If you want to understand why Susan Gruber is so good at her job as CFO of the Pleasanton, Calif.-based Patelco Credit Union, here are a few things you should know: She doesn't tolerate silos. She isn't afraid of hard conversations. And she's something of a balance sheet whisperer.

These are some of the qualities that have helped Gruber, who is the winner of CU Times' 2018 Trailblazer Award for CFO of the Year, put Patelco on an impressive growth trajectory to transform the heart and soul of the credit union. On her watch, assets have gone from about $4 billion when she joined in September 2014 to about $6 billion today, and membership has risen from 282,000 to 325,000.

But Gruber has also been on an impressive growth trajectory herself.

“Like every other small child, I wanted to be a marine biologist or work with dolphins. But when I got to college, I really loved finance and accounting. More finance than accounting, but I didn't concentrate in finance until I got to graduate school. I was very pragmatic and just said, 'I need a job when I graduate' — and accounting is pretty much a sure-fire job when you graduate,” the Massachusetts native said.

Gruber's first job out of college was as an accounting manager at a small community savings bank in Brookline, Mass. It was 1986.

“That's where I really learned what it meant to be in a community-based organization,” she recalled.

About two years later, she left to get her MBA at Boston University. After graduating, she headed to New York City, where she worked for MetLife and Elf Aquitaine. By 1994, though, Boston was calling. So Gruber took a job as manager of domestic accounting at BankBoston.

“I actually loved Manhattan, but it is not a place where you settle down and raise children,” she said.

Gruber kept climbing the ladder, becoming treasurer and controller at Fleet Financial, then doing business and strategic analysis as a vice president at State Street Bank and Brown & Company. In 2003, she became the vice president and finance officer of derivative operations back at Fleet. But a year later, Bank of America merged with Fleet.

“When Bank of America took over, even though they called it a merger, it was a takeover,” Gruber recalled. “We knew we wouldn't survive, because our broker business on the derivative side was a half a trillion and Bank of America's was $13 trillion. So we were like, 'We all have to get new jobs.'”

And in some ways, that's where Gruber's story really begins. In 2005, she became SVP and CFO at Jeanne D'Arc Credit Union in Lowell, Mass. That credit union has $1.3 billion in assets and about 84,000 members today — but it wasn't always that big.

“Jeanne D'Arc was my first CFO role, and coming from a trillion-dollar organization to a $600 million organization was definitely a big change. I had to stop saying 'billions' and start saying 'millions,'” she said. “It really was getting my feet wet as a first-time CFO.”

Gruber loved her job. But nine years later, in 2014, Patelco CEO Erin Mendez came knocking.

At that point, Gruber knew more than a thing or two about how to make a credit union succeed. So when she joined Patelco, she wasn't afraid to make a few changes.

One of the largest involved taming the balance sheet.

“One of the things I think I do well is, I can really look at a balance sheet and understand where its strengths and weaknesses are. I can do that fairly quickly,” she said. “I don't know how to say this — it talks to me. I really can say, 'This is an area of concern; this is an area of strength,'” she explained. “That's one of the reasons why I said to the team here, we have a liquidity problem coming and it's three years away, but no one's talking about it.”

When Gruber joined Patelco, the credit union had a lot of cash on its balance sheet, but there was a mismatch between the growth of loans and the growth of deposits, she said.

“Growth was very high, deposits were very low, and that's a recipe for disaster,” Gruber explained. “Everyone was too busy looking at the large cash balances to realize this is not sustainable.”

The credit union had to grow its deposits, which got Gruber and her team mulling over Patelco's product offerings.

About six months in as the new CFO, she and her team helped launch the Money Market Select Account — a reverse-tier savings product that pays a higher rate on smaller balances and a lower rate on bigger balances. She got the idea, she said, from a similar product at Jeanne D'Arc.

“That has had a tremendous impact in growing the credit union,” she explained. “Everyone won on this product. When we launched it, we had a little less than $800 million in money market accounts. We now have over $1.8 billion.”

Gruber has also worked hard on making a broad cultural shift at the credit union.

“When I first got here, Patelco was in the starting stages of really coming together as one team. It was very siloed, it was very much fee-driven, not mission-driven,” she said.

Changing that mind-set, especially in an organization Patelco's size, is not easy. Gruber wasn't intimidated.

“I think really one of the things I'm very passionate about is enterprise thinking. The enterprise has to come first, and it's a very anti-silo approach. It stems from one of my experiences in my past where I worked for a very large bank, and it probably was the most siloed and most unhappy I was in my career, because there was no interaction,” she said.

Part of the change involved requiring more candid, transparent communication.

“It's a strength and a weakness at the same time, but I'm very direct and forthcoming. I think other people avoid difficult conversations and difficult situations. While I don't enjoy them, I don't shirk from them,” she said. “I'm very willing to have those conversations, and I know that's not as common as I think it should be.”

But it requires balance, Gruber noted.

“I can be very analytical, but I never lose the human side,” she said. “I've seen many CFOs either be one way or the other. If you're too analytical, your team does not feel engaged. If you're worrying too much about people's feelings, you don't do what's right for the organization.”

The other part of her culture-shift strategy is to apply a member-first philosophy throughout the day.

In any meeting where there's a decision being made, “the member has to be in the room with us,” she explained. “If it negatively impacts the member, then we need to rethink this. If it positively impacts the member, how so, and then how do we communicate that?”

Like most credit union CFOs, Gruber diligently watches her organization's capital, liquidity, operating expenses and a variety of other metrics. But she knows that it's not all about the math. Maintaining trajectory also means monitoring some of the less tangible parts of the business — especially team engagement, which is one reason why the credit union does a team survey five times a year.

“I don't care what position you have in leadership; if you're so focused on the numbers and you're not looking at the bigger picture, I don't think you can be as successful as you should be,” she said.