Chase sends key executives to special school for 'Top Guns'

CNY Business Journal (1994-95), May 15, 1995 by Hadley, Mark

ROCHESTER--Two jet-fighter pilots maneuver at 600 miles as hour in a deadly cat-and-mouse game high above the earth.

A commercial banker sits face-to-face with a potential customer in his office.

These two scenes don't have a anything in common...Or do they?

Actually, in both settings, success depends on timing and subtle maneuvers that often go unnoticed. And for both, the best training comes from those who have been there--those who know the challenge of keeping focused on the target despite the heat of moment.

That was the line of thinking that caught John Kipta's imagination when he was trying to come up with a plan that would provide valuable training to top performers in various business areas of Chase Manhattan Bank nationwide. The immediate spark came from watching Tom Cruise play the part of a Navy fighter pilot in "Top Gun."

"I had recently seen the movie. And a couple of years ago, I was flying to New York City, and it was a rough flight. I was thinking about a lot of thins when the inspiration hit," Kipta recalls.

Kipta says that three thins intrigued him about the way the Navy trains its pilots. First, the instructors are experienced fighter pilots. Second, the trainees get immediate feedback on their performance. And, third, participants gain a strong esprit de corps.

Kipta and his colleagues at Chase's training center here worked for more than a year researching the Navy program and building the skeleton of a training program for Chase's top performers nationwide.

"First, we wanted to know everything we could find about the Navy school. We got our hands on everything we could find in print, and then we talked with instructors and graduates of the program. The Navy was really helpful. I learned the whole story--how it was planned, how the program was built, everything," Kipta says.

But Kipta and Denise Selak, vice president and senior management training specialist at the Rochester center, admit they did not want to build the entire program themselves. They called on the expertise of the kind of people who would be participating in the program--Chase's top performers in different areas of the bank that demand face-to-face relationships with bank customers. One of those was Syracuse's James Getman, vice president and division executive for Chase's middle-market segment.

Kipta's invitation to Getman was the answer to a long-perceived need in the bank, Getman recalls.

"Chase has always put a high priority on training to help people be the most productive that they can in their jobs, but, like many other organizations, most of the training focuses on helping people who need a boost, and not on helping the high performers get even better," Getman explains. "There really wasn't much in the way of training available to leaders."

Getman and other leaders from across the country worked with Kipta and Selak to build the body of the program, identifying resources, schedules, and content. And again, they drew on what Kipta had learned from the Navy flyers--that each confrontation with an opponent has an opening in which both parties gather initial information about each other and probe to discern personality and preferences.

Then comes the "body" of the engagement where the bulk of the pilot's expertise comes to bear. For the banker, this means helping the customer recognize a need and explaining possible remedies the bank could offer. He helps the customer see the potential impact that using the bank's services could provide.

Customers, however, often bring a certain amount of skepticism to the meeting and that skepticism takes the form of evasive maneuvers or objections and reservations about what the banker is offering.

Once the banker has passed those two parts of the encounter, he enters the phase where the pilot would select and fire his weapon. The weapon of the banker, however, is not a missile or a cannon. It is a pen. And the end of the encounter is the "close" rather than the "kill." The customer won't go down in flames or escape. Instead, he will either sign up for a new banking service or decide against it.

Getman stresses that while bankers are always looking to deepen their relationships with customers, they are not interested in winning at the customer's expense. They have no intention of leaving a customer's business riddled with holes.

In putting together the program, Kipta and the team decided to divide the content into different phases of the encounter and to recruit instructors from Chase's operations around the country who were particularly expert in each phase.

The result is an intensive, five-day program for no more than eight participants from across the United States. It features a heavy schedule of lectures and presentations from instructors and numerous role-playing exercises.

Kipta stresses, "We wanted the role-play to be based on what these people face everyday on the job--just like the exercises in the Navy school use actual combat encounters. We base our exercises on customer files and have the instructors play the customer."