Hi. I’m Roxanne Emmerich, and I work with bank CEOs and their boards to help them align strategy, culture, and execution.
This week, we’re diving into the critical trends your board must understand—or risk making growth decisions in the dark.
Let’s be honest. Most board packets are long on reports and short on insights. But the top five percent? Their boards drive growth with precision because they understand the levers that matter: culture clarity, strategic discipline, and real-time visibility into performance drivers.
Let’s face it: the board is there for strategic purposes. You’ve heard the insight: minds in, fingers out. We go to our boards to make sure that they’re driving strategies and giving us ideas about how we can attract more high-profit customers that are lower risk—how we can move into other markets. These are strategic issues that should be covered in strategic planning, where we are actually getting information from the board about how they can bring their wisdom in to make sure that this bank thrives.
One of the biggest mistakes I see is so many banks seeing their executive team and their board not gelling together.
That’s just simply not okay.
The board is not just here to rubber-stamp, and the executive team is not here to ignore the strategic insights of the board. The executive team is here to get the strategic insights of the board, weigh them, and build systems to implement those things. And that’s where most strategic planning goes wrong. See, most banks have strategic planners that are more accountants. They tell you what numbers to hit—they don’t tell you how to hit them.
That’s the whole point. By definition, a strategy is basically this: given limited resources, how do I accomplish a miracle?
And this miracle is what is defined—that is the strategy. And most banks have a strategic plan devoid of any of those strategies about how to get it done.
That’s what you need to be thinking about right now, because it is strategic planning season, and it’s time to do your best strategic plan ever. Not a list of to-dos like most banks. Not a list of aspirations without the strategies to make it happen. But instead, a workable plan that drives a performance culture, drives a higher net interest margin, less risk, more growth, and—for goodness’ sake—more low-cost deposits.
That’s the game of high-performance banking, and that’s what the strategic plan must be about as you go into this next year to make sure that you create a bank that’s a top five-percenter.
And that is the game. Right?
