If you want to see who a leader is and what she’s really capable of, give her a crisis.
For some leaders, crisis is a fire to be extinguished. For others, it’s a forge to create something better and stronger. Jennifer Warren, head of institutional services and equipment finance for M&T Bank/Wilmington Trust, has spent nearly half her career not just managing crisis, but leveraging it, using the heat of moments like the 2001 dot-com bust, the 2008 financial crisis and the 2019 global pandemic, to reshape processes grown brittle with time and reimagine what’s possible in an environment where change never rests.
Canadian by birth and a corporate finance lawyer by training, Warren began her career as a business lawyer at a top firm and rose to become a senior executive of Rogers Communications, working closely with company founder Ted Rogers for a decade, culminating in the first-ever launch of broadband internet access in Canada, which has served as the foundation of the modern broadband internet experience.
Warren then became General Counsel (Canada) of the $900 billion Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) and was later named president and CEO of CIBC’s U.S. operations, working long hours for years on end to lead teams across North America in navigating the 2008 global financial crisis, one of her greatest challenges in a career filled with them.
From there, Warren became CEO of Computershare’s North American Issuer Services business where, during the pandemic, she used every resource available to her to stand up new products for a world that had suddenly become heavily virtual.
M&T Bank, a client at the time, reached out to inquire about Warren becoming part of its team. After six months of talks, Warren joined M&T as head of the Institutional Client Services group, a respected leader in corporate trust solutions serving a diverse client base of companies, asset managers, institutions and governments across the U.S., the UK and Europe. As always, she brought with her the crisis management skills that have become like muscle memory through continual use across a variety of contexts.
“Jennifer is truly a master of not just mitigating a crisis, but seeing and leveraging the often well-hidden opportunities inherent in it,” Miles Herman, CEO of LEAF Commercial Capital, Inc., part of the M&T equipment finance group Warren leads, says. “No matter what challenges arise in the equipment finance industry, we couldn’t have chosen a better leader to help us navigate them.”
It’s turning moments of crisis into opportunities for growth that Warren is most proud of, and she’s prouder still of the people who have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her, bringing a special brand of discipline, empathy, resilience and stamina to bear on moving forward in times when others lose ground.
Doing that takes trust, something Warren believes women are particularly capable of cultivating, especially in moments of crisis. The core of that trust is relationships built on integrity, loyalty and service.
“Always strive to do more than you’re asked, see more in others than they see in themselves and give more than you take. There is intrinsic motivation and purpose in knowing that we have pushed the limits of our performance to achieve something difficult and worthwhile. Let those things be the measure of your success.”