Halfway Is No Excuse: The Midyear Execution Test Every Bank Must Pass
Midyear is not the time for excuses. It is the diagnostic checkpoint where elite community banks assess what’s working, fix what’s not, and accelerate execution before year-end.
This week, I want to talk about getting rid of the crazy.
Almost every workplace has a little bit of crazy going on: gossip, whining, excuses, blaming, and pot-stirring.
Almost every executive team I talk to when I ask them what has been going on will tell me, “You know, we have big things to do, yet we’re still acting like fourth graders, it’s just not okay.” Maybe you can’t relate to this, but if you’re on planet Earth, maybe there’s some truth-telling 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 happening 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. The magic is bringing your highest and best self to work even though somebody hurt your feelings, although you didn’t get that promotion you thought you should have, even though 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 get accomplished, and we’re going to rub up against each other. How we learn 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 learned 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 do you then start to build from there so that everyone who is now operating in terms of being supportive of other team members now becomes a true contributor to the team.
To your continued success,
Roxanne Emmerich
Please watch the video above and share it with your exec team and board.
Midyear is not the time for excuses. It is the diagnostic checkpoint where elite community banks assess what’s working, fix what’s not, and accelerate execution before year-end.
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