Bankers and industry partners will honor John Sorensen, president and CEO of the Iowa Bankers Association since 1997, at the annual IBA convention Sept. 15-17 in Des Moines. Sorensen, who joined the IBA staff in 1986, announced in April he will retire by the end of the year. As a search committee works to identify a successor, industry colleagues are sharing praise for a leader who quadrupled the organization’s income and increased its net worth by 70 times.
“As a leader, John has displayed an unwavering commitment to the advancement of community banking across Iowa and throughout our industry,” commented Mary Kay Bates, IBA chair and president/CEO of Bank Midwest, Spirit Lake. “His upcoming retirement is both a moment of reflection and a time to celebrate his many achievements in shaping the future of the Iowa Bankers Association.”
“John is one-of-a-kind,” said Dave Nelson, CEO of West Bank, West Des Moines, and IBA chair in 2016-17. “He has done just a fabulous job. His leadership will be missed, but the culture he has created will be maintained by all those bankers who he has inspired.”
“He treats everyone with respect. It doesn’t matter who you are, whether you are from a large bank or a small bank, he treats everyone the same,” commented Brad Lane, president and CEO of Security Savings Bank of Gowrie. Lane, IBA chair from 2019-21, described Sorensen as intelligent, prepared, professional and courteous.
Lane spoke of Sorensen’s reputation across the country. “There were several times I went to meetings throughout the nation where there would be other state execs present. I would meet with one of them and John wasn’t there. I would tell them ‘I am from Iowa,’ and every time they would say, ‘Oh, you’re from Iowa, yes, John Sorensen is the best state exec out there.’ It would happen all the time,” Lane said.
“John is very humble and he will be the first to say: ‘I wasn’t me when I started thirty years ago’,” said Nelson as he reflected on Sorensen’s career. “John gives this impression of this easy-going nice guy, and he is a nice guy. But it’s like the old analogy of the duck that is moving gracefully across the pond, effortlessly, but what you don’t see is under the water those legs are going like heck.”
Leadership traits built over a century
To understand why Sorensen is so universally respected, however, one needs to go back much further than to the beginning of his career. Sorensen puts developments of the last few decades into the context of an organization that is 137 years old.
IBA, founded in 1887 as the nation’s fourth state banker association, began offering insurance in 1910, and about a decade after that it began organizing bankers into vigilante groups to protect their institutions from robbers who seemed to fan out across the state, often from Chicago. IBA offered training in munitions handling and provided ammunition and shotguns. The groups were successful, reducing the number of robberies and the insurance premiums they paid on their policies against such crime.
Meanwhile, a man named Soren Sorensen and his brother were settling in the United States after traveling from Denmark in search of opportunities to make the most of their farming skills. They rode the rails until alighting in a Danish community in southwest Iowa called Exira. Soren married a woman named Violet and they had a son named Dale. The offspring turned out to be a pretty good athlete, playing on the Exira High School baseball team, winning a state championship in 1950. Dale Sorensen pursued a career in education, married a woman named Norma JoAnn, and they had a daughter and three sons; they named the youngest son John.
In addition to teaching, Dale Sorensen proved to be an effective coach. In 1965, he coached girls’ basketball and softball teams to state championships. Dale Sorensen was later inducted into the Iowa High School Girls Athletics Hall of Fame. His career evolved through a variety of teaching positions, concluding with service as a superintendent of schools in the Iowa communities of Corwith-Wesley, Lake Mills and Carlisle.
Dale Sorensen died at the age of 91 earlier this summer, Norma having passed away in 1998. John Sorensen attributes much of his own character to his parents. Sixty-six years old now, John Sorensen grew up in Corwith, spending his summers working on farms and participating in 4-H, which prepared him for the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, where he earned an accounting degree.
He worked at the Iowa Corn Growers Association for three years before getting the job at the Iowa Bankers Association, which was run by a cowboy-boot-wearing, risk-taking association maverick named Neil Milner. He had guided IBA through the creation of the Iowa Transfer System (which became a separate electronic payments entity known today as SHAZAM), formalized a subsidiary to sell insurance, and created a mortgage company designed to make it easier for community bankers to participate in housing finance. Sorensen was brought in to make sure the numbers totaled in the black.
Days prior to the 1996 IBA convention, Milner announced he would leave IBA to become the leader of the Conference of State Bank Supervisors in Washington, D.C. Sorensen put his name in to be considered for the opening. Al Tubbs, IBA chair at the time, described the process of selecting a successor.
“We put together a capable search committee and hired a search firm,” Tubbs explained. “We received applications from some very qualified candidates, including John. We had people with trade association experience, people from the American Bankers Association, and people from senior leadership positions from throughout Des Moines.
“We were looking for someone who bankers could relate to,” Tubbs continued. “Someone who would be a good leader. Someone who had political savvy. Neil left big shoes to fill; he had been there a long time. Neil knew how to relate to the bankers. In a way, it was a little like hiring a field manager to follow Casey Stengel when he retired from the Yankees.
“I remember that the search committee divided into three groups, with each identifying a group of candidates to interview. Each group invited John in for an interview and at the end of the process, each group independently selected John. It was unanimous,” Tubbs recalled. Thirty-eight years old at the time, Sorensen was the youngest of the candidates.
“We needed someone with unquestioned integrity, and John fit the bill. He is so honorable, and yet so humble,” Tubbs said. “He is sensitive to individuals but also to the needs of the entire industry.”
Sorensen’s 10 years of IBA experience propelled him to the head of the list. In addition to traditional advocacy work, IBA is a complicated financial organization providing compliance and HR services to members, as well as operating mortgage and insurance subsidiaries. The IBA board selected Sorensen, and the results of the last 27 years validate the choice. Today, the IBA is the largest state bankers association in the country by revenue, in addition to counting 98 percent of the state’s 265 banks among its membership.
Foundation on relationships
No matter what part of his job Sorensen discusses, it is evident building relationships is key to everything he does at IBA. Sharon Presnall, senior vice president of government relations and compliance, joined the IBA staff a year before Sorensen did. The two have worked closely on countless advocacy campaigns, Presnall generally heading the state efforts and Sorensen focusing on federal initiatives. Sorensen noted many of his key federal relationships began in Des Moines at the State Capitol, citing examples such as Rep. Leonard Boswell, Rep. Dave Loebsack, Rep. Tom Latham, Rep. Jim Nussle, Rep. Randy Feenstra, Rep. Zach Nunn, Rep. Ashley Hinson, and Sen. Joni Ernst.
“Shortly after I started in this role,” Sorensen said, “Rep. Jim Leach became chair of the House Banking Committee. That was good for me because I had a great relationship with Jim and when we’d go to Washington, I often played a liaison role between Jim and the ABA. I was part of key conversations and I was fairly young at the time.”
And Rep. Leach wasn’t Sorensen’s only contact on Capitol Hill.
“There were several times we went to Washington, D.C., and we’d go for a run with Senator Chuck Grassley,” Lane said with respect to the nation’s longest-serving Republican senator, who turns 91 this month. “John had that connection, and Sen. Grassley would allow us to run with him.”
“John is a great listener,” Bates said. “He is so well respected. One of the gifts John has is he is not the loudest voice in the room. He lets others speak. He listens. He will always have something to say, but usually toward the end. He is very thoughtful, so while his is not the loudest voice in the room it is always one of the strongest, with a powerful message.”
“I call John Sorensen the E.F. Hutton of the banking world,” commented Jeff Plagge, IBA chair 2003-04 and currently a director with Northwest Bank of Spencer. “John isn’t always the first one who is going to pop up to the microphone. He’ll sit back and listen. But when John does go to the mic, people really do listen. It is not because he forces the issue. He is a thoughtful guy and people appreciate that. When he gets up to speak he has clearly thought through the issue.”
Nelson suggested that Sorensen’s strengths were passed to him as part of his heritage. “John is a great coach, which certainly runs in this family,” Nelson commented. “He’s a great coach because he is always prepared … John instills confidence in others. He inspires others to do their best, or to do better.”
Sorensen concurred with Nelson. “I attribute a lot of my emotional IQ to my parents,” Sorensen said. “My ability to relate to people, to listen, and to understand where they are coming from, my ability to develop relationships, that came from them. My father was a real patriot, and a proud Iowan. He had a commitment to the state and he did things that contributed back to the state and to the community.”
While running a trade group is serious business, Sorensen knows how to have fun, which came through for years when the IBA hosted a leadership dinner in conjunction with its annual convention. Sorensen would narrate a slide show featuring photos and stories from IBA events that took place during the previous year. Sorensen, who would write the script for these shows, shared a string of jokes, delivered with perfect timing. Presnall said Sorensen’s performances were reminiscent of a Johnny Carson monologue.
Reflecting on the association’s history and his place in it, Sorensen shared: “Neil Milner was entrepreneurial, but I would say it was Frank Warner who really got IBA going down that path.” Warner ran the IBA from 1916 to 1966.
“Frank Warner was highly respected in the industry,” Sorensen said reverently. “He really wrote the Iowa Banking Code at the time. He was involved in creating the Graduate School of Banking in Wisconsin. He promoted the insurance business, and he organized those vigilante groups. Later, he helped establish a radio system that connected banks with law enforcement that became so successful in fighting crime that eventually it was turned over to the state police and it became the state police radio system.”
The search for the next IBA president is well underway, and is expected to be completed in time for the selection to join the staff by the end of the year. While Milner left big shoes to fill in the mid-1990s, the IBA board came through with an outstanding successor in John Sorensen. “Neil was the right person for the times, and John was the right man for the job at the right time,” Presnall commented. “We can have confidence the board will come up with the right person again.”
Now it is Sorensen who is leaving big shoes to fill. “He has built a strong culture, a culture of leadership at Iowa bankers,” said Bates, who is serving on the search committee. “His ability to create vision and lead a team is really important. We want continuity there. We have said time and time again during the interview process we are not hiring someone to come in and fix something. We are hiring someone to come in and build on something that is already great and continue to make it greater.”
