There may be a lesson for leaders in the hiring of Vaune Cripe. It has to do with foresight, perseverance and judgment about talent.
Cripe started her career in a public accounting office in Dickinson, N.D. George Ehlis, a farmer and bank CEO, was a tax client. “My farm experience was really limited,” Cripe said, and tax laws for farmers are complex. She made mistakes on a couple of Ehlis’ tax returns, which required rounds of follow up and rework. “I thought, he must think I am a blundering idiot. Two years in a row I had to talk to him about his tax return and errors I had made,” she said.
So Cripe was a little surprised when Ehlis stopped into the accounting office one day and asked whether she planned to be an accountant forever. She was further surprised when an officer of Ehlis’s bank followed up a little later with an invitation to lunch. As far as Cripe knew, “they hadn’t advertised an opening, and I wouldn’t have looked at it anyway.”
The subtle recruitment effort lasted more than a year, until Cripe, who “never thought I would be a banker,” became a commercial lender at Ehlis’s American State Bank. She worked in lending for nine years and became the manager of business banking before switching to management roles in operations.
Sometime after joining the bank, she asked Ehlis what he could have seen in someone who “messed up” his personal tax returns. Cripe recounted his answer: “Ehlis told me ‘it was because you messed up that I recognized your ability in handling that kind of a situation. You didn’t try to brush it under the carpet. You just hit it head on.’ ”
The transition from accounting to lending took about a year. “I remember sitting at a loan officer meeting, and they congratulated one of the lenders for having a portfolio of $10 million; and I thought, okay, in one year I will have a very solid, safe and sound portfolio of that much too. That became my personal benchmark. About 18 months later I had a loan for $10 million, and that was so much fun.”
The bank restructured a few years ago, at which point Cripe decided that “what will make me a better banker is to learn more about the bank.” She wanted to rise in management and decided to tackle operations. “They had to take a leap of faith with me on that one, because it was something totally different” than lending, Cripe said. She became the senior vice president of internal operations. Last year she was named the senior vice president of external operations. She is now leading the next phase in the merger of the bank’s Dickinson and Bismarck locations for American Bancor, Ltd., the banks’ holding company. The merger began in 2002.
Cripe has also spent a lot of time recently at her “other full-time job” — on the family executive council of the North Dakota National Guard. Her husband is the Guard’s state command sergeant major, and the council does a lot to support the families of deployed soldiers. “We have taken a very active role and the bank has been very supportive. It involves quite a bit of time away from the bank,” Cripe said. In fact, American Bank Center was recently recognized by the National Guard as a Patriotic Employer, for its support of the Guard and Reserves.
Cripe also serves on the boards of the Dickinson State University Foundation and WIGS, Inc., a local nonprofit corporation that provides wigs and hair care for cancer patients. She is an adjunct instructor in the management leadership course at Dickinson State and is on the steering committee for the Badlands Activity Center. She is also a director for the Stark county job development authority and the North Dakota Bankers Association.
Within the bank, Cripe relishes the role of mentor, a responsibility she thinks a lot about. “I have always subscribed to the philosophy that everybody is in charge of their own career; but as management and leaders, our responsibility is to give them the necessary tools to be successful,” she said.
Cripe said she does not “lay awake worrying about somebody’s promotion” so much as she spends time figuring out how bank employees can get the supervisory attention and development opportunities they need to advance.
Cripe said that the people part of a supervisory role “is the only part of your job that should keep you awake at night.”