Oxymoron: A combination of contradictory words
Friendly Tyrant
This leader resides in a bubble, surrounded by a group of “yes” people. This leader can be a good friend. She can make everyone feel great about where the bank is headed. She will help you in anyway she can. Until… you cross her. When you cross this leader or disagree or move outside the status quo, she will turn into the tyrant. The tyrant may be aggressive and she may be passive or even a combination of both. Unfortunately for many CEO’s, this leader is sometimes sitting on the board of directors. The tyrant will also be that person who will hone in on the 1 thing you didn’t do exactly right instead of focusing on the 99 things that went extremely well. Don’t fall into this status. Instead, seek outside opinions, encourage healthy debate and never accept the status quo.
Scoreless Winner
The following is not a popular statement, but in most cases it’s true… 50% or more of your top 10 employees are not your top 10. We’ve asked leaders over the years who they believed their top 10 employees were and upon further review of the “score” we found that usually half of those were not top 10. This leader formed his list based on opinion, likability, and feelings. He didn’t actually have a measurable score. Without a clear score for your bank, your teams and your employees, it’s impossible to know who is winning. We have a score report that measures cross-sells, advocacy, and employee engagement. We have phone shops that measure customer service delivery. These are scores. There are many other scores you can use. Effective leaders that win, have scores.
Common statement: Billy Bob is one of my top commercial lenders.
Our response: How do you know? What do you base that statement on?
Scores can vary based on the market, the current loan portfolio size, deposit relationship penetration, and advocacy. We’ve seen many employees over the years who were perceived to be the best, but after review of the scores, they weren’t exactly producing at a winning pace. Additionally, we’ll often see that 2 or 3 of the perceived best are actually at the bottom 10 and hurting the bank. We have yet to come across a bank that was more than 50% correct on it’s top 10. If you’re a leader and you are not keeping score, you will not win and at best you wouldn’t know it if you were.
Ambiguous Director
This is about the board of directors… and yes, we’re going there. Great board members can be extremely valuable to a community bank. They can be your best advocates, they can bring real world opinions, ideas and innovation to the table, and they can provide the accountability needed in this highly regulated banking world we now live in. Unfortunately, there can be a dark side to some boards. This dark side appears when you have board members that are there for the prestige or the board fee or even worse, the ones who happen to be the idiot children or grandchildren of the original owners. These board members can create havoc for a CEO or executive team. They aren’t there for oversight. They feel a need to circumvent the executive authority in order to run the bank. There’s nothing worse than having the son who inherited a successful bee keeper business telling a banker how to run a bank or the person who runs a small 5-employee business telling you how to run a much larger bank. When this occurs, the employees are put in a very difficult and ambiguous place. The decision most employees will make is to stick with the status quo while trying not to get noticed. At best you end up with a bank that just treads water and at worst you get a bank with two diverging cultures that constantly clash. If you have one or two of these directors, you can usually work around them and still move your culture and bank forward. However, if one of these becomes the chairman of the board, then you have a real problem. Once this happens, the chairman will often place like-minded friends on the board as well. You’re now in a tough spot. You can either collect a check until retirement or you can move on to a career somewhere else.
