How to Tie Everyone to Profit [VIDEO]

Most bank executives assume their people understand how they drive profit. The hard truth? Over 90% of employees in a national study believed they were top‑10% performers—yet most can’t show how they actually tie to profit. That disconnect quietly destroys margin, culture, and competitiveness.

In this week’s video, Roxanne Emmerich cuts through the industry’s most dangerous habit: thinking expense‑cutting is a performance strategy. She exposes why efficiency ratios stay stuck, why cost‑cutting crushes culture at the exact moment you need discretionary effort, and why the top 5% of banks outperform—year after year—without layoffs or fear tactics.

You’ll discover how to:

• Shift from cost‑cutting to profit expansion by driving revenue and productivity per employee.

• Give every role a direct line‑of‑sight to profit with stage‑appropriate accountability that creates consistent wins.

• Build an extreme learning organization focused only on what ties directly to bottom‑line improvement.

If you want a team that drives profit instead of consuming it, this episode shows the system high‑performing banks use.

Watch now. 

Does your team know how they tie to profit? Really? Well, when a study was done of six thousand people, where they were asked, “Do you perform in the top ten percent?” over ninety percent of employees said that they performed in the top ten percent. So yes, we do have a problem. And yes, people do not understand how they tie to profit, but they think that they do.

And that’s a problem to be solved—and solved quickly. For so many banks, efficiency ratio is an important thing, and they—and we—always solve it with the wrong approaches. “Oh, let’s see if your pencil is short enough before you can have another pencil. Let’s cut every little expense.”

“Let’s cut payroll.” Well, what if we got more revenue out of every team member? What if we got people to be far more effective and productive at what they’re doing and had them really understand what profit looked like for their particular jobs? Yeah, it’s tricky to get people to understand something when they’ve had a lifetime of experiences where they believe that they’re tied to profit.

And yet, it is something that, as a leadership team, will be very important during challenging times because it’s really bad for your culture to cut people just when you need them to be engaged and alive and passionate and doing better work than they’ve ever done before. So now is a good time to figure out how your people tie to profit, how you build the systems, and how you get them accountable by stage-appropriate accountability—never measuring anything until they are winning—and always making sure they have the right education that works, where they immediately have a lift up in performance every time they learn something new.

That’s the new game of banking. If you look at the highest referring banks in America, they have something in common: their people know how they tie to profit, and they are extreme learning organizations, learning the right things that tie to profit.