Chief Strategy and Customer Experience Officer
The distance created from working remotely during the pandemic has actually brought Liz Wolverton closer to her team.
“As Zoom connections took the place of travel, I reaped the benefits of reduced time in airports and Ubers and more time with teams,” said Wolverton, whose wide-ranging job is to oversee all corporate strategy, marketing, digital, customer experience, and diversity and inclusion initiatives.
Counter to once-prevailing opinions that business undoubtedly suffers without in-person interaction, Wolverton — like some others in the Most Powerful Women ranks — has experienced just the opposite. “I have found that removing the stress of travel has had a positive effect on the energy directed to the work and relationships at hand,” she said.
Wolverton has used videoconferencing for more frequent one-on-one connections, particularly with midlevel and junior team members she might not have otherwise met with.
“It has provided me invaluable perspectives,” including insight into employee engagement and awareness of a broader array of factors affecting the execution of various projects, she said. “It’s counterintuitive to think distance has improved personal connections, but these are great examples that it is happening.”
Now, more than ever, for both Wolverton and Synovus, those connections at all levels of the organization are critical as she helps oversee one of the largest internal corporate initiatives in the $54.3 billion-asset company’s history. Called Synovus Forward, it launched in 2020 with the goal of driving $100 million in incremental performance improvements.
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Most Powerful Women to Watch: Liz Wolverton, Synovus Financial The Women to Watch: No. 14, Synovus' Liz Wolverton
A key part of this effort hinges on a new, enterprisewide analytics program, the creation and integration of which Wolverton is leading. Far more than simply deploying sophisticated data architecture and modeling to improve business, the process requires a fundamental shift in mindset around how Synovus interacts with and serves customers. By the fourth quarter of 2020, several commercial analytics projects, focusing on reducing attrition and cross-selling, had already yielded savings of $20 million.
Meanwhile, Wolverton’s efforts to guide the company’s COVID-19 response and enhance its diversity and inclusion efforts have also been instrumental, said Deron Weston, a financial services principal at Deloitte Consulting.
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“Having been an outside partner with Liz in many of the outlined endeavors, I have watched her bring consensus and resolution when the path was unclear, the concepts were new and the skepticism around the unknown was extremely high,” Weston said. “Synovus is a better bank today because of her leadership, influence, ideas, innovation and her ability to bring people together around a common cause."
