Most banks say they want an accountability culture.
Almost none actually build one.
Why? Because leaders confuse accountability with punishment. Or worse — they protect “niceness” at the expense of performance.
In this week’s video, Roxanne Emmerich exposes the real barrier to execution: the unspoken “I won’t call you out if you won’t call me out” agreement quietly eroding results inside executive teams.
Here’s what you’ll discover:
Why holding people accountable too early destroys good talent — and how to create mastery before measurement
The hidden cost of approval-seeking leaders and how high empathy can unintentionally sabotage performance
A practical script for mutual accountability that strengthens relationships while driving outcomes
Community bank performance strategies don’t fail because of strategy. They fail because no one insists on execution.
Friends don’t let friends miss deadlines. And high-performing banks don’t let cultural ghosts dictate results.
If you want a bank performance culture that improves ROA and ROE — this is your wake-up call.
Watch now.
Everywhere I go, people tell me we’ve got to build an accountability culture. What a great and novel idea. Sadly, decades have gone by and most organizations have gotten nowhere on that. So what’s the problem? Why do we keep talking about the same problems, but we’re not fixing them? I have a couple of ideas.
Idea number one. One of the things that organizations do wrong is they bring in some new training, and then they hold everybody accountable right away before they’ve had any level of mastery whatsoever. And so good people start thinking, I’ll never get this. They run for the door, and they lose their good people.
This is not a good solution. That’s one problem, but that’s not the big one. The big one is the whole concept of “I won’t tell on you if you don’t tell on me” philosophy.
But here’s the thing. We all know friends don’t let friends drive drunk. Well, guess what? Friends don’t let friends not perform in the workplace. Because when they miss a deadline, when they miss an outcome, eventually these things get reconciled.
They get reconciled in that somebody doesn’t get a raise. They get reconciled in that somebody gets fired. Do you really want that to happen to your friends?
And yet, for many organizations, they have the ghost. We talked about ghosts a few weeks back. The ghost of, “Well, that’s how we do things around here. We’re just nice.” And you’d stand out and be different if you were to challenge.
Well, here’s the thing. We have to stand out and challenge, but we can do that with love in our heart. We don’t have to be nasty when we’re holding people accountable. It’s just like, “Hey, Joe. I think this is the third week you’ve had this on your list. Need this done by Wednesday at eleven o’clock. What do you need to move? What mountains have to be moved in order to make that happen? Because, dude, I’m counting on you. Look me in the eye. Tell me I’m going to see that.”
It’s a fun, light, easy way to basically say, I care about you. I’m not going to let you keep giving lip service to things and not performing.
It’s not good for you. It’s not good for the organization.
That need for approval within humans ends up being a big problem.
As you’re hiring, make sure you’re not hiring a bunch of people with a strong need for approval who will never confront. Those of you who are doing the emotional intelligence assessments, you’ll see it as the higher intuition/empathy score. Because at a certain level, they will do anything to not say anything about what’s going wrong, and therefore they become the source of the problem.
As you’re putting your executive team together, make sure you’re averaging between a six and a seven for average scores in intuition and empathy. That will be the magic that will make sure that you keep saying, “This is what I need, Joe. I can count on you, Joe. Right?”
With kindness, with love, accountability can happen. And yet it must happen.
Growing a bank isn’t some mysterious process that involves tea leaves and oracles. It’s more like building a house or tuning up a car’s engine, with a power tool for every step and a hand tool for every part you need to work on. Effective builders have a “franchise system”—the proven best way to do things that minimizes mistakes and maximizes results per hour spent.
The process begins with one crucial step: Find out what matters to your best customers, then build hundreds of Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) around those components and list them explicitly in your marketing materials.
Most banks focus on what they should do. That’s a good thing. But too few seriously evaluate what they are currently doing that has to stop. Awareness of the common characteristics of low-performing banks can keep you from falling victim to any of these practices before you join the group.
Let’s start with the first four:
Let’s face facts. You know it is true. Banks stink at sales culture.
Most say they’re working on it…but most have been “working on it” for three decades now
For starters, if you want it to be read and followed, it’s one page long. No, not 3 to 5 pages—ONE! And it starts by identifying target niche markets because that’s what the whole plan has to be about.
Of course, it’s commonly known that 50% to 80% of mergers fail to meet expectations—in fact, they’re economically a disaster.
Getting a clear framework in place BEFORE you hit the road matters more to the outcome than anything else. Unaligned teams, fuzzy objectives, and a lack of common goals often bog down strategic planning sessions.
I get a kick out of watching Mad Men. There’s something captivating about being transported to another time like that.
Slightly less fun is the feeling I get when I see banks in the real world and the present day throwing money away on traditional advertising like it’s 1965.
If you saw that title and immediately thought, “Uh…succession plan?”—we need to talk.
A recent survey across all industries showed that leadership succession planning, or the lack thereof, was the most pressing area of concern among CEOs.
Improving the commercial loan portfolio means bringing in high-quality business customers who are in growth mode or who have some other financing needs—while minding...