Russ Porter is Chief Executive Officer of Mountain West Bank. He's a banker who personally knows the value of manual labor and a man who is reluctant to talk about his own accomplishments but is not shy about praising the work of his employees.

Tell me what other jobs you've done besides banking.

I've been lucky. When I was young, I got jobs in an aluminum reduction plant. I worked all over the place - I was in the casting department and poured huge ingots and then I poured steel to build pot parts. Basically I was manual labor and this included mopping the floors in the bathrooms.

Oh, and I sometimes got work on the railroad in the track departments. I was mostly on the steel gang.

Compared to working at a financial institution, how was the experience?

Hot in the summer and cold in the winter. I never resented the work, though - not in the slightest.

I got a lot of experience working for people in jobs I didn't want to stay in. Sometimes when I worked for a difficult manager, I thought I could do a better job of managing people myself.

How would you rate your college experience?

College was OK. Education is a means to an end and yes, I think I did learn something. Maybe it was because I was paying for it myself.

You get out of college what you put into it. It's just another testing ground.

In the end, I suppose I was as qualified as any other graduate for going into a business or a business training program - that's where you really get to learn the specifics of what you're doing.

How long did you keep the first job you got after college?

I worked for Mountain Bank in Whitefish for 15 years. I started out as a management trainee and that was what we all used to do back then.

The job included a little of everything. I was a teller and drive-up teller and did back-room work and handled loan assistant responsibilities. You work your way through a lot of departments over time.

What was your goal?

After a while in banking the goal became to run the bank - running the bank and being the owner. At some point, you needed to have some ownership in the bank and to be a shareholder. These were not publicly traded companies.

Did all go according to plan for you?

Well, that bank got purchased and I worked for the next company a couple of years before I got an opportunity to work for Glacier Bank, which was also in Whitefish. At that time they were much smaller than they are now. Glacier Bank is part of GBCI, which was a mid-sized holding company at that time and has been growing ever since. After a few years there, I became president.

Was this the equivalent of a banker's Aha! moment?

The timing was good. After Mountain West Bank here was purchased by GBCI (Glacier Bancorp, Inc.), I ended up here. It was a new challenge for me because of the size and the footprint of the bank.

Which brings us to the question of what, exactly, does a bank CEO do?

You hire good people and let them do what they do very well. Your job is to support them.

Then you sit on numerous committees for loans and you have a lot of meetings with staff. Those meetings are mostly concerned with options as to what you need to do within the bank to make it better.

We spend a lot of time now dealing with changes in the banking environment - things like regulations and technical developments. Government today is into our business more so than in the entire history of banking.

How removed are you from the customers who walk into your bank?

Not as removed as you might think. You build your relations with your customers through the relationships built with them by your staff. I try to engage with everyone who works at Mountain West Bank.

The way I see it, there's nobody in this bank that works for me. We all, however, work with each other.

Not every banker is like every other banker, right?

During the recession, I think there was a lot of confusion between mortgage bankers, investment bankers and community bankers. Mortgage and big-bank bankers are different from community bankers, which is what I am.

Investment bankers are the guys on Wall Street - the venture capitalists. The big-bank bankers are back in New York and Washington and they're involved in the multi-million dollar operations.

Now us community bankers, we're the ones going to Rotary and the Hospice wine tasting - those community events that give us the chance to talk with our customers. We're more part of the community fabric.

What's so attractive about community banking?

You get to enjoy your job, for one, and it's different every day. I have no desire to suffer through the political side of what I envision life must be like for some of the big bank leaders.

But at the end of the day, are your own responsibilities any less formidable than those of the big guys?

Our responsibilities are to both the community and the bank itself. We're not a not-for-profit - we have to make money.

We just have to make sure the bank is operating in a reasonable manner and trying to support the community to the best of its ability. It's a delicate balance - the bank supports the community and the community supports the bank.

The bank is dependent on the community for its survival and the community is somewhat dependent on the bank to thrive.

What is the status of the community bank today?

The number of community banks is shrinking. Regulation of them is costly and at some point in time it will be too costly to comply with all the regulations. This, ultimately, will force many banks to consolidate.

As a man who identifies himself as "fairly conservative," have you made many outside-the-box decisions?

Over the length of a career, I think we all make those kinds of decisions. We're not always rewarded positively for doing that, but the times we are make it worthwhile.

What has changed in the banking industry as a result of our recent recession?

Change has been a constant in banking. If you don't like change, you shouldn't be in banking.

I'd say that banking has changed dramatically over the years. We've learned, as consumers, that our government can only protect us to a certain point and that beyond that we have to take personal responsibility for our financial decisions.

My advice is to deal with someone you trust.

Any thoughts about what you want to do when you're done being a full-time CEO?

With banking, when you're done, you're done. It's not a great part-time occupation and that's because of the relationships involved. You can't be there part time for someone.

In terms of retirement, I like to do entirely too many things - activities like woodworking, golf, mountain biking, road biking, fly fishing and skiing. Mostly I'd like to stay healthy and spend more time with my wife and family.