It floats in the forest as a treehouse among the greenery — a chapel of wood, glass and steel.
A pedestrian bridge curves like a metal spine around this landscape, connecting structures that nearly blend in with the trees. Nature is the unmistakable theme here, a place to retreat from the surrounding world of aging suburban strip malls and sprawling megachurch parking lots and to peer into one's inner self.
This is the campus of the growing Truist Leadership Institute in Greensboro, North Carolina. Behind the genteel, retreatlike setting, would-be executives at one of the largest banks in the country undergo what the psychologist who first developed the institute's programming called a "dramatic and often threatening plunge into the vortex of the mind."
Truist Financial is proud of its leadership institute, while critics — none of whom attended the Truist Leadership Institute's programs — question whether it inappropriately blurs boundaries between work and employees' psyches and personal lives. Underpinning that conflict is the Truist Leadership Institute's tight connection to the late psychologist Dr. James Farr, who in his Greensboro, N.C., practice, promoted the idea that unresolved issues from childhood could stunt the personal and professional lives of leaders.
John Allison served as CEO of BB&T from 1989 to 2008, during which time the bank
"One of the key components of the program was voluntary self-hypnosis," Allison said. "Any significant event in our life is held in the subconscious. Bringing these events to consciousness can often dissipate the energy because we realize we drew an irrational conclusion as a child."
Truist says it no longer uses voluntary self-hypnosis. The bank did not say when Farr's program, or when the BB&T evolution of that program, stopped doing so.
Will Sutton, the institute's president and director, said that hypnosis "of any type" is not a part of the institute's curriculum.
"My experience with the program goes back over 20 years, when I experienced it as a participant, and no such thing was part of it then," he said.
The BB&T Leadership Institute — the outgrowth of the acquisition of Farr Associates — became the Truist Leadership Institute after BB&T merged with SunTrust Banks in 2019 and the unified bank was named Truist. The flagship program offered by the institute is called "Mastering Leadership Dynamics," and it is based on programming that originated with Farr.
Executives say the Truist Leadership Institute teaches self-awareness: People are driven by the subconscious beliefs they developed as children, typically in how they relate to their parents. Identifying those beliefs is key to overcoming their negative effects, or at least in working around them, according to the institute.
This could mean that attendees of the program find themselves emotionally vulnerable, discussing the ways their childhood experiences continue to play a role in their shortcomings at work and at home.
"For example, my mother was hypercritical," Allison said in an email. "If I got all A's and one B on my report card she would focus exclusively on the B. I concluded that the only way I could be 'good enough' was to make all A's, which is not achievable in the real world. So I would be unhappy and could take the negative energy out on [my] fellow employees, which was completely irrational."
It's not unusual for banks to offer leadership training to employees, especially to those viewed as high-potential managers. And Truist has continuously stood behind its leadership institute and its approach. In fact, the Charlotte-based bank is investing in the institute, expanding the size of its campus by adding 86,093 square feet in new construction to the tune of $51.53 million, according to a permit filed with the city of Greensboro.
Others have raised significant concerns with the way the institute could cross the line between the professional and the personal. Several management experts expressed concern that the power dynamics inherent in the Truist Leadership Institute and its programs are troubling.
Managers' participation at the Truist Leadership Institute is voluntary but encouraged, Sutton said.
Some outside experts questioned whether the bank's workers should be expected to dive into these deeply personal issues in groups that could include their current or future colleagues.
After all, if someone wanting to move into the executive level at the $555 billion-asset Truist gets an invitation to attend bank-sponsored leadership training, are they really going to turn it down, or not appear to fully embrace it? Especially if it's an experience common to senior executives at Truist.
"This is wildly inappropriate," said Alison Green, a management consultant and author of the website
Even without any "voluntary self-hypnosis" aspect of the program, Green said that she would "continue to have the same concerns about that kind of deeply intimate emotional work being inappropriate for a work context."
"For many kinds of trauma, this kind of work should only be done under the supervision of a trained therapist," she said. "The CEO's examples are about his grades, but what about people whose childhood trauma is about far more serious issues, like abuse? The workplace is not an appropriate forum to deal with those issues or the emotional aftermath of dealing with them, or, for that matter, the secondary trauma it might bring up in listeners."
'This achievement does not come painlessly'
Lakecia Stewart was sure she was the youngest person in the room. She remembers feeling like her bosses at the bank believed she was one of those high-potential leaders they wanted to develop.
"I felt a little intimidated because I was so young at that point around very senior people who were much older," she said. "It felt like, how do I say this, or should I, because of how young I was."
At the leadership training, she found herself in a group of more seasoned leaders, both from within the bank she wanted to advance in, and from other companies.
"You would have to write things about your childhood, the traumatic things that may have happened," Stewart said. "One time we actually had to close our eyes and try to almost meditate on different things that had happened. The instructor said something and you had to think about it, go way back into your childhood and be one with the experience. It was a really deep class, I'll say that."
She went back to work and told her boss what she thought — that it was the best thing she ever did. Stewart last worked for the bank in 2012 as a senior vice president of brand and communications strategy.
"I didn't even really know who I was, and they did a very deep dive into that, and why you behaved the way you did," she said. "It was very personal, you weren't forced, but you wanted to do it because you were trying to figure out what made you tick. That was the whole idea."
While Truist is careful to say that the Truist Leadership Institute is a leadership development program, not a psychological institute, the bank does claim that its approach is
The underpinnings of the institute's programs, particularly Mastering Leadership Dynamics, come from Farr. The Truist Leadership Institute website publicly calls its current programming a "natural evolution of Farr's world-class approach to leadership development."
Sutton said that the modern-day Truist Leadership Institute has "similar ultimate goals" to those of the programs run by Farr, but that its approach has evolved. Both Farr's original program and the current iteration aim to "help leaders understand themselves at a deeper level and to know the impact we have on our own success as well as those around us," Sutton said.
"It is much more open and collaborative and our executive consultants work hard to create an environment that allows participants to discover their beliefs about themselves," he said. "This includes those elements of our leadership that make us successful along with those facets of our personality — particularly when we're under stress or conflict — that leak out and are destructive to relationships and our leadership goals. We spend much more time on leadership purpose and what teammates see and experience when we're on purpose versus off purpose."
The Truist Leadership Institute follows the ethical guidelines of the International Coaching Federation, Sutton said, and its work with executives is "guided by very strict rules of confidentiality."
"Whether it is executive coaching, team development, or our programs, nothing is ever discussed outside of the classroom and we set those norms upfront with every group with whom we work," he said. "All participant feedback and assessments are their own and we do not share them — even if asked by a participant's manager so that they may 'better coach them.'"
Any notes the Truist Leadership Institute's employees take during the program are either given directly to the participant or immediately and securely destroyed, Sutton said. And the program's attendees can disclose as little or as much as they want to as part of the process, he added.
"In fact, we set the stage for that early in the class by using a metaphor of a boat — when it comes to reflection and disclosure, you can dip your toe in the water, put a foot in the boat, sit in the boat tied to the dock or push out to sea — your choice," Sutton said.
Former BB&T and Truist CEO Kelly King, who
"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," King said in an extensive three-part interview with the Truist Leadership Institute's podcast
In James Farr's 1998 book "Supra-Conscious Leadership: New Thinking for a New World," Farr describes running workshops like the ones King and Allison attended for executives at his firm in Greensboro. Farr died in 2000.
"Nine out of 10 of those leaders arrived believing, if they thought about it at all, that leadership was something that could be learned like mathematics or computer science," Farr writes in the book. "They did not understand that becoming a genuine leader would require a dramatic and often threatening plunge into the vortex of the mind — their own minds in particular and the human mind in general. But it does require such an experience. It is heartening to note that all but the most stubbornly resistant participants in our workshops finally came to see and accept this."
"This achievement does not come painlessly and is no small accomplishment," he writes later in the book. "It usually takes a long time to practice and exercise our reflective and imaginative faculties to reach supraconsciousness."
The leadership industry
The Truist Leadership Institute might be unusual for a bank to own, but it makes perfect sense in the context of a growing — and increasingly controversial — corporate leadership industry.
Leadership books, seminars and retreat programs contend they hold the keys to success, both personally and professionally, said John Van Maanan, an emeritus professor of organization studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The amorphous nature of the industry makes it difficult to quantify, but some estimates range around
"There's influence and money to be had," Van Maanan said.
The unspoken bargain in many leadership programs goes something like this: Accept the underlying principles and morality of whatever leadership theory is being taught (such as servant leadership or task-oriented leadership), and be rewarded with the money and power that comes from promotions at work and advancement in your own life.
"Some people may find satisfaction and ecstasy in theories like that, but ultimately it's telling people what to do," he said. "If you believe in it, they tell you the rules to follow and that you will become a success. I think it's helpful for some people but some people may find it draconian and really offensive."
And in these cases, there's not much room for naysayers.
"You either get with the program or you get out," Van Maanan said. "Some people will manifest outward and suggest that they accept it, but inwardly feel very conflicted because you have to go along with it to please the boss."
The Truist Leadership Institute is not run as a profit center for the bank. It accepts money from outside clients — typically executives at other companies — but runs free programs for students and has a large initiative for school principals.
Most leadership programs, like the Truist Leadership Institute, teach a higher-minded ideal than simple techniques for managing employees. At Truist, the phrase "purpose-driven leadership" is popular: The idea that you have a purpose for your work other than just making money for the bank — for example, expanding financial access for underserved communities, or increasing economic opportunities for women — underpins much of what the bank espouses.
"It helps to rationalize a path that we otherwise might scrutinize a lot more carefully," said Stacie Bosley, an economist at Hamline University who studies managerial economics. "It puts it in a glossy package that says this is really about your self-actualization; it's really about showing all these intrinsic qualities you have about yourself."
Leadership frameworks make it seem as though the byproduct — not the primary goal — of this pursuit is freedom, wealth and influence, Bosley said.
"People need to feel like going for those things means something else," she said.
But that reward structure is misleading, she said, especially in a corporate setting where there are a limited number of leadership positions. Though many may attend the seminars, only a few will actually climb the corporate ladder.
"There's structural reasons why most people aren't going to rise into what they denote as leadership positions, or positions of wealth," Bosley said. "That's exactly the reason why leadership trainings say that this higher-purpose is an even bigger prize, because not everyone can achieve the tangible rewards."
Chase Thiel, a professor of management and expert in ethical leadership at the University of Wyoming, said the academic literature is at best inconclusive on whether these leadership programs meet their stated goals.
"The secret that everyone knows about in the industry is that companies will spend billions of dollars on training, but relatively few spend any on training evaluation," he said. "The best thing you'll typically find is an exit survey, but nothing substantive in that you're actually looking at changes in behavior, like the relationship that these people have with their subordinates. That's not being measured."
The landscape of leadership development programs is disparate, made up of small companies, leadership gurus with high public profiles and larger companies that have some kind of training arm, he said. There's little standardization as far as what they teach or how they're measured.
"It's pretty unregulated," Thiel said.
Van Maanan said that for many leadership programs, anecdotal results are enough. "Getting results" isn't really the point, either.
"They believe deeply in it, and maybe for them it works," he said. "But working is not the same thing as demonstrating the factuality of it. That takes it out of the scientific realm and puts it into the inspirational realm."
Red light, green light
Everyone in the classroom had a choice: red light, or green light.
Robert Halfacre is now the mayor of the city of Clemson, South Carolina, and a commercial banker at Park National Bank. But from March 2010 to June 2014, he worked for BB&T. And he once sat in a room with a group of his peers as an instructor asked participants to decide if their colleagues "exhibited the characteristics of a leader." (King, in the Truist Leadership Institute podcast, talked about his experience during this same exercise, and said that he believes the institute still utilizes it.)
"Then all around the room people would press green for yes, and red if they felt like maybe they didn't exhibit those behaviors," Halfacre said. "That's nerve-wracking — to get someone's response at a very limited interaction, really a first impression."
Sutton said that the Truist Leadership Institute does use a "First Perceptions Exercise," sometimes referred to as red light, green light.
"It's utilized early in the program and is meant to give participants exactly that — the first impressions they give people," he said. " It's designed to illuminate two things — the cognitive biases we all have when evaluating others and to help participants understand how they process information about themselves."
Halfacre attended the program as a BB&T employee, but his success in his home community is emblematic of one of Truist's biggest goals with its leadership institute: reaching outside the company, and influencing communities more holistically.
"I'm still using it today," Halfacre said. "Not only just in banking, but on the political side — and, like I said, on the personal side."
The Truist Leadership Institute hosts a number of programs for people who don't work for the bank.
These programs are where Truist is most vocal about the leadership institute. Truist's current CEO Bill Rogers talked about the institute's work with K-12 principals in a recent
The institute takes outside executive clients who can participate in cohort training and one-on-one executive coaching. It also has programs that go into colleges and universities, and one that invites K-12 principals and teachers to the institute to go through a version of its Managing Leadership Dynamics program.
The institute
The ideological underpinning of these efforts is found, once again, in Farr's work. To see what he says are the benefits of this psychologically influenced leadership training, the leaders he and his firm have trained need to go out into the world and bring other people into a similar mindset.
"One of the primary tasks that leaders must recognize and begin to address is leading the population, their followers, to reprogram their minds as required: Leadership in a rapidly changing world must, of necessity, take the form of reeducation," Farr writes in his book.
Kevin Oritz, until he left the Truist Leadership Institute, worked on the leadership development organization's efforts in universities. Oritz went on to an MBA program at the University of North Carolina.
He said that programs with schools expanded dramatically in the time he was there.
"We recognize to improve our organizations and our communities we need to improve our leadership," he said. "The Truist Leadership Institute focuses on this concept of conscious leadership, of being self-aware that our thoughts, actions and behaviors have some kind of results."
Students and universities don't pay for this training, Oritiz said. There's also no cost to play the mobile game.
"We recognized the importance of getting this message to students at an early stage," he said. "There's not so much of a contract as a handshake. We say we'll come in and facilitate the program, we'll do that at no cost to you and no cost to the students, and we'll introduce you to these concepts that executives pay for."
Banking on leadership
Halfacre, who said he enjoyed his experience at the leadership training, also said he knew about half of his cohorts by name going into the experience.
"Obviously, throughout the program, we all got to know each other very well," he said.
His story echoes the experiences of other people who come out of the program, especially internal attendees from either BB&T or Truist: Would-be executives gather at the institute, and often share deeply personal stories.
"You got comfortable over time with your peers sharing some of your innermost feelings," he said. "I can remember that very vividly. They provided the right environment for people to share certain things that you would normally not want to share, certainly not in a banking environment, per se."
While Stewart and Halfacre felt as though their time at the Truist Leadership Institute was a valuable experience, some experts warn that not everyone is going to feel that way, and the power dynamics at play make it difficult for attendees to speak out. The sharpest of those critics warn that it crosses a significant boundary that should not be breached.
"Many people simply feel violated by demands that share deeply personal emotions with co-workers or managers," Green said. "No licensed therapist would say this activity is safe or appropriate, given both the lack of professional supervision and the power dynamics that exist in the space where it's happening."
But both the institute's promoters and detractors agree: The institute is unique, particularly for a bank to have. The degree to which that's helpful in a setting so closely tied to attendees' workplace is up for debate.
"It's all related," Halfacre said. "Your personal life and your professional life are all intertwined."
