A lot of bad things happen around acquisitions. If you’re being acquired, it’s rarely pretty. And if you’re the one acquiring, the Wharton School of Business says your chance of failure is greater than 83 percent. And even if you don’t go down in flames in the opening round, the real heartaches continue for two years after the acquisition as two dark forces are inevitably unleashed:

1. The “us vs. them” conversations, including the need to make somebody else wrong, and
2. The bickering about whose system to follow, because no one has really sorted out the best practices.

So how do you prepare for a year in which many smaller, exhausted banks will be throwing their keys at other banks when catching those keys is statistically more likely to bring you tragedy than success? By having a proven franchisable management system that can be replicated and installed in any new branch or institution you acquire.

Begin preparing NOW to figure out what effectiveness looks like in every area and job description of your bank.

Take the branch manager position. In a franchisable system, you would know how to onboard a newly-acquired branch manager, what to do when their emotional intelligence scores show them to be a medium risk, how to advise them of their Job Performance Progress Plan before starting so they have an identification of all tasks and critical drivers they’ll be reporting into on a weekly basis—even how they should run a huddle to keep everybody informed of, and coached to, progress on the critical drivers of the branch.

The list could go on and on—and that’s just the branch manager’s position. Multiply that out to every position in the bank, and you’ll have the foundation of a proven system for predictable success.

Roxanne Emmerich