Forget the Millennials, fix the selfie mentality in your culture
One could argue that the selfie was first introduced by Narcissus in Greek Mythology as he admired and fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. This same narcissistic, selfie mentality is now thriving in our culture and has found it’s way into many community banks.
Bankers are inundated with advice on attracting and marketing to Millennials. In past years the focus was on Boomers and in 10 to 20 years we will be talking about some other, yet to be named, generational group. While there is nothing wrong with being informed and planning for the needs of the future generations, community banks should never lose sight of relationship based banking. Emphasis should be placed on the employees that are suppose to deliver the brand promise to those various generational groups. By simply looking below the surface, most community banks will find they have a culture of employees with smartphones and selfie sticks walking around with a “what about me” mentality, aka, narcissists. Here are a few examples of the selfies thriving in community banks.
If you come, I’ll have extra work
We encounter this employee at least 75% of the time when phone shopping community banks to request product information. In most cases the employees are nice enough and provide the requested information. Some may think that sounds fine but here’s the problem, if you pay attention, it will quickly become apparent that many employees only answers questions that are asked and will not provide information in a way that will be inviting to the caller. We sometimes refer to this employee as an order-taker. I’ll only do what I have to do and nothing else. He has figured out the minimum requirements to keep his job and at the same time discourage potential new customers from coming in to the bank. This employee figures he gets the same paycheck whether this new customer comes into the bank or not, so why do anything to create extra work! Unfortunately, he is driving away the very business your marketing dollars are driving in. Check out our most recent market survey. You can bet that banks scoring below 70%, a “C”, have this sort of employee throughout the bank.
Trust me, but don’t track me
Don’t phone shop me. Don’t track my sales. Don’t compare me to others in similar positions and experience. This employee has fooled management into thinking she is a top employee. However, once you begin keeping score, you’ll often find that half of the employees you thought were the best, are actually some of the worst. This employee is very easy to spot. Just start tracking! In addition to not performing well, she’ll question the integrity of any method used to keep score as well as expressing her “concern” for the employees showing proven performance. She doesn’t care about the bank and is only focused on protecting herself and her influence. This employee’s selfies look the part of the model employee. She looks professional, speaks well, cheers your every decision (at least to your face) and will go a little above and beyond the call of duty at times to give the impression of support, especially when you are near by. As long as you are on her side and advancing her career, she is on your team. Just don’t do something stupid like tracking results.
It’s not me, it’s you
Sometimes an employee is simply in survival mode in a community bank that came to a fork in the road and took the wrong road. In many cases this employee has invested years with the bank and it’s customers and is now just doing what is needed to stay off management’s radar and protect himself from the bank’s new direction. It’s not unusual for this employee to have once been a superstar and actively engaged in the bank. What causes this change?
- New management – Sometimes it’s the result of a new senior executive recruited from a big bank. We see some from the big banks wanting to truly become part of and lead a relationship-based culture. At their core, they believe in the relationship based culture and will thrive in the community bank. However, the problem arises when some of these new leaders try to recreate the same type of a high pressure sales culture within the community bank that they had with their previous bank. It’s baffling to hear this manager’s claims of despising the big bank ways and at the same time leading their bank down this road. It sounds odd, but when you try to make sense of craziness, a severed headache ensues.
- Out of control board members – This CEO nightmare is a board member who, deciding that the CEO and Executive Team can’t do the job, attempts to take the reins of leadership. This member causes most employees and those in management to shift into survival mode until a clear winner emerges… either the rogue board member or the CEO/Executive Team.
- The rise of the subculture – We just wrote a great article on the subculture. You should read it! The subculture is despised by the best employees. When this culture emerges and is allowed to thrive, many of the best will leave for your competitors with a well-defined culture and strategy in place. Those that stay, will simply disengage and go into survival mode until sanity arrives or management changes… whichever comes first.
Selfie focused to relationship based
Getting back to Narcissus, there have been different variations of this story over the years, but they all end with his demise from the obsession of his own reflection. Community banks that feed into and allow the selfie culture are putting their bank in a position that will lead to the end of a thriving relationship based culture. At that point your bank will become all about the “selfie”, with employees who could care less about your bank, strategic plan, or your customers but instead are focused on “ME”, my paycheck and the respect that I am due for just being me. Stop the selfies and refocus on the relationship, the community bank’s main advantage over its competitors.
