Cover Story
Banking on talent
How Joseph C. Guyaux keeps himself and his staff energized at The PNC Financial Services Group
By Brian Horn
Smart Business Pittsburgh | August 2008
Page 1 of 3
You don’t need to tell Joseph C. Guyaux about tough love.
The president of The PNC Financial Services Group Inc.
learned all about it when he was in college.
Guyaux had two potential summer jobs: One was for a company that was a precursor to Merrill Lynch, and the other was
for the Upper Allegheny Joint Sanitary Authority — when
there was a lot of rain, it would be his job to lift manhole covers and climb in with a hard hat and little shovel and unplug
clogs.
Guyaux planned to accept the Merrill Lynch job, but his
father had other plans. His father told him if he didn’t take the
sanitary job, which paid less than the other job, he would have
to move out.
“I said, ‘I don’t understand,’” Guyaux says. “He said, ‘Look, I
don’t know what you’re doing when you are off at college, but
I want you to understand where you could end up if you don’t
make the best of your opportunities. So, this is your job.’
“I later found out that the sanitary authority hired 14 people
for the summer. Twelve sat in the air conditioning and painted
the pipes at the sanitation plant different colors.
Two went out on the line. My father had requested that if I
was given the job, that I must be one of the people that went
out on the line.”
Guyaux didn’t leave the experience without learning a lesson.
“Where it shows up for me and what my father instilled in me
was, we all have chances and opportunities in life,” he says.
“Sometimes, we take them for granted like they aren’t that big
of a deal or, ‘I’ll get another one.’
“I think what my dad was trying to say to me was, ‘Hey, you
should be thrilled to go to college, but what are you going to do
now that you are there?’ I try to tell people that you might be
thrilled with a promotion, you might be thrilled that you got
hired here, but now that you are here, celebrate, but how are
you going to take advantage of it now? What are you going to
do to prepare yourself to be the best that you can be so that
you don’t have any regrets?”
Guyaux says one of his biggest challenges is motivating more
than 28,000 employees at PNC, which posted $6.7 billion in 2007
revenue, to achieve new goals.
“It is hard,” he says. “It’s sort of like when you have a group
of people that are trying to win a world championship in anything. Everybody makes the sacrifice to do it. I think why it’s
so hard to sort of continue and repeat with the same group of
people is that once you’ve achieved it, it does feel like, ... ‘Don’t
we deserve a break?
“You just have to keep saying, ‘As well as we’re doing today,
it’s not a certainty that because of how well we are doing today
we will be doing this well three years from now.’”
Guyaux and his team are consistently asking themselves the tough questions about where they are now as a company and
where they want to be in the future.
“So, I’ll get my team together and say, ‘Three years from now,
if we are doing the same things, if we’re executing the same
strategies, does that sound like a winning place for you? What
are people that are struggling today or maybe are better in certain areas or even nonbanks, what are they doing? What do we
think about that? If we are going to stay ahead of them, what
are the implications of that for us?’” he says.
