Kevin Jones, ETA President and Chairman, and CEO, Celero Commerce September 16, 2019 It was a pleasure to spend two days in Washington, D.C. advocating on behalf of Electronic Transaction Association (ETA) members during our annual Fly-In and ETA FinTech Policy Forum.  Across the events, ETA members exchanged ideas and provided essential input on our industry to Members of Congress and policymakers across the government.

It’s exciting to serve as the President of ETA at this time of tremendous growth – in both size and importance – of the payments technology industry. ETA members, from startups to public companies, drive the future of commerce. Through innovative distribution and payment acceptance models for credit, debit, and prepaid cards, electronic payments are more important to American businesses and consumers than ever before. As we head into the final quarter of 2019, we have many reasons to be excited about the state of payments and financial technology, as well as the future of our association.

Since I joined the payments industry at the start of the new millennium, the total number of credit card transactions in the U.S. has doubled to over 33 billion per year. The payments industry now fuels annually $7 trillion in payments across North America and a staggering $21 trillion globally.

I witnessed  firsthand the enthusiasm for the products and services our industry is delivering during my two days in D.C. Our work truly speaks for itself – you can tell our government leaders are just as excited as we are about our industry’s achievements and where we are headed.

A key example is how payments technology is helping the underserved and democratizing access to financial services.  More people today own a cell phone than have a bank account. FinTech enables a simple app on your phone to make a payment, take a payment, transfer money to a friend, or even allow a small business to submit a loan application. With advances like these, fintech has the power to help Americans of all incomes and businesses of all sizes.

With the power of the internet, merchants of virtually any size can instantly operate in all 50 states and around the globe.  Part of our advocacy efforts was to encourage policymakers to provide clarity with a uniform national privacy law. Complying with a patchwork of unique state privacy laws would be confusing to customers and daunting, logistically difficult, and costly for payments businesses of all sizes to ensure compliance.

ETA’s advocacy on this issue is critical since data plays an important role in supporting our industry’s continuous effort to fight fraud.   Our long-standing commitment to fighting fraud is essential to the profitability of our businesses. One of our industry’s greatest achievements was the rollout of EMV cards.  With tokenization brought by EMV cards, counterfeit fraud was reduced by 87% in the U.S. and made that fraud less profitable.  But our industry’s fight against fraud online is far from finished.

Now, real-time monitoring allows for malicious actors to be identified even before a fraudulent transaction is executed. Tools like biometrics, geo-location, and tokenization—all recent innovations—are key to efforts in fighting fraud. These technologies are powered by the responsible use of data to create smart and sophisticated tools that prevent and detect fraud. It’s essential that we as payments advocates speak up for a policy environment that supports them.

From my seat on the ETA Board of Directors, I see how vital ETA is, both in Washington and around the country, to help our industry grow.  Under the new leadership of Jodie Kelley, we are bringing fresh energy to our work with policymakers on pro-payments legislation that helps all consumers and business move forward and strengthen the American economy.

Innovation, collaboration, and a motivation that’s built on positioning American businesses and consumers for financial success—these are the defining qualities of our industry and of ETA.

This article originally ran on TransactionTrends.com, the official news site of ETA. Click here to subscribe to Transaction Trends Weekly to receive weekly payments industry news and analysis from ETA.

Much has been written and discussed on the notion of the performance-based culture. This is a concept that I bought into as a very young manager, and I’ve expanded on it through my years leading larger and larger groups of people as they accomplish great things together.

Focusing on people doesn’t just mean hiring right, nor does it stop at training. It means a commitment to their development, helping them align their own built-in purpose to the needs of your organization, so you can grow together and succeed together.

Values Alignment

I’ve always had the thrill of managing very diverse teams, people coming from all walks of life. Maybe it’s just my upbringing in the North Carolina mountains, where we all scrapped to make a living and take care of each other, but I never ascribed any kind of merit or status based on somebody’s wealth, skin color, or whose son or daughter they were.

To the contrary, it was ingrained in me, as I was raised by my single mom, to be humble and respectful, and to honor those who showed humility and respect for others.  I took this to heart in a big way—I’ve collected many friends along my journey through life, and these are the two common denominators in those I value most. To a person, the men and women in my life work hard at whatever they do, and they do so humbly, going out of their way to show respect to others. And the values they have transcend all walks of life, so you naturally find yourself surrounded by men and women, people of different races and ethnicities, rich, poor and middle class, and any of the other ways in which society is happy to differentiate us.

Challenging Mediocrity

I think with any large group of people, you’re going to have some application of the 80/20 rule, where your top 20 percent pulls the team goalward, or a bell curve, where you have some at the high-performance end, some pretty weak performers, and a fat middle who range from those who just need a little boost before they become top performers to those just another cycle away from joining the bottom-feeders. 

Whatever diagram applies to your group, it’s important for all to challenge mediocrity. When you consistently challenge your team to do more, to do better, to do things more simply, and to do those things faster, you find out where the leaders are. I’ve always prided myself on doing the work necessary at leadership level to take this ethos a step further.  If you want to know my opinion on the secret sauce to success—and more specifically, what I feel has helped to drive the success of my teams—it’s that I consistently challenge mediocrity in all its shapes and forms at individual level.

Anybody can—and should—reward top performers with raises, bonuses, and promotions. But the real reward for leaders comes from startups, and better yet from turnaround projects, and we need to think of those possibilities not just in the organizations we lead, but in the individual sense.

From Worst to First 

I’ll give you an example of employing this strategy with individuals. At 27, I found myself leading 10 branch offices of a regional bank. Each office had a manager, assistant manager, and about five entry level sales executive employees. The leader of our division, one of my earliest and best mentors, was committed to building a high-performance culture, and it was great for me to gain early exposure to this concept in a bank environment.

My own path showed just how exciting of a culture my early mentor was building. Within just over a year, I had earned three promotions after leading my division as an individual, as a branch manager, and as a regional manager in new loans generated. Our entire team was known as a group of champions.

I learned one of my bigger lessons in leadership, when I was handed a new opportunity to double the size of my region. Instinctively, since I was raised to treat people with respect as individuals, I began studying my new employees and surveying their managers and peers. This process armed me with the information I’d need to tailor a management style to each individual’s needs.  

One of the first things I did was to confront our team’s weakest links. My theory was that the team would win if these folks did better, or if they left. What I discovered, by focusing on each individual’s needs, is that sometimes when you meet people where they are, without sacrificing your standards, you’ll see people that can actually go from worst to first.

One of the more important people in my life is just such an example. He’s one of those I confronted after taking over additional branches. The word on this guy was that he was very bright, but his poor attitude reflected not only in his own performance (or lack thereof), but also in the flagging performances of those he’d befriended most.

Tough Love Works When People Need It

I chose an approach of tough love. When I confronted him, I let him know how much potential I thought he had—in fact, I let him know that he could become our best performers in the entire region (and one of the bank’s stars) based on his grasp of the business and his people skills. I also let him know that should he rise to my expectations, raises, promotions, and the thrill of every success awaited, and in short order.

But I also told him that there was another path. He could do us all a favor—especially himself—and find another job where he might be more self-motivated and ultimately happier. Needless to say, and the reason I’m obviously sharing this example with you, our bottom performer chose the harder path and stayed. And he didn’t just stay. He excelled in every aspect of his job, becoming one of the best examples and motivators to others. I ended up putting this guy—who himself came within an inch of being fired—in charge of all of my region’s hiring and training! 

It’s About Them, Not You

That level of success that we achieved together was eye-opening for me. People have different needs, and managers and leaders should uncover those needs and respond to them in kind. Our bottom performer, it turns out, needed to be challenged more creatively. In any profession, there are lots of problems that require creative minds to find solutions. I found him to be an incredible strategic partner, and my role in his success was simply to help him find ways to unleash his creativity. Now, nearly a quarter-century later, he holds a very important role here at Celero.

I believe strongly that an effective CEO should focus on facilitating great decisions, as opposed to always making decisions ourselves. That requires a lot of work and focusing on culture, so that people can perform in ways that fulfill their purpose and hit your goals, too.

A performance-based culture is a fair culture that rewards team members who create value. It challenges the top performers and keeps them engaged. I have found that in the day-to-day, some team members prefer comfort, but over time, they will leave if you aren’t cultivating them to reach their potential.

I think intentionally about those who report to me and work in my organizations. A driving thought is ensuring that if they chose me as a mentor or my organization as home, that I have high expectations for myself, as we them to reach their full potential. Through my career, my greatest joy and success is playing that role with others:  recognizing and cultivating excellence in the individuals on my team and witnessing their growth, in their careers and in life.

Kevin Jones- June 27, 2019 I’ve reached a place in my career where I choose the people I work with, whether it’s our employees, our strategic partners, or the kinds of customers we bring in to Celero. That’s not something to be taken lightly, and while that’s an incredible place to be, it comes with a high price. That price is constant mindfulness of the needs of others, and how best to take care of their needs. The key to our success is empathy.

When I first began managing people over 20 years ago, I knew that in order to motivate people to succeed for themselves and their customers beyond their wildest dreams, there couldn’t be a “Kevin Jones Way” of leadership. Instead, I decided to make each relationship about the other person, thinking that if I gave them what they needed—confidence, encouragement, tools, and sometimes an appropriate dose of tough love—they would not only play their role on the team, but be the ultimate teammate.

Early on, I could see that this path to leadership was a formula for winning—and winning big. When people know that you believe in them, consider their well-being in an authentic way, and invest in them for the long-term, their performance, productivity, and happiness know few boundaries.

The same dynamic holds true for partners and customers. When you extend empathy and try to walk a mile in the shoes of those outside your company, great things happen. In the business-to-business world, business owners and managers are looking for someone that transcends the traditional vendor/client framework, wanting trusted partners. When you live with empathy for your partners and clients, you can even transcend the trusted partner level and become more like a teammate or even a friend or family member.

What I’m talking about here isn’t a normal approach, but I think it’s what the best companies do best—empathizing to better understand employees, partners, and customers. And this abnormal approach definitely yields abnormal responses, underpinned by a higher level of loyalty.

Here’s the best part: when you choose to lead with your values, first among them empathy, but closely behind come teamwork, accountability, respect, and positivity, success is sweeter. It’s sweeter because you share it with others, with your employees, partners, and customers. I like to think of the difference in a way that many can relate to immediately. I enjoyed my life immensely before I met my wife. My life was certainly good, but I had no idea how great it would become, first through sharing it with her, and then with her and our children.

Anybody who knows me at all hears me talk a lot about concepts like loyalty and culture. Loyalty is something we create through individual relationships, and so is culture. But culture is what happens through the exponential power of all of those individual relationships when you bind them together in the service of a single mission. And the key to all of these wonderful elements of a company is empathy.