A friend here at work recently took his family to Disney World for the first time. They had a blast, but the kids were so spent by the second day that the rest of the trip didn't go as planned. "If I did it again, I'd scale back the agenda and leave a lot more room for downtime," he said.
Strategy is one thing; implementing it is another.
In banking (or anywhere else for that matter), people generally talk a good game about their intentions and are prone to failing to carry them out. It's easy to see why. All the planning in the world can't account for the actions of other people, be they children tired of waiting to ride the Tea Cups or company staffers who just can't seem to get with the program. But there are strategies for increasing the odds that your strategies get implemented. And if you can implement those, you'll have a much better shot at implementing everything else. I picked up a few tips on this recently from Richard Davis, the chairman and CEO of U.S. Bancorp, who knows as much as anyone (and indeed a lot more than most of us) about implementing strategy.
Put U.S. Bancorp up against its peers, and the reason it so often has the upper hand generally can be explained by one thing: execution. When I spoke with Davis at American Banker's recent conference on retail banking, I asked him what it is he does that his competitors aren't doing. He wasn't sure, which was fair enough. But he did share the things he says have made the biggest difference at U.S. Bancorp. He swears they're boring, and none of them will ensure implementation of a corporate strategy. But they can make colleagues a lot more likely to want to help you in your goals.
1. Communication. Two years ago, Davis and his chief financial officer began holding a 90-minute conference call every six weeks with the top 2,000 people in the company. The agenda would vary; in one call they might discuss the future of the business model, and in another they might provide a detailed update on the firm's municipal finance exposure. It was a good exercise, but the feedback from those on the call was that more employees should be invited to it, because hearing from the C-suite is different than hearing something that has been filtered down through the ranks. So now, a week after each 90-minute call, the next 6,000 or so employees are invited to a 60-minute version with the same agenda. As Davis sees it, you can't be a good leader in one part of a company without knowing the rest of the company. "Having been a teller and having come up through the branches, if I ever had gotten the chance to learn about how everything was coming together, I would have been a much more engaged employee," he says.
2. Recognition. Small tokens can mean a lot. At U.S. Bancorp, milestones get celebrated and good work often gets recognized with an electronic thank-you card that can be cc'd to anyone in the recipient's chain of command.
3. Community service. Encouraging volunteer work is nice. Doing it together is better. The Friday before I spoke with Davis, he spent the morning serving breakfast at a shelter with co-workers. There's just something about wearing matching T-shirts and hair nets that can make people feel part of a team, he says. With any luck, the feeling stays with them when they're back in the office.
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