In this week’s video, Roxanne Emmerich calls out the expensive mistake too many community banks make: confusing branding with positioning. A polished logo, a clever tagline, or a faster turnaround time is not enough to make your ideal customer choose you. If your team cannot clearly explain why your bank is the best or the only one, you are not differentiated. You are replaceable.

In this video, you’ll discover:

• Why weak positioning destroys deposit growth, pricing power, and marketing ROI
• How to tell if your so-called USP is actually a real competitive advantage
• Why the right third-party credibility instantly helps your team sell value instead of rate

Roxanne also makes the case for why recognition matters when it proves performance. A credible award can do more than decorate a lobby. It can open doors, validate your claims, and help your team close.

If your bank has built real discipline, real alignment, and real results, this is your moment to step forward.

Banky Award applications are open now at BankyAwards.com

Watch now. 

Let’s get honest about something that’s quietly killing your deposit growth, sabotaging your pricing power, and making your marketing dollars evaporate.

It’s not your message. It’s your positioning.

Most community banks have been duped by well-intentioned branding firms who took hundreds of thousands of dollars, designed beautiful logos and catchy taglines, and then gave you one half of a decent USP like, “We approve loans in thirty-six hours,” which, okay, that’s something. But is it enough to make your ideal customer say, “Woah, we have to talk to that bank?”

Not even close. Marketing only works when it’s tied to one thing: positioning. If you can’t articulate why your bank is the best or the only, you’re just another option in a saturated market. And your team, when they get asked, “Why should I bank with you instead of the other guy?” they’re saying things like, “We’ve been around for eighty years. We have great people. You’ll get me.” Let’s be real.

These aren’t selling points. They’re red flags that you have no positioning.

A real unique selling proposition does one of two things. It proves that you’re the best or it proves that you’re the only. If your USP doesn’t do that, it’s not a USP, or a unique selling proposition.

It’s wallpaper.

And here’s the real cost. Without a strong USP, your marketing falls flat, your sales team doesn’t have the tools to close premium business, and you’re forced to compete on rate instead of value, which is a race to the bottom. So here’s the test. Ask your frontline team this question: “Why should someone bank with us instead of anyone else?” If you hear silence or clichés, you’ve got a positioning problem.

Incidentally, there’s one USP that instantly separates a bank from the rest of the pack. The one line that makes prospects stop scrolling, stop hesitating, and start saying, “Well, obviously, we should talk to them.” That USP: “We’ve been named one of the best banks in America by the Institute for Extraordinary Banking.” That, my friend, is positioning.

The bank award doesn’t just sit on the shelf. It gets you into the room. It closes the deal. It proves what your marketing claims. So if you’ve already built a performance culture, if your team is aligned, if you’re growing low-cost deposits and delivering real results, get your Banky Award application in at BankyAwards.com. Because the banks that win this award don’t just market better, they close better, they lead better, and they bank better.

The post Your Marketing Isn’t Broken. Your Positioning Is. appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

They’re not grinding harder—they’re executing smarter. While average banks chase vague “best practices,” elite banks install systems that drive measurable performance, profitability, and positioning.

Here’s what separates them:

• They systematize performance – culture, pricing, and execution are engineered—not left to chance
• They tie every role to profit – every employee understands how they move the bottom line
• They leverage positioning – recognition like the Banky Award becomes a revenue-driving asset

This isn’t theory. One bank moved cross-sales up 300% and increased NIM by 120 basis points—not by trying harder, but by installing the right system.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: being great isn’t enough anymore. If the market doesn’t see you as elite, you’re invisible.

If your bank is already doing the work—but not getting the recognition or pricing power you deserve—it’s time to fix that.

Apply for the Banky Award and claim your position at the top.

Watch now. 

What the Top 1% of Banks Do That the Other 99% Still Don’t Get

There’s nothing noble about working harder than your competitors unless it actually works. But for most banks, it doesn’t. The top one percent of banks, they’re not working harder. They’re working smarter with systems, culture, and leadership alignment that pull results like a magnet. Let me show you what they’re doing and how you can do that too. Now let’s be honest.

Best practices in banking have been watered down to meaning, well, nothing. Every bank claims great customer service. Every team says they’re relationship-based. Every CEO says our people are our biggest asset. So if everyone’s saying the same thing, why are only a few actually crushing it? Because the top performers don’t talk practices. They install them systematically, relentlessly, measurably.

One of our clients was buried in margin pressure. They couldn’t move pricing. Cross-sales were dead in the water. They trained their people twice and still got no lift.

But then we installed the Breakthrough Banking Blueprint performance system. Cross-sales up three hundred percent. Net interest margin up one hundred and twenty basis points. Team alignment locked in.

And today, they’re one of the best banks in America.

Incidentally, you might have seen them on stage receiving the Banky Award from the Institute for Extraordinary Banking. But here’s the part most banks miss. They didn’t win the Banky to feel good. They won it because it was smart business.

The Banky isn’t a trophy. It’s a tool. It separates you from the B2 banks. It gives your team a reason to step it up.

It gives your prospects proof that you are elite in your market. And let’s face it, it’s a lot easier to close deals and command premium pricing when you can say, we’ve been recognized as one of the best banks in America.

So what do the top banks actually do differently? They build culture like it’s a core product. They tie every role to profitability. They own the pricing conversation. They use metrics that matter.

Here’s a little hint. How many new accounts that you’ve brought in is not one of those metrics. They compete on value, not rate, and yes, they leverage positioning through the Banky Award to build prestige and close the deal.

If you’re already doing the work, and if your bank is walking the talk on performance and leadership, and if you’re ready to let the world know that you’re in a different class, apply for the Banky Award now. Position your bank where it belongs, at the top. Because these days, being great isn’t good enough. Being seen as great is everything. Don’t let the almost-best banks grab the spotlight that you’ve earned. Go to BankyAwards.com and make sure that you nominate your bank. And we’ll see you in September at the Best Banks in America Super Conference.

The post Why the Top 1% of Banks Win While Everyone Else Spins appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

You’ve seen it: missed deadlines, tolerated underperformance, and a silent agreement not to challenge each other. It feels polite. It’s actually dangerous.

In this video, Roxanne Emmerich dismantles the myth of accountability and replaces it with something far more powerful: mutual accountability rooted in respect—not avoidance.

You’ll discover how to:

• Stop premature accountability: Holding people accountable before mastery drives top performers out the door.
• Break the “I won’t tell if you won’t” culture: Silence doesn’t protect people—it delays consequences.
• Lead with accountable care: High-performing teams challenge directly, clearly, and with commitment to results.

If your team is “nice” but not performing, you don’t have alignment—you have avoidance.

And avoidance is expensive.

Ready to build a team that actually delivers?

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 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.

The post Stop Nice. Start Accountable: Why Your Culture Is Failing (and How to Fix It) appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Most bank executives tolerate a dangerous pattern: disagreeable behavior disguised as “passion” or “high standards.” The result? Top performers disengage, culture erodes, and accountability quietly disappears.

This video draws a hard line between healthy dissension and toxic disagreement—and why failing to address it is costing you more than you think.

In this video you’ll discover:

• How one toxic communicator silently impacts 8+ employees—and your retention

• The simple language shift that instantly removes defensiveness and drives alignment

• Why executives must confront behavior directly—or accept cultural decline

The strongest cultures don’t avoid conflict. They weaponize it for performance—without letting it turn personal.

If your team is walking on eggshells… or worse, checking out… it’s time to reset the standard.

Watch now. 

So you disagree, and yet you can disagree without being disagreeable.

Have you noticed that there are certain people that you work with that, no matter what they do, they just have a way of being disagreeable?

Underneath that is not just maybe a lack of skill set, but maybe a disgruntlement where it’s basically always an attitude of, “You’re ticking me off, and let me do a little harm back the other direction.”

Allowance of these behaviors is underneath all crazy-making behaviors, but also it is the principles that cultures are built on that are unhealthy cultures. And yet, in many organizations, this kind of behavior does not get approached.

As you’re onboarding new employees, make it really clear that you expect them to disagree. You didn’t hire them to be bobbleheads to agree with everything that you said—you’ve hired them to think and challenge. But how they challenge makes a difference.

A mentor of mine taught me years ago to never say, “I disagree.” Instead, just say, “I see that differently.”

Immediately, we’re no longer being combative. We’re just basically saying, “That’s interesting. I give you points for what you said. I would like to have some points for what I’m saying so we can figure this out together.” But notice how the tone, the words matter.

Having disagreeable people on your team who believe that they can get away with any infraction of what they believe to be perfection in the workplace—which you have to understand is pretty much every day, all day long, because it’s never perfect—when that person in the room gets away with that, I guarantee you, if they work in proximity to eight people, those other eight people are very much impacted. Walking around on eggshells, not enjoying their job, not bringing in and recruiting their best friends to come work there too, and counting the days until their retirement.

Understanding that we must deal with those who disagree in disagreeable ways, so that they don’t suck the energy out of the room, is part of what it means to be an executive.

Again, going back to what I was talking about a couple weeks ago—you’ve got to grow a backbone to make sure you deal with those things. And again, as you’re bringing it up, you don’t need to be disagreeable. You just need to say, “This is how we do things around here. We’re going to expect you to always do it that way.”

Do we agree on that? Can I hold you accountable? Great. You can count on that being the case.

Looking forward to working with you under these new parameters.

Make it clear that you want them to disagree, but they don’t need to be—and they should never be—disagreeable.

Come back again next week. We’re going to talk about the next layer of building your culture, because it’s about getting people to play nice in the sandbox together, but then it’s about getting them to be productive together as well. See you back next week.

The post Healthy Dissension: Eliminate Toxic Disagreement Before It Erodes Your Culture appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

Most executives are unknowingly tolerating “culture ghosts”—toxic, normalized behaviors that silently destroy performance, accountability, and trust. And the longer they linger, the harder they are to remove.

In this video, Roxanne Emmerich exposes how these invisible forces take hold—and what it actually takes to eliminate them.

Here’s what you’ll discover:

• Why toxic behaviors persist long after leadership changes—and how they spread

• The hidden cost of tolerating gossip, low performance, and misalignment

• Why culture transformation requires systems—not speeches or good intentions

If you want a high-performing bank, you cannot allow low standards to masquerade as “just how things are.”

The strongest cultures are not accidental—they are engineered, reinforced, and protected.

It’s time to stop managing around dysfunction—and start eliminating it.

Watch now. 

I’m not big on the paranormal, but I do believe that there are ghosts within businesses.

Let me tell you a story. Years ago, I was working with an organization that supported the banking industry in a technological way. I won’t give you more detail than that. And I was working with them on their strategic plan, and I remember going into the CEO and I said, I gotta talk to you.

And I said to him, I am concerned that you’re gonna have a big HR issue here because the level of sexual references made as jokes between these team members is really beyond anything I’ve ever seen. I’m not a prude, but I’ve never seen anything like this, and I do think something’s wrong here. What’s going on, and where did this come from? And he said, hang on one second.

I gotta share with you a story. And he said, I purchased this company from a gentleman who was having an affair with his secretary, and they used to go to the back of the office, and there was a little room they went into, and they had a red light—you can’t make this stuff up—outside the door. And that was basically a sign for the rest of the group, don’t come in here now.

And he said, no matter what I do since I purchased this organization, I can’t seem to make the sexual references go away. It was such a normalized thing within the organization that even as new people come in, the ghost remains.

And I basically said, okay. That is it. We need to have an exorcism because this has got to stop. And many of you know what I’m talking about.

You need an exorcism for something else. Maybe it is an exorcism of, well, low performers, okay, get away with everything around here. They don’t really have to work, and nothing really ever happens to them, and they get the same bonus anyway, so why work? That might be your ghost.

Or, hey, when we disagree with things that the executives say, we just gossip about them in the break room, and therefore, we get to complain and feel better about ourselves. But they’re not making a difference. They’re making everybody feel worse and destroying the very fabric of your culture while they’re doing it. All of these kinds of things that are normal within your organization may not be the culture that you choose.

Your job as an executive is to define the culture that you choose.

You’re gonna have to get rid of the ghosts, and you’ll need to build the systems for improving the culture to tie everyone to the values and behaviors within this organization.

Now, as you’re doing this, I gotta say it is important to do it right and in the right order and with the right steps because if you make an attempt in that direction and you don’t get it done the first time correctly, each new initiative you will roll out will now be a “this too shall pass, let’s just slow walk them one more time” process because they don’t like giving up that control. And you know what I’m talking about if you’ve been on planet Earth for more than a decade.

So understand that you create the culture in the organization, which means you’re gonna have to grow backbone, decide what you stand for, and start to put systems in place to transform your culture.

And yes, I did say systems. It’s not a happy feeling. It’s a series of ongoing systems that keep everybody aligned to the values and the behaviors of the organization and also get people who are not aligned to understand—not around here. That’s not how we do things around here.

Enjoy growing your backbone and stick with me over the next few weeks as I give you more strategic ideas about how to land this because you shouldn’t have to live with ghosts. See you back next week.

The post Banish the Culture Ghosts Sabotaging Your Bank’s Performance appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

You have a culture contamination problem.

High-performing employees cannot thrive in an environment where drama, excuses, and finger-pointing dominate the conversation. Yet many executive teams tolerate these behaviors far longer than they should.

In this week’s video, Roxanne Emmerich delivers a blunt wake-up call: eliminating workplace drama is not optional—it’s leadership’s responsibility.

If you want top-tier performance, you must create crystal-clear behavioral standards and ensure every employee understands how conflict is handled inside a high-performance organization.

In this video, you’ll discover:

• Why gossip and whining quietly destroy high-performer engagement

• How unclear behavioral standards allow dysfunction to spread

• The leadership move that eliminates drama and restores focus on results

High-performing banks don’t tolerate “fourth-grade behavior.” They create cultures where every employee brings their highest and best self to work.

The question is simple: Are your lines in the sand clear?

Watch this week’s video to discover how leaders eliminate dysfunction and unlock real performance.

Watch now. 

This week, I want to talk about getting rid of the crazy.

Most every workplace has a little bit of crazy going on—gossip, whining, excuses, blaming, and pot stirring.

Almost every executive team that I talk to, when I ask them, “So what’s up?” will tell me, “You know, we’ve got big things to do, and we’re still acting like fourth graders, and it’s just not okay.”

Maybe you can’t relate to this, but if you’re on planet Earth, maybe there’s some truth you may want to get about that says there’s just a little bit of this going on—and it’s just not okay.

Let me ask you this question.

Do you think your high performers thrive when they have a cesspool of those behaviors going on around them?

And who do you think this falls on the shoulders of to get this fixed?

Yep. That’s right.

There is nobody who has a name tag that says somebody. It’s everybody. Everyone must step in to make the magic happen.

And the magic is basically bringing your highest and best self to work regardless of the fact that somebody hurt your feelings, regardless of the fact that you didn’t get that promotion you thought you should have, regardless of the fact that it’s hard out there.

There are lots and lots and lots of problems. It’s called work for a reason. It would be called Disney otherwise—we would buy tickets to get in.

But when it’s work, there are challenges. There are hard things to accomplish, and we’re going to rub up against each other.

And how we discover to work through conflict in productive ways is really a consequence of how we manage not allowing crazy to go on within the organization.

Let me ask you this—are the lines in the sand clear?

Are your people educated about how they should handle things instead of their natural response that they discovered in the fourth grade about how to handle conflict?

Next week we’re going to talk about once you have settled in and taken care of getting these dysfunctional behaviors out, how you then start to build from there so that everyone who is now operating in terms of being supportive of other team members becomes a true contributor to the team.

See you next week.

The post Drama Detox: The Leadership Move That Eliminates Gossip and Ignites Results appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

They’re wrong.

Research—and decades of organizational performance data—show something far more powerful: the feeling of progress every single day.

When employees believe they are winning—moving the needle, improving, mastering something meaningful—their motivation skyrockets. Yet most banks fail to define what “progress” actually means for their teams.

The result? Talented employees feel stuck. Lower performers stay disengaged. Leaders mistakenly assume capability is the problem—when in reality, the system is.

In this video, Roxanne Emmerich reveals why progress is the hidden driver of performance—and how leaders can activate it inside their organizations.

You’ll discover:

• Why compensation and appreciation alone don’t sustain motivation

• How undefined progress quietly creates disengagement in your team

• The simple “one-needle” mastery approach that turns struggling employees into top performers

When leaders create visible progress systems, something remarkable happens: people begin to believe they can win.

And once they believe they can win, performance accelerates.

Watch this week’s episode to discover how to build a culture where progress fuels performance.

Watch now. 

Trick question for you. What is the number one motivator for employees?

Every time I ask executives, they say pay, up to a certain level. Yes, the research shows that—but that’s not it.

Feeling appreciated? Yes, that’s important—but that’s not it.

Are you ready for the answer?

The answer is the feeling of progress every single day.

But what is progress?

That is the question that needs to be solved. For many people, as we established last week when I was talking, we mentioned that they think they’re tied to profit in such a way that they believe they’re performing in the top ten percent. So perhaps they do not truly tie to profit.

What we have to figure out for them is: progress on what?

Here’s what I’m going to suggest.

When I did graduate work in organizational development, I discovered the concept of making sure you never get ahead of your skis. You take people from learned helplessness—the belief that “I could never do that”—and you give them one thing to do.

You guide them to mastery.

You celebrate it. You high-five them. And you make sure the system is in place to keep that needle up.

Then you show them another needle to move.

You put a system in place after they move that one up to make sure it stays there. Then you add another.

Here’s why this matters.

Some of your lower performers are actually high performers who have simply not been properly groomed because they cannot answer the question: progress on what?

But people get energized by the feeling of making progress every single day.

Once they start to feel like they’re winning, suddenly some of your lower performers become some of your higher performers—and you didn’t think that was possible.

But here’s the real miracle.

They didn’t think it was possible either.

Next week, join me as we cover the next piece: How do we create a workspace everyone wants to be in—one that supports high performers and doesn’t allow low performers to suck the energy out of the room?

The post The Real #1 Motivator at Work (It’s Not Pay) appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

But busy is not the same as profitable.

If your lenders are running up and down Main Street chasing low-close-rate deals and matching rates just to “win” business, you don’t have a hustle problem—you have a behavioral economics problem.

In this video, the sacred cow of your endless to-do list will be challenged and replaced with a sharper question: What is the highest and best use of your time right now?

You’ll discover:

• Why activity without profit focus quietly destroys margin

• How to identify and target your next 100 most profitable relationships

• A two-meeting close strategy that eliminates price objections

High-performing banks do not reward motion. They reward profitable motion.

If your team says they’re “too busy” to think strategically, that’s not resistance—it’s a systems failure. Behavioral economics drives buy-in, execution, and margin expansion.

The future belongs to banks that understand what truly makes money—and eliminate what doesn’t.

Watch the full episode and decide: Are you running faster… or running smarter?

Watch now. 

Are you still operating off of a to-do list? Well, might I suggest that you throw that thing out—and do it immediately?

Because not every to-do is as important as the other pieces. And it’s one of the main reasons that most organizations just never get to that state of thriving: they do not create a clear understanding of behavioral economics.

What is the highest and best use of my time at this moment?

Let me ask you this. For a loan officer, should they be going and calling on all kinds of people up and down Main Street with maybe a ten percent close rate—where they’re having to match rates and thereby losing money for your organization?

You can’t make that one up in volume.

Or would it be better to identify your next top one hundred most profitable customers, know how to call on them in such a way that they actually get the appointment, and know how to, with a two-meeting close, close the entire relationship—with pricing not being a thing—and have all of their business and all of their friends as a result?

You tell me.

If somebody’s telling you, “I’m too busy running up and down Main Street doing deals that lose money for you,” versus, “I’m going to take the time to figure out how to do this instead,” which one makes more sense?

And yet—God bless you—I’ve been around bank executives for decades now, and I know as you introduce this thought what you’re going to run into. I know it.

You’re going to have some folks who are basically going to tell you, “Don’t you get it? I am so busy running up and down Main Street. I don’t have time for this. I’m exhausted. How dare you ask me to be more?”

Here’s what we’ve got to understand.

The future is here for those who understand.

We’ve got to bring brilliance to our work. We have to bring good strategic thinking to our work. We have to execute with behavioral economics and understand what makes our organization money—and what actually loses money for the organization—and get about the right things.

All right. Next time we talk, we’re going to have some fun. It’s going to be a surprise. Stick tight, because I’m going to show you something that nobody knows how to do, and I think it’s going to be very important for the future of your organization.

The post Stop the To-Do List Madness: Use Behavioral Economics to Drive Bank Profitability appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

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.

The post Accountabilibuddies: The Missing Link to Real Bank Performance appeared first on The Emmerich Group.

They have a profit connection problem.

CEOs tell me the same thing: “We’ve got good people. Great service. Strong work ethic.” But when you ask those same employees how they drive profitability—how they bring in the full relationship at premium pricing—you get blank stares.

And it’s not because they’re lazy. It’s because most employees don’t know what “top performance” actually means.

In our national research, we analyzed 1,000+ workplace professionals and asked a simple question: Do you perform in the top 10%?
Seventy-five percent said yes. Statistically impossible. Culturally normal.

That gap creates a dangerous illusion: people believe effort equals value. Coming in early and being nice to customers becomes the definition of performance—while profitability drivers stay invisible.

Here’s the trap: when organizations introduce accountability before people understand what they’re accountable to, they trigger fear, resentment, and turnover.

In this video you’ll discover:

• Why “good service” is not a profitability strategy

• How to connect every role to measurable profit drivers

• The hidden risk of letting low performers ride on your best people

Because when lower performers aren’t paying for themselves, your top talent subsidizes the entire system—and that’s a risk you can’t live with.

Watch now. 

 
 
In talking to hundreds of bank CEOs, I’ve heard the same repeated message. We’ve got good people. They have good customer service skills, but they don’t really know how to bring in the entire relationship at premium pricing, and they don’t really know how they tie to profit. Well, if you have this problem, you’re not alone because this is a common issue.

People mean well. It’s not their fault. Did you know that when we did our national research, where we analyzed over a thousand different people in the workplace, and we asked them, “Do you perform in the top ten percent?” what we found out is that seventy-five percent believe that they perform in the top ten percent?

Yeah. I know. I know. That’s statistically impossible.

And yet, they truly believe that they’re a top performer because they come in early and they’re good to the customer. But they don’t know that there’s another whole piece in terms of the critical drivers that tie them to profit. And here’s the problem that most organizations have when they start bringing in accountability cultures: they get ahead of their skis. They ask them to be accountable for things they’re not ready for yet, and then they have a mass exodus for the door.

In today’s day and age, we have to figure this problem out because we do need people who know how they tie to profit, because they do have to pay for themselves. And here’s why it’s important.

When your lower performers are not paying for themselves, that means they are on the shoulders of your very best performers—and that’s a risk you can’t live with.

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