The Assistant Vice President of Branch operations at Leaders Credit Union greeted me with a hug as I stepped into his office. Kevin Morgan, formerly a Resident Director at Union University (and my old boss and current friend), picked up right where we left off since we had last worked together. As we chatted, I glanced around the room.
The first thing I noticed was the difference between his offices. His old office was actually a part of his house. This house also happened to be inside the Bowld Student Commons, leading to an interesting work/life separation dynamic. Because his old office was simply upstairs it had a homier feel (ie. carpeted floors, posters, used dishes, a gaming chair and PC). This new office was the epitome of corporate: pamphlets, bank literature, business cards, an ergonomic keyboard and mousepad with wrist support. Elevator music played softly overhead. A bottle of hand sanitizer solidified the idea of a sterilized corporate office ushering in a new era of life and career.
After reminiscing about old times, we got to talking about what work looks like for him these days. What struck me is how not strictly administrative his role was. His work was not just ceaseless numbers and Excel sheets and counting money—at the end of the day it was primarily people, just like it had always been.
In 2013, Morgan, a junior psychology major at Union, became an RA after repeated encouragement from the Assistant Residence Director at the time. It was not something he was initially seeking out, but instead a role others encouraged him to pursue, a common theme in Morgan’s life. After completing his undergrad, he attended graduate school in Memphis to get his master’s in Student Development. He worked at the school there for a while before returning to Union as the Assistant Residence Director of Heritage where he stayed from 2019-2022. After that he moved up the Residence Director of Men’s Quads from the years 2022-2024.
His last year working in Residence Life is when I came to know him. Although he was not directly in my area of work, I was a freshman RA and he worked with male upperclassmen. I had the pleasure to get to know him and work with him, and was shocked when I found he was leaving ResLife. These two names had become synonymous in my brain, and him not returning was seemingly out of left field. What could have swayed him from doing what he was so clearly wired for and skilled at? How does a man with a bachelor’s in Psychology, a master’s in Student Development who worked with college students for 5+ years end up managing a bank? The answer: he got scouted.
One fateful morning Morgan attended his church’s Bible study per usual and sat with a group of men he didn’t know at the time. It seems he left a good impression because a few days later, he received a text from one of the men at his study. The man ended up being the CEO of Leaders Credit Union. A week later, Morgan interviewed. A week after that, he had the position. I asked him if he ever saw himself in this role.
“Now that I’ve been at Leaders for a couple months, I can see how the relationships, the people and development, it all overlaps,” Morgan said. “For college students, I would want to help them develop as freshmen into seniors and then into people that graduate and go get jobs. But as a financial champion at Leaders I want to see people that maybe don’t have a lot of money get a couple dollars, or people that have a lot of money spend it well, or budget it well, manage it well and grow it into more.”
A lot of the skills needed to be a good Residence Director directly translate into managing a bank. Both involve viewing things in a big picture context and having those individual interactions with others. Both involve managing the mass influx of information and making sure your people feel seen and heard and appreciated. They mean enforcing rules and policies and having difficult conversations with people. In the same way he represented Union University when dealing with worried parents or students in crisis, Morgan now represents Leaders when talking to bankers. As aforementioned, the stakes can be higher. In both circumstances peoples lives are being dealt with, but the outcomes can be drastically different.
“If someone’s sitting in this chair on a fixed income and they’re trying to figure out if they buy dinner or keep the lights on, those stakes are a lot different than being at Union where students have said they want to move rooms because someone didn’t like the poster they put up,” Morgan said. “The stakes are different, but perspective is everything, right?”
Morgan is a walking testament to the fact that we do not always know what awaits us in life. We may think we have our lane that we’ve mastered, that we can do with our eyes closed and life will present us with a vastly different alternative. It’s scary to walk through those doors but blessings can await us if we’re bold enough to step through. We don’t have to be the best in our fields or have extensive knowledge of the workforce. Simply being a good leader, a good person, someone who loves others well and can lead them to becoming a better version of themselves is a good start. It gets you noticed, and once you’re noticed who knows where you might end up?
“The development and the people and the relationships, it’s all the same,” Morgan said. “It’s just the stakes are a little different.”
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