Samantha Zeckmeister

I grew up in a household where my dad was in banking and ended up as CEO, and my mom was in real estate and always in management, so I had a solid foundation with parents who absolutely pushed my brother and me to want more, be more, and pursue education. Despite my resume maybe looking a bit crazy and all over the place, I credit having such a diverse background to making me really good at my job now - I have the ability to work with all kinds of people and I have that perspective from working in customer service, inside the corporate building, and outside the corporate building. My husband is an engineer, completely opposite from me in nature, but he has a work ethic that has probably been contagious over the last 15 years. I genuinely am a harder worker and more persistent just by osmosis of watching him - he is truly one of the most loyal and hardworking people. And honestly, my current boss is by far the best manager I've ever had. I've been working with him for the last three and a half to four years, and I think he's really shaped me. He's given me confidence and the ability to speak up for myself and say the things that I'm thinking. He's absolutely helped me come into my own and be able to freely speak up, knowing that I'm going to be supported. So I think it's a combination of everything, but mostly just the really good people that I've had in my life.

My current boss and I have a lot of conversations that start with the question, 'What does good look like?' - meaning, what are we hoping to achieve today, what do we consider for our own personal standard, and then maybe our team. But mostly it comes down to: how have I helped today? Especially in business, it's very easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, the negative, the problems, or what's going on. But asking yourself, how can you be helpful? What can you do to make somebody else's life easier? What can you do to make something more clear? What can you do to take something off somebody's plate? It's a really interesting way of working because it doesn't mean that you're doing all the work or doing everything yourself - it's kind of like that 'do unto others as you want done unto you,' but just in the corporate setting. We set it as an intention this year to just try to be helpful. You don't need to be all the things to all the people, but if you can make every interaction about how you can help, how you can make it better, that is contagious and it spreads. It's been a couple months, and I do think it really helps. It makes you have different conversations with people, you have a sense of trust with people, they're more willing to help you out when you need it. That little phrase in the back of your mind - what can you do to help - can make a huge difference in culture, in how you work with people, and in your relationships with people. It doesn't keep all the ownership on you, and it can be the tiniest thing. It doesn't even need to be anything huge, but it also forces your brain to look for a positive.

I think you need to have a solid understanding of the banking industry as a whole. I know this might be controversial in the world of project managers, because I understand that our role, strictly speaking, is not to know all the things - I don't necessarily need to understand how to code software because my job is just to make sure things are on time and to be the ringleader. But I will say, truly what has made me successful at KCU in the last 5 years is taking the time to actually listen and pay attention and learn something when I'm in meetings. I could absolutely just sit there and listen for dates and deadlines and timelines, but I actually learn about banking and strategy and all of those things just from listening and paying attention. I think it's important to think broader than just your job description as a project manager, because by taking the time to understand what deposit operations is really going through, or what accounting is doing, or IT, that does help you build trust. Now you're somebody that they can have a conversation with and bounce ideas off of, and you're that person that's an ally to them in the room. So you are more than just the note-taker, more than just the scheduler or the person who follows up - you become part of the discussion. I strongly believe that project management can very much help strategy and change management and all of those things, but if you don't take the time to really learn your industry or really learn what people are doing, you don't have the credibility to be in the room to have that conversation. It's absolutely about going outside of the mindset of 'that's not my job,' because it's not your job to understand data mapping in a core conversion, but I could talk to you about it because if I was there, I might as well listen. That extra knowledge in your back pocket allows you to have conversations with people on their level, because otherwise you're just going to talk to them about dates and deadlines. But if you're going to talk to the CFO, maybe you can have a conversation because you know what they're doing in accounting. It helps you build relationships, which helps you gain credibility, and it makes you more valuable as an employee. It allows your name to come up in rooms that you might not even be in, but they still think of you because they know you could do it. So stay open-minded, and it opens doors that you don't even know are there.

I think an overall challenge in the financial services industry is that when you get on the backside of banking - the operations side of things - it is a male-dominated industry. If you're in the branches, if you're a branch manager or head teller, it's female-dominated for sure, but when you get into the back world of finance and financial services, it's male-dominated. I have had some amazing men that I have worked with, so it's by no means a blanket statement, but it is different trying to find the balance of assertiveness and knowledge without being labeled bossy. My dad always told me growing up that it was the gray hair tax, and it's absolutely true - in financial services, you think of an older demographic of people, so it's interesting growing up in banking, having the knowledge and experience, but still not being labeled as old enough. Within the credit union space, there's very few CEOs that are women. As women start to make strides and get in the C-suite, it is happening and it is growing, but as somebody who has aspirations of the C-suite, I'm glad that it happens - you are truly kind of fighting an uphill battle in an industry that is traditionally seen as male-dominated. In terms of opportunities, AI is a huge one. Even for us, being a smaller regional credit union, the push for AI and all of these fintechs that are out there - the competition is insane. We are no longer competing with just the bank down the street. We have to compete with the SoFi's and the Chimes, and you have to be very innovative. Yes, you can view that as a threat or something to be worried about, but it also is a really good opportunity. I was just talking with my son because he didn't know where he wanted to go to college, and I said, the job you have when you grow up probably doesn't even exist yet. There's so much opportunity with how quickly technology is advancing - AI, everything in the digital world is huge. We're starting to have a lot of younger people, specifically in IT, which is the business unit that I'm in, so we have a lot of fresh ideas coming in. Being open-minded to people that have that knowledge is going to be huge. AI allows your people to spend more time being humans - it doesn't replace your actual people, it just allows them to do what AI can't do, all that manual, monotonous work.

I very much value honesty, but honesty in the way of transparency and clarity. Part of it's my role - I obviously need to keep things organized, and I'm very Type A and probably a little OCD. I do know there's a time and a place you can't share everything with everyone, but I do just think that if you are clear with people, you are intentional with what you say, and you're honest with them, I think that builds respect. I also really enjoy being curious, and I enjoy people who want to be curious. If we have a problem or something comes up, instead of just saying 'I don't know' and moving on, it can be an 'I don't know, but let me find out.' It kind of goes in line with that being helpful thing again, but just taking that extra step to figure it out - not passing the buck. Being curious about why is it that way, let's figure out if we can fix it or how to do it. I want to have honest conversations with people, but I also really want them to give it their all and ask questions about why it's that way and could it be better.