination.

Anna Slaydon: It sounds like it and it sounds like through your work that you were doing you were able to extrapolate those life lessons and start putting together how you wanted to live life.

Kelly King: Yeah, my brother and I were very fortunate. We were the first ones on our family side to go to college and so we were fortunate that there was a – we went through the schools through the public schools but there was a really good guidance counselor there that took us under her wing and helped us get loans and scholarships so we were able to go to college and ended up with good careers so we had – we were blessed and we had some luck along the way.

Anna Slaydon: That's incredible. I've always enjoyed your stories and found them really relatable because I came from a similar background too, food insecurity, homeless a lot, and I had this moment, I thought it was normal, but I remember 1 day when I was about 15 I went over to somebody's house and I asked permission to flush the toilet because in my house you did not do that. And she looked at me like I was crazy and she was like, "Why would you even ask that?" and I realized in that moment that my life was different.

Kelly King: Right.

Anna Slaydon: I'm wondering if you ever had a moment like that when you started to realize that not everybody lived like that.

Kelly King: Oh yeah. Yeah, 1 of the things that I think because my parents' relationship was disjointed for whatever reason every night they would go somewhere else; they just didn't want to be home so they would go visit people. And I remember many, many times riding in the backseat of the car as a youngster driving by houses looking and seeing lights on and like a living room and you could kind of see people living like what I thought was, "That would be kind of cool to have a home and people in the home," but we never had that. You were either out on the farm working or you were in bed asleep getting ready to go to work the next day and so that was an a-ha to me that there are other people that live differently than this. They're not always depressed, they're not always experiencing fighting literally, and they have food in their house and they cook.

Anna Slaydon: They don't worry about that stuff not being there.

Kelly King: Right, right. Yeah, that was a big a-ha and I would just dream looking at the windows of those houses like maybe I can have that 1 day.

Anna Slaydon: As you started to move into adulthood and start to take on your career and going through college when did you start to realize that there was something like leadership, that it was a little bit different than just the mechanics of supervising people?

Kelly King: Yeah, so I think that was kind of a continuous journey for me. It wasn't like just 1 day I read a book and said, "This is it." I mean frankly when I started I was so fortunate I felt to be able to get a job at a bank. I tell people back then on the farm if you'd have asked me if I could ever work for a bank and be a branch manager that would be just like the height of a possible career.

Anna Slaydon: You'd arrived.

Kelly King: I would have arrived, absolutely. And so when I started out you know I didn't know anything about leadership. In fact, even though I did an undergraduate degree and a graduate degree I learned a lot but back then the most prevalent concept was around management. I still remember this, they always taught you the steps of management, plan, organize, staff, direct, and control; that was it. So when you came out of graduate school, plan, organize, staff, direct, and control. They didn't talk about leadership and it was the traditional hierarchical organizational structure and that's why you had command and control, plan, organize, staff, direct, and control because with a hierarchical structure you have to do a lot of directing and controlling. Now if I were writing a book about it I would write plan, organize, staff, and lead but back then it was all about directing and controlling.

So my early years were really about just that, directing and controlling because that's what I learned, that's what I thought I was supposed to do, and I'll just share with you a quick segue because I think this is true for a lot of people. So 1 of the challenges of kids of alcoholics is that they experience a lot of insecurity when they're a child and you know the way psychology works is whatever's happening to you when you're very young is totally embedded in your subconscious, and it starts showing up, you may not realize, you probably don't realize it, but it starts showing up in terms of what you think and the way you act. And so for me because I had all of those insecurities from childhood of bad circumstances I came out and developed early on I would say in my first 8 or 9 years I developed a very command and control, driven, get ahead at all costs kind of – I wouldn't even call it a leadership style; I'd call it a management style.

Anna Slaydon: And what did that look like? Can you share some examples? What did that look like?

Kelly King: Yeah, so what it looked like was I was blessed to be relatively smart, I graduated number 1 in the school of business, and so I knew what I was doing but it looked like being sure that my team did what I thought we should do, so direct and control to make sure this team's got to do what I want to do because I'm not proud to admit this but this is the way I thought then, I was smart, I figured it out, I knew what we needed to do, and we just needed to get on with it. And that actually works early on in your career oftentimes because you're at relatively low levels, you're managing smaller groups, and you can direct and control a smaller group. If you've got 4 or 5 people working for you in a branch it still won't be the best thing in the world but you can get it done because if you work hard you can kind of overcompensate. Now with 55,000 teammates I can't exactly direct and control anything at Truist.

Anna Slaydon: Right.

Kelly King: So you hit a wall. You run into a situation where you can no longer manage and if you're successful you learn how to switch to leading. So what actually happened to me was I went to the earlier versions of the leadership institute, which was Farr and Associates, Mr. Jim Farr, and I had the fortune of actually being in his class.

Anna Slaydon: Wow.

Kelly King: And so I went and it was our executive leadership team so there were like 6 of us there and I think they still do – we still do this now but 1 of the exercises that you did then was called the red light/green light and so what you had to do as a part of that process, it was a 5-day course, but part of it was this process where you would stand up in front of the room and each of the participants had a little switch and they could switch it red or green and then you stood there with a dashboard that had all the lights that related to all the people in the room. So you could ask, "Is it raining outside," and everybody would flash either red or green –

Anna Slaydon: Like a voting system.

Kelly King: Like a voting system. You couldn't see who was voting the light because they had it in their lap but you could see the results so everybody tells the truth.

Anna Slaydon: I am nervous in this story for you. Wow.

Kelly King: Yeah, they tell the absolute truth. So I get up there and so I'm asking questions and I get all green lights and I'm feeling great, but 1 of the questions they required you to ask was, "Do you feel comfortable screwing up around me?" making mistakes. I got all red lights. First time in my life, I was probably 27, 28 years old, first time in my life I had gotten any negative feedback. In school I got great grades, teachers said I was great, early career I got promoted several times early on, nobody ever gave me any negative feedback, "Go, go, go Kelly, you're doing great," all red lights.

Anna Slaydon:  Wow.

Kelly King: So you know what a lot of people do when they get that kind of feedback is they immediately say, "Well that's their problem." In fact I said that so I said – my first reaction was, "Well the comfortable was would you feel comfortable screwing up around me. They're saying they feel uncomfortable. This is about their insecurity; it's not about me." That was my first reaction. Then I thought about it and I said, "Well that's not a very good – because I can't do anything about them. I can only do something about…" so this was the beginning of my real journey. I said I have to take responsibility for me and I don't like that outcome because I mean the last thing in the world I would've thought about was that I could intimidate anybody. I mean for me, little 3-year old Kelly waking up in the middle of the night with his dad beating his mom, scared to death, the last thing that would've occurred to me is that I could intimidate somebody. I'm just trying to survive.

Anna Slaydon: Right.

Kelly King: And so I didn't want that. I didn't – that made me very sad that I was intimidating to somebody so I decided to take responsibility and I decided to take action. So I talked to 1 of my colleagues and I just said, "Look, I'm going to be honest with you." You didn't have to tell anybody what your lights were, nobody knew, so I said, "I'm going to tell you I got all red lights on this question and I need some help because I don't have a clue what to do." And he said, "Well let me tell you." He said, "You are intimidating." I said, "How? What do I – I'm naïve. How?" He said, "You're tall, you're energetic, you're dynamic, you do a great job, don't get me wrong, I'm glad you're on our team, you do a great job, but," he said, "For example if we're in meetings and I say something like, 'Well 1 of my people isn't doing a very good job,' you'll pound the table and say, 'Well fire them. Get somebody else,'" and that was intimidating. And I was hearing him talk I realized that was exactly true. I was in fact acting in a command and control, not that I wanted to intimidate anybody, not that I wanted to hurt anybody, it was the last thing in the world in my mind, I was just trying to get ahead. I didn't want to go back to 3 years old and be scared again so my way out was to climb the ladder.

Anna Slaydon: Right, through ways that had worked for you up until that point.

Kelly King: Through ways that worked until then.

Anna Slaydon: Until then.

Kelly King: And so – and of course the whole leadership institute process included a self-awareness process and that whole – it went to multiple other events with the institute, but the first 5 days was the giant, leaping pad for me because it started self-awareness. I was completely unaware of anything. I was just surviving and that's the problem in life. Most people go through much of their lives if not all of their lives and are never self-aware. They may have miserable lives and unsuccessful lives, but they never have the experience of being made to be self-aware because for most of us it takes some event, some catalyst to help us to be willing to become self-aware and then for many even though they've become self-aware they immediately ignore it, sweep it under the rug, go right back because when you become self-aware of your weaknesses and that if you want to continue to move forward you've got to change that's a very uncomfortable feeling; it's scary.

So I went through a period starting then, I said, "I do not like who I am. I want to change," so I started that journey and it was a very uncomfortable journey because when you've been doing something and that for me up to say 28 years old I had this style and all of a sudden I didn't have to but I chose to admit the truth, which is this is a flawed style. It's not going to work. I'm not going to be able to accomplish in life what I want to accomplish so I've got to change myself and so I had to kind of bare myself, go into deeper introspection, why is this? Fortunately through the institute and through self-awareness I was able to go back and examine my childhood and what did that – what was the impact of that on me and then – and gained a sense of some security and being able to approach it and – but it still didn't work so I still – that was the beginning but it didn't end.

So I went through another few years of working on that but still not making the progress that I would've liked to have made and then I discovered the second part of my problem in life and that was that success does not inherently bring happiness because I had this belief and it was a clear belief if I was successful I would be happy. I was successful in college, I was being successful at the bank; I should be happy.

Anna Slaydon: Which I think is probably a little bit of that childhood self of if I have that house and there's food in the fridge then that will make me feel happy.

Kelly King: Oh yeah, get the house, and so at 1 point, by then I'm probably let's say 32 years old, I could – I was actually working here in Charlotte and I actually had a house on a lake just south of Charlotte, I could take you right now to the place. On 1 Saturday afternoon I was cutting the grass and I had what I'm sure psychologists would have described as some type of significant emotional event, but I mean I literally just became aware that I was grossly unhappy.

Anna Slaydon: Oh wow.

Kelly King: And I immediately became really scared, so scared I literally shut off the lawn mower, left it in the middle of the yard, went into the house, went in the bedroom, laid on the bed, and cried like a baby. First time in my adult life, I cried.

Anna Slaydon: Yeah.

Kelly King: And so I thought I'm going crazy you know and again because of the way I grew up I didn't have anybody to lean on and I didn't have anybody to say, "Hey, you ought to go see a psychologist," and so I went through a deep period of introspection and I just decided that I had to figure this out by myself.

Anna Slaydon: Okay.

Kelly King:  And so I didn't say anything to anybody but I was miserable, scared, and I didn't know how to – I had to figure out life because my life's journey wasn't working. I had done everything I had done to be successful, I'm totally miserable, this is a problem.

Anna Slaydon: Yeah.

Kelly King: And so I went and being analytical I went through deep introspection, I even made myself think – I said, "I've got to think about dying." I know it sounds morbid but I made myself go through the whole life journey. I want to see myself in the casket. I want to – I went through the whole thing and the deeper I went the deeper I went.

Anna Slaydon: Right, but really trying to tackle it.

Kelly King: I was tackling it with the same – but it was that same command and control, figure it out by myself, you can see the pattern, and so I was still trying to get it all done by myself. And so I can tell you another day when I was driving home and I kind of pulled over the side of the road and I literally just prayed. To that point I had not been a religious person but I just prayed and I said, "God, I don't know who you are and you probably don't know me but I believe there has to be a power higher than me and I need help. I just need help and I believe you're up there somewhere."

Anna Slaydon: Yeah.

Kelly King: And honestly I had this sense of great relief and I had this sense of, "I'll help you."

Anna Slaydon: How beautiful.

Kelly King: And it didn't get perfect but I wasn't by myself another day. So then I continued the journey but with help and I continued to get help through the institute and I continued to learn about myself, I learned about how my childhood affected my behaviors, I took my feedback from my colleague and I started changing my behaviors so I learned that being tall and driven and all that does tend to be intimidating so even though I'm cold-natured I would almost never go into a meeting with a coat. I'd take my coat off and rather than lean up on the table I'd lean back, I'd relax –

Anna Slaydon: Oh okay.

Kelly King: Just to make myself look like I was not intimidating, almost look like I was out of it, even though inside you know it's like the duck with its feet pedaling.

Anna Slaydon: Right, furiously under the water.

Kelly King:  I'm going 100 miles an hour under the water but I'm relaxed but it helped me learn how to be more supportive of others and it helped me learn how to manage my own emotions because my emotions were what was the problem. It was those hidden emotions, and this is true for most people, it's those hidden emotions that are deep down inside that are flushing up through your subconscious that are causing these bad behaviors that cause people to not be as successful in life as they can be. But if you're willing to put in the work, if you're willing to recognize the truth, which is I can change but I have to be willing to change, I have to be willing to work at it so I have been working and I still work at it.

I mean you know I'm now in my 49th year of banking and I still work at it but that's been kind of the broad journey of Kelly King from scared, little 3-year old up through doing great in college and early stages of business, hitting a wall, and realizing this is not going to end up real good if I don't change, and I wanted to change, which is really important. And since then I have continued to progress in life and I tell people and it's true, there's not a chance in the world I would be CEO of the 6th largest commercial bank in the country today had I not gone through those experiences. To be honest, if I had not gone to the leadership institute I don't believe I would be here today, I really don't, because I would not have had the tools to be able to tackle these deep-seated challenges.

Anna Slaydon: Yeah, so it sounds like it helped supply you with the questions to start asking yourself.

Kelly King:That's right. That's right. Now they can only provide the questions; they don't have the answers. But they can provide the questions and they can help you realize that you can answer the questions if you're willing to.

Anna Slaydon: Join us for our next episode in which Kelly shares how he came to understand the relationship between beliefs, behaviors, and results and how that concept empowered him to lead more effectively. In his interview Kelly discussed his experience with the Truist Leadership Institute Mastering Leadership Dynamics program. Having gone through it myself I can personally attest to how transformational the experience is and how it is completely unlike any other leadership program. If you're interested in attending Mastering Leadership Dynamics visit us on the web at truistleadershipinstitute.com or email me at leadershipinstitute@truist.com. Leadership Amplitude is a podcast production of Truist Leadership Institute. All rights reserved.

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