Does every team member on your team know how they tie to profit? I mean really know?

When a study published in Businessweek revealed they had asked 6,000 employees, “Do you perform in the top 10 percent?” more than 90 percent said they performed in the top 10 percent! Whoa.

So yes, you likely have a problem. And no, your people don’t really understand how they tie to profit—but they certainly think that they do. That’s a problem to be solved…quickly.

For so many banks, the efficiency ratio is an important metric. They usually try to lower their efficiency ratio with the wrong approaches. “Oh, let’s see if your pencil is short enough before you can have another pencil.” “Let’s cut the budget.” “Let’s cut payroll.”

The very things that are the investments in their profitable future are usually the things that get cut first.

What if instead, we improved the efficiency ratio by getting more revenue out of every team member? What if we get people to be far more effective and productive at what they’re doing?

What if we helped them accurately understand how they could create more profit from their jobs?

Buckle down. It’s tricky to get people to change their minds about what parts of their jobs and how those jobs are done drives profit when they’ve had a lifetime of experiences where they believe that they’re aligned to profit.

And yet, as a leadership team, nothing will be more important during challenging times than improving the profit per payroll dollar to create a performance culture at your bank.

Let’s face facts. It’s deadly for your bank’s culture to cut people just when you need the remaining team members to be engaged, alive, and passionate—doing better work than they’ve ever done before.

Now’s a good time to figure out how your people tie to profit.

Here are three questions you must bring to light:

Question 1: How do you build the visibility systems you need?

Question 2: How do you get them to embrace stage-appropriate accountability?

Question 3: How do you make sure you have the right KPIs and critical drivers?

Most bank accountability programs set metrics the executives hope will change things. One bank CEO after another has already abandoned that “metrics” board” and their consultants as a failed experiment—often their results plummeted after their new “accountability culture” rolled out.

Why? Shouldn’t it work to have a great dashboard? Seems obvious.

The problem is you can’t measure anything until the team members are winning. And your team members won’t win until you make sure they have an ongoing blended learning program of the right education designed to catapult their performance metrics. This type drives metrics quickly and sustainably. The learning needs to tie to a confidence-raising process that gets people to apply their new understandings.

That is the new game of banking. Suppose you look at the highest performing banks in America. In that case, they have one thing in common: their people know how they tie to profit, and they are inevitably extreme learning organizations.

The framework is that first they learn the right things…then they connect each person with their newfound knowledge to profit. That is the formula for success in the new game of high-performance banking.

Let me show you how to do it in just the right way.

– Roxanne Emmerich

Please watch the video above and share it with your exec team and board.