Why Top-Performing Banks Never Delegate Culture

Most banks say culture matters. The problem is that many leaders treat culture as if it can be assigned to a committee, delegated to HR, or discussed during a monthly meeting.

It can’t.

The highest-performing banks understand that culture is not a side project. It’s a leadership responsibility. While every employee has a role in protecting and reinforcing the culture, accountability for creating and sustaining it rests squarely with the CEO and executive team.

In this week’s video, discover why culture committees often fail, why good intentions are not enough, and why top-performing organizations rely on leadership-driven systems instead of volunteer-driven initiatives.

Here are the key takeaways:

• Why every employee owns culture—but leadership owns the system

• The costly mistake banks make when they delegate culture to committees

• How top 5% organizations create sustainable culture change that drives performance

Strong cultures don’t happen by accident. They happen when leaders deliberately build systems that reinforce the right behaviors, values, and expectations every day.

Want to discover how top-performing banks engineer cultures that consistently drive growth, deposits, and profitability? Join our free upcoming masterclass, “Culture Is Not a Feeling—It’s a Performance System,” on June 11 at 1:00 PM CT.

Watch now. 

Sometimes two different ideas seem to be challenging each other. So you’ve probably heard me say everybody has a role in managing the culture of the organization, and you’ve also heard me say you can’t delegate culture.

Let me allow these distinct distinctions to play out so that you can rest through this concept. Yes, everybody needs to understand that they’re responsible for culture. So when they see somebody who’s doing something that’s not within the culture guidelines, they need to be able to say, “That’s not how we do things here at ABC Bank,” so that everybody understands they are in charge of culture.

That said, culture can’t be delegated. Basically, the CEO and the executive team are one hundred percent responsible for driving the cultural systems within the organization. Make sure they are aligned. Make sure the team members are matching the values and behaviors of the organization.

Make sure to acknowledge those who are doing it. Make sure to talk through it with people who are not doing it to let them know this is how we do things around here.

Delegating this to a culture committee—God forbid. I’ve probably talked to a hundred people now who said they were on a culture committee. And when I asked them, “How’s that going?” they said, “We meet every Tuesday, but not so well,” because culture committees don’t get it done. Cultural systems driven by the executive team and executed, perhaps, by some of these other people could make sense.

Again, always study people who have their information in order. If someone has driven and changed culture within an organization radically and sustainably, then probably just putting them on a committee is not going to get the job done. They mean well, but the world doesn’t go around with a bunch of do-gooders. The world goes around with those who bring mastery and excellence because that’s the only way to be a top five percenter—to understand what gets done by a top five percenter and how we can implement that here with perfection so that we know exactly the result we’re going to get.

Why?

Because we followed the only system proven to work.