When David Reiling, president and CEO of Sunrise Banks, invited Jennifer Docherty to lunch to talk about diversifying his board, she believed it was because of her work with Bank On Women, the nonprofit she co-founded in 2019 that champions qualified women in search of board or senior leadership positions.
Instead of asking Docherty for help recruiting a qualified Bank On Women candidate, however, Reiling offered a board seat to her. After two decades of investment banking and legal experience at Piper Sandler, Docherty was no stranger to such offers. But she’d always declined. Better to wait until she wasn’t working, or working so much, was her thinking. But this time was different, she said, because Sunrise was different. “They’re so differentiated in the banking space,” she said. “It’s a very forward-thinking institution. The opportunity to join a bank that was really having such an impact was just too interesting to wait for.”
Docherty, a New Jersey resident who now serves as chief legal counsel to Chicago-based Performance Trust, is being recognized by BankBeat as a 2025 Amazing Outside Director for her role in the governance of the St. Paul, Minn.-based CDFI.
Saying yes this time was less a matter of having time to spare and more about finding a board role in an institution that shared Docherty’s values. Sunrise is a B corporation bank and a member of the Global Alliance for Banking on Values, a network of independent banks using finance to deliver sustainable economic, social and environmental development.
For Docherty, there is a history of applying oneself toward making an impact. Docherty joined Sandler after 9/11 to help the company rebuild. (The investment bank lost 66 employees in the attack on the World Trade Center.) At Sandler, Docherty was part of its Capital Markets division, focusing on community banks.
“It’s just such an important part of the economy,” she said. Importantly to the mother of two, she was happy there and loved her colleagues. But, as had been the case with Sunrise, Performance Trust approached Docherty with an opportunity that couldn’t be shuffled over to someday.
“They were looking to continue to grow their business to focus on community banks, in particular on CDFIs and MDIs, and one of the things they needed to do was to build out the legal infrastructure to support the business,” she said. “It was an amazing opportunity to join a platform that was really narrowly focused in the space that’s most meaningful to me.”
Being chief legal counsel required Docherty to build out a team, and help her colleagues succeed in their career journeys, to “marry the strategic with the personal.” It’s not unlike coaching, she said, tapping into another facet of her background: Hockey coach.
The nearly 53-year-old Docherty, a former D1 college softball catcher, has loved and played hockey throughout her life. She currently serves as a volunteer assistant coach for not one, not two, but three hockey teams. When coaching hockey, “I focus on the skills as much as the strategy because you find that if people are missing certain skills, they can’t execute on what you want to do strategically,” she said.
It’s the same challenge when trying to govern a bank. “Most bank boards are having to evolve,” Docherty said. Bank boards are “traditionally composed of people who own businesses, or maybe had some connections in the community. Now, the business of banking is becoming so much more complex that you need both that community connection as well as different talent sets on the board.”
Sunrise, for a relatively small community bank, has what Docherty deems a “very sophisticated” board, something she believes will become increasingly important as the industry continues to evolve.
“I chair the board’s Finance and Audit committee so I spend a lot of time in the weeds on the numbers,” she said. “That is largely a function of my legal and investment banking background. I have a good perspective on what’s happening on an industry-wide level and certainly with respect to strategic initiatives as well as the issue-spotting on the legal side.”
Women have a slight numbers edge on the Sunrise board, and that is not an outcome of any DEI initiative on the bank owners’ part. As chair of Bank on Women, Docherty said she works with banks that are trying to find talent that they don’t know or don’t see in their market. Sunrise is an example of a bank that needed compliance expertise on its board and Bank On Women delivered.
“We always try to identify the top three criteria. The No. 1 criteria is always some expertise. The No. 2 criteria is ‘I’d love to have somebody maybe with technology expertise who also understands the numbers,’” Docherty explained. Below skillset A and skillset B sits geography. She lives the example of effectively bridging the distance between home, vocation and avocation.
While traditional sourcing for bank boards is friends and family, Docherty said, “the reality is, we haven’t been recruiting the best person for a job. We’ve been recruiting from the pool of Somebody We Know, and that almost guarantees you’re fishing in small ponds and you’re probably not going to find the best candidate.”
The industry’s response to Bank On Women’s efforts to champion qualified candidates for roles within community banks nationwide has been enthusiastic, Docherty said, even as DEI has become a political lightning rod. “Banks still want somebody they know or somebody who they know knows,” she said. “We’ve always tried to just meet the banking industry where it is at, which is: ‘I’d love an introduction to somebody who could fill this need on my board, but I really don’t want to hire a recruiter.’ Or, ‘I don’t want to go too far afield from somebody whom I already know and trust.’”
The goal for Bank On Women when it was founded was to change the ecosystem for how banks think about boards. “If we do it right, we will be obsolete at some point because banks will evolve their way of thinking about identifying talent, retaining talent, sourcing directors, and onboarding directors,” she said.
Docherty expects to be promoting Bank On Women for a while, raising support and visibility, and building up its database of candidates that sits near the 400 person mark. Yet she’s hopeful that in 20 years, the effort will no longer be needed. She also wants community banks to remain strong.
“It will be important to me to look back at the end of my career and see that I have contributed in some meaningful way to maintaining that,” she said. “Not because I believe in maintaining the status quo. I rarely do.”