Will It Hold: 8 Board Members. 7 Definitions of Winning.

So, you know, if you have followed me at all on social media, in particular here on LinkedIn, that I'm a big advocate in particular for community banks. And there's no diss on the big banks. They serve a completely different purpose, in my belief, than what community banks actually serve. So even though the, the principles of operating I think in a community bank are very similar to those of any organization, large, small. A lot of the context is around, again, community banking. I think they provide a certain value that an extremely large bank can't do. I think extremely large banks provide a different type of value to a different type of customer, but that personal touch, decisions close when the community bank is allowed, there's a lot of advantages to that. And And I've seen it from the inside and outside because I've sat on the board of a number of banks over the years, and so I have an appreciation. But at the same time, there are a lot of opportunities for community banks to improve, and the learning from that can be, again, applied to just about any bank that's out there. Let me give you a sense of what happened just in the past couple of weeks and how— why I think it's an issue that we've got to discuss. here. And again, if you follow me at all, if you wanna comment on any of today's session at all, you got 2 options. You can do it live. I've got a chat message screen up here, or feel free to text me. I've got my phone right with me. I make it public. It's directly mine. It's not, you know, some business monitored phone. It's 734-837-8500. But let me explain what happened and then let's figure out what the hell do we do about it, right? So I was asked to facilitate virtually a board meeting for a bank that I've done some work with on and off for the last 4 or 5 years. And I just couldn't make it in person. So they asked me to dial in virtually and to start the meeting. The CEO and the board chair are the ones that reached out to me and asked me to do this. And not that anything's going wrong with the bank, but there was just this feeling that not everybody on the board, think you can extend it to senior leadership, was on the same page. And really the goal was to get me to, to kind of shake things up a little bit in a good way, to see if they view the bank the same way, to see how they view the future of the organization. And this is a common question that I have for both bank boards as well as non-financial institution boards. And it seems almost too easy, but it's a— it's an exercise that I took them through. So I started off the conversation, but instead of asking, hey, what do you think the direction of the board is, I asked that, where the bank is. I asked that question, but I said, what does winning mean for the bank? But don't say it out loud. And they kind of looked at me and I said, here's what I want you to do. I want you to write down on a piece of paper in front of you your definition as a board member for the bank on which you sit as a board member, that particular bank. What's the definition of winning for the rest of 2026 and into 2027? Because we're already at the end of August and soon to be in September. I said, you don't say anything. Keep your mouth shut. I'm a little animated when I do things like this. So they were, I think, a little shocked because I don't know all of the board members. I said, write it down. I gave them 3 or 4 minutes to write it down. And there was one at the end that was still scribbling. It's like he was writing a book or a paragraph on it. But everybody's got their own style of getting all of the ideas out of their head. And then after a couple of minutes, what I had them do is, I asked them to read back your definition verbatim. Nobody's gonna comment on any of the definitions. Read it verbatim. Do not change it because you heard something you liked from somebody else. All I want is verbatim, what do you think winning is for the bank? And so they went around as I'm watching them on the screen and they read off their definition. Some were really short phrases, which is fine. Some were a couple of sentences or a longer sentence, and then there was one or two that were, let's call them mini paragraphs. And that's not the point. It's not the number of words. But as I sat there listening and I was watching the CEO and the board chair to the different description of the definition, you know where I'm going with this, going around the board, I didn't say a word after I heard the last definition. And the CEO looks me square in the eyes from across the screen and he says, boy, that's a problem, isn't it? And I just kind of looked at him and I needed that to settle in. What ended up happening is out of the 8 board members that were there, 7 of them— there were 7 different ideas, 2 of them actually very similar. The CEO and one of the board members, their definition was pretty darn close. And I'll address that here in a second. But in essence, there was 7 definitions from 8 people. Now think about that for a second. If the board, which has all of the right intentions, these are qualified, immensely qualified people to be sitting on this board. They're business owners, community leaders. I mean, we had some real serious players on that board. They've run businesses. They are running businesses. They're CEOs of businesses and so forth. But yet you put them all together and they all had a different idea, except for 2, of what winning was. And what I come to find out is that the board member and the CEO that were the closest aligned actually spend the most time with each other. So it makes sense that they'd be the most— they would be the most aligned. But I want to, I want to dig into this a little bit because it's actually a very similar exercise that I do with almost every organization that I've done with mine, and usually it ends up with this, a similar result. So whether it's the board, whether it's the executive team, it doesn't really make a difference. If you go into your organization today, wherever you're working, and you ask 5 people what the definition of winning is, are you going to get 4 or 5 different answers? And 99.9% of the time, I'm making that number up, the answer is— Profit. Yes. Now, what's the challenge with that? And again, I'm saying completely different. Whether it's deposit growth, whether in this particular case, everything from deposit growth to loan growth to compliance to, I mean, you name it. There wasn't a single wrong answer of what's important to a community bank. Let me just get that out of the way. There was nothing out of left field. Nothing along those lines. These are common things that you would see within a bank. But what's the problem with that? You already know where I'm going with this, but I think it bears understanding. And then what the heck do we do about this? Because this is a prevalent issue across organizations. I'm using the context of community banking and we need to address it here in this context. But we can go beyond that as well because it applies to every single organization, every single layer of leaders, end up doing this, are in this situation where the definition of winning is assumed that everybody's on the same page. Yet what do we find out? That the board's missed the mixed messages that I know were coming from the board. And the reason I know that— this is a very hands-off board, by the way, in terms of they don't get involved in daily operation. They fulfill the function that a board is supposed to. But because they're pretty local, I think pretty good friends with the CEO. They're around the bank quite a bit. So the senior lender, the senior, the individual that runs retail for the bank, they have a fair amount of interaction with the board members as they come around. And you can tell the different messages that are coming from the different board members around what does the future of the bank actually look like? And I only know this because I had a conversation with some of those leaders previously that led to CEO to actually asking me to come in and have this conversation. So it's a very, very, very common thing. But again, very intelligent people. Here's what I believe has happened and is happening in way too many community banks. We take agreement for clarity. I guarantee you, if I had the CEO in that situation, I didn't have the time to do this because of the restrictions around my role in this particular meeting. But I guarantee you, if I had the CEO Read out his strategic plan, you would get agreement from everybody that's sitting in that room. And that's the easiest way. That's what we end up doing in board meetings and leadership team meetings. And I, again, I see this a lot in the context of community banking. We take agreement as alignment on everything. But I didn't allow him to have agreement. I made him write it down and verbally say it. Because when somebody else says it, you can kind of— I mean, naturally as human beings, you pick up on the people in the room and what they're saying. And yeah, that sounds good. So I'm going to make that part of my definition. I removed the ability to do that. You need to remove the ability to do that within your bank and take them through this exercise, whether you're the CEO and it's your board, or it's you're the CEO and it's your executive leadership team, because the truth Will tell you a lot about what's going on. And even if you're doing exceptionally well as a bank, if there's an inconsistency on what winning is, it's going to cause problems in priorities, in making decisions, in all kinds of other things, what we'll get to here in just a second. But in this particular case, you can have 8 people who've approved the plan, but that are viewing winning still through a completely different set of eyes. Again, loan growth, deposit growth, credit quality. None of those are wrong. But if every one of those is the priority, what's the rest of the group and the board going to base their decisions off of? If everything is important, all things being equal, how do you have a tiebreaker on whether or not we should invest here, whether or not we should open another branch, whether we should close a branch because it's going to save us incrementally a million bucks? but we're going to lose $50 million in deposits. Like, that's— what makes the most sense? If it's cost cutting, well, okay, because our bottom line isn't where it needs to be. If it's we've got to grow, let's be smart about it, because you can only cut your way so far. You all know that if you're watching this, right? So we have to really pay attention. But approval, whether it's in the context of a community bank board or the executive team, does not constitute understanding of clarity and true, let's use the term alignment, on what the hell are we doing as a bank? What's our purpose? What gives us our basis for the decisions that we make? It's the same thing you've got to do in your non-banking organization. What is winning? But the problem is, is we focus on general alignment and agreement versus truly understanding What— how people define winning for their role. And some of the examples that came up, I wrote them down. Do we chase deposit growth with price or do we protect margin and focus on deeper relationships? Well, if we don't— if we're not aligned on what winning actually is, we're going to look at answering that question and many others from completely, completely different perspectives, confusing rest of the people in this particular bank. Do we push loan growth? Or protect credit discipline when the market gets hard? Do we invest in the branch as a source of influence or cut expenses because traffic is down? Now, I'm gonna say, you know my feeling if you watched any of my stuff on that particular one. It is ridiculous in most cases, not in all, to close a branch because traffic is down. Foot traffic is down in 80% of the branches that are out there. 20% or 24%, it's actually up. So it makes those coming in that much more important. So the experience we give those people coming in as the bankers in the retail branch is more important than it ever has been before because you don't have an unlimited line of people coming into your damn branch. Why close it and cut those people off? If they're coming into your branch, there's usually a reason. Yeah, there's this very small percentage of population, they just haven't adopted technology, and that percentage is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. But usually when they're coming into the branch, it's because it's not a simple transactional thing. They may do that simple transaction because they happen to be there, but it's because they're looking for something more, a higher level of trust, a higher level of service, solutions to problems that they don't even understand. But we treat them as a transaction and they turn around and they leave. That's my sidebar for that particular thing. I did not bring that up in this particular board meeting. That was not my place. at this point. But if going back to the original intent, if the board hasn't decided clearly what winning actually is, then the CEO is actually negotiating with 7 strategies all at the same time. And dang, if you're that CEO, you got more work on your hands that you shouldn't have. And that confusion of the priorities, I guarantee you will come out of you and you don't even realize it as a CEO. When you're talking to the rest of your leadership team, there'll be inconsistencies. Are we going here? Are we going here? Well, today we're going here because this board member is looking at this. Tomorrow we're going here because this board member is looking at this. It's— see, I'm overdramatizing this. You get it. But I'm trying to paint the picture of what was going on and what I see across way too many community banks. Again, sometimes it's at the board level and it spreads down throughout the organization. Sometimes the board is actually much more aligned than this particular situation, but there's confusion and inconsistency in how that's communicated down. And when our definition of winning is not something that is measurable, not something that is specific, is ambiguous, it leaves it up to interpretation. And that's what was going on in this bank. And if you're in a bank right now, Credit union. Credit union. I don't care where you are, right? But let's, let's keep it— let's keep the context here to community banking because it's just so prevalent. Go into your bank and do what I said earlier, what I did with this group. Go ask 5 people, write down your definition of winning, and you're probably going to get 5 different answers. Now, the other thing that I noticed with this particular bank is They agreed on that strategy. So they— I didn't have the CEO read his strategy in that context because I know previous, the board, quote unquote, agreed with the strategy. And I think it's really easy to do that and still have a different definition of what winning is. And that's exactly what was proven in this particular case. And unfortunately, that created some unsettledness throughout the organization, as I'm sure you are aware it would in your organization too. And sometimes if you're kind of feeling that, where are we really going? It's because there is no clarity on what's going on, on where are we going. Here's the reality of this. So here's the storyline, the punchline to the story. And then what do we do about it? Because this is one that I'm not just going to give my opinion. You already know my opinion on some of this stuff. I'm going to give you some steps, a little bit more on the educational side than I usually do. But I think this one in particular is important. Here's what we got to understand and take— make it more practical than you have in the past. Winning for your bank has to come first behind everything else. But it's how we do winning. And I am not talking about— Oh, we want to be the community bank of choice. I'm just going to say it. What the hell does that mean? The community bank of choice because this or the community bank of choice because that? Because you have the lowest loan rates? Because you have the highest deposit rates? Because you can close a loan in 3 days? I'm just making stuff up at this particular point, but what the hell does that mean? And I see so many aspirational, this is what we're to the community. I get that. There's a community-facing vision and mission that you got to have. But what does winning really mean? Because you can't expect certain behaviors of rest of the team across the bank be consistent with what winning means if everybody has a different definition, different definition of winning. Of what winning means in the first place, and we miss this because we make it so much more difficult. In the Guide, Don't Drive performance engine, which is basically bringing in the structural side of the business and the behavioral side of the business together, there's 6 components to that: winning, identity, behavior, tolerance standards, and results. Every business operates the same way, but in particular, This plays really well within banks because if you have one of these 5, the first 5 off, the 6th one, which is results, just doesn't happen. And if winning, which is the first thing, isn't clear, the behaviors will not be consistent. They'll be completely different across the entire bank core. And then what do we do when we don't have winning clear? Is we default back to we got to hold our team. more accountable. And this particular bank, that was some of the conversation that I had with some of the business leaders, right? The head of retail, the chief lender, the chief credit, chief underwriter, all of that. Right. There was, there was some confusion about what was really going on. And they kept saying, well, we just got to hold our team more accountable to get them on the same page. And my comment to them before having this board conversation was, What is winning? Now, what do you think I got? Every one of them gave me a different answer, and it was primarily focused on their function, right? Well, winning in retail means X. Awesome. How does that help winning for the bank? And what's the definition of winning for the bank? My job is to just drive more loans because that's, that's what adds the greatest to the bottom line of the bank is, right? We borrow, we have deposits at X. We loan it out at Y, there's my spread, I'm gonna make a bunch of money off it as long as I'm not stupid about my credit. Yes, I completely get that, but how does that help the overall objective of winning for the bank? Oh, well, I'm not really sure. We wanna be the bank of choice. Call me overly practical, but what the hell does that mean? That's the last time I'll say that. It just doesn't make any sense. And what happens is when we focus then on, we're not clear first of all, And then we focus on accountability to get the stuff done. Really what we start saying is, I got to give consequences to people that aren't doing what I think they should be doing, but they don't actually know all the things they should be doing because they don't know how it ties into what winning is for the bank corps itself. And all you're doing is perpetuating the problem. Call it disengagement, call it whatever the heck you want at that particular point, but it starts to create some real challenges instead of sitting back and asking some real questions. What are you truly asking your people to own at that point? What result matters the most? What are the trade-offs? So even if you get results right, what are the trade-offs that they can use to achieve those results? What are you willing to give up in order to achieve those results? We don't have these conversations and they did not have them across this particular bank. What evidence proves they're winning? In essence, what's the scoreboard? Now, I know banks are really good with scorecards, man. You guys measure as you should. I'm not, I'm not saying it's not the right thing to do, but you measure everything and, and you need to keep track of everything. You've got compliance things to do and so forth. But, you know, again, I've mentioned it, deposit growth. loan growth, fee income efficiency, net interest margin, customer experience, turnover. There's probably 15 or 20 other things that we measure. The problem in banks in particular, and I find this specifically in community banks across the country, is it's not a lack of numbers. It's not a lack of things that we track that determine are we going to be able to win. The problem is that few people decide or nobody decides on which of those numbers actually trumps the other ones, which ones are most important, that are the actual numbers on the scoreboard? Which ones are guardrails that we won't give up in order to achieve that other score, whatever that happens to be? What keeps us honest and what are just kind of general check-ins, so to speak? Because those metrics are really in 3 different categories. But which one is truly driving the bank Right now through the end of 2026 and the end of 2027. And if you're listening to this, I'm going to encourage you, I'm going to suggest you go find out what's the one, maybe 2 numbers or 2 things. They're not always numbers. In banks, they're primarily numbers, but sometimes outside of banking, they're not numbers. What defines winning? I mean, think about this for a second. I've used this example time and time and time again because it's so good. If you're on a sports team, Let's say college and above, all the way to the pros. Why are you on the team? Yes, to make money. Yes, to have some camaraderie with the guys or the gals or whatever the case is. But what's the purpose? No matter who I go ask on college and above, and usually even in high school, what's the purpose of the team? Winning. Great. How do you know? Well, the scoreboard right there says I got more points than they have. That's clarity of winning. And I can't get more than X amount of fouls or I'm going to end up hurting the team. That's a guardrail around winning. In the banking world, if right now there's a press for deposits, we know that because loan volume is going up. We don't want to get our liquidity out of whack. So we got to bring in more deposits. That is the objective of one particular bank that, that I work with them and their board on. That's all it is right now. 2026, winning means increasing deposits by X amount of dollars. Awesome. Now there's an— if you just put that out as the goal, that's the only thing we're going to measure is deposit growth. You can get it, but you're going to give away the farm or you're going to take broker deposits. Or there's a whole list of things that may happen that end up hurting you while the scoreboard says you're winning. So the score isn't enough in the real world, and particularly in community banking. You've got to have some guardrails around it. Deposit growth is absolutely critical, and it needs to be $30 million by the end of this year. Now I've got a specific goal, but we will not buy broker deposits. We will not win just based on rate, and we're not going to be two clicks higher than everybody else down the street in order to buy those deposits. Because as soon as I buy those deposits and somebody else is a click higher than mine, they're gone, and it becomes transactional. It becomes a transient deposit. We know. Banks do not operate well, and then we run into liquidity issues and all kinds of stuff. So they put guardrails around it, and then there's time for some diagnostic measurements and so on. But in your bank, do you have a clear understanding of the score and the guardrails that protect the score in doing it the right way? It doesn't matter. I don't care what the guardrails are. But is it that clear in your organization? And if it is not, if you're a CEO, if you're a board member, that is the first thing you need to do before you start talking about strategy and implementing the strategy across the bank core and a new core deposit system. And like, stop. Get clear first, but in practical terms. Scoreboard. What's that decision when competing things come to the table? What am I using as the tiebreaker between those competing things? If you don't determine that from the board level, from the CEO level, from the executive team level, rest of the team isn't going to know what to do with it. And if your team can't look at the scoreboard and say whether or not they're winning, you're going to continue to have a problem. Now, if you're watching this live and you've experienced this, don't tell me the bank. Don't tell me the institution. I don't want any of that. But I'd be curious if you've experienced this because, I mean, I see this in 99.9% of the financial institutions that we do work with all across the country. They just don't have it clear. And then in some instances, they think they have it clear. And then I start asking questions. Well, how do you measure that? Well, does the team know? Is that going to be the tiebreaker? What are you willing to give up if there is an issue? Like when I start asking those questions, unfortunately, they haven't gone far enough. So I started asking this particular bank a number of questions, and I write all this down and I have my AI note-taker listen to it, at least what's not confidential. And then of course I delete it. But here's some of the questions I started to ask. Hey, are you going to grow deposits through deeper relationships? Or are you going to do it off of temporary pricing? 8 board members. Actually, there was an admin person there too. But are you going to grow— how are you going to grow deposits? Are you going to do it through relationships, deposits that stick, or are you going to do the next marketing blitz and just have a cheaper or a higher return, a higher rate back to the depositor? Which one are you going to do? I'm not saying one's right and one's wrong. In this particular case, one was right and one was wrong. They didn't really think about that. Well, what do you mean by relationships? Well, do your tellers actually know not how to sell, but do they know how to ask the right questions to determine where the need is, to determine if there's a deposit opportunity amongst other things? Not selling them on something they don't need, but servicing them the way a community bank should service them. Those are 2 very different approaches. Or we can just do a marketing blitz, get all the really, really high deposits that we can get, and as soon as somebody else comes out with a marketing blitz, they're transient and they're gone. Second question: are you going to grow the loans by expanding sound judgment with your lenders, giving them a little bit more autonomy within guardrails, or by quietly weakening the credit discipline? Now, you know the answer to that one, but these are questions that I was asking to see how this group is actually going to respond. Are you going to add technology to increase human capacity, Or are you going to remove every single human decision from the customer, which is kind of what we're doing in way too many instances? And then I asked the question about branches because it was all related to their definition of winning. Will you open branches to expand influence, or are you simply going to add locations? Let me, let me say that one again. Are you going to open branches to expand influence, because that's a very, very different approach to how you open the branch, who you put in the branch, how you develop, what you install within that branch, or are you simply going to add locations and hope the deposits actually start coming in? This particular bank was adding 2 new locations. I said, why? Well, we're in the market. We're going to get more deposits. I said, great. Tell me about your tellers. Tell me about how you train them. Well, they know how to sell. Do they? Yeah. Yeah, there's— here's the product sheet. They know how to ask the questions off of this product sheet. That's not servicing the customer. That's selling an absolute product. I'm not going to get into too much of that today, but I ask them these questions in order to get them to think not just about what winning should be, but how they're going to achieve winning the right way. Because we make an assumption, even if we're clear about winning, we make an assumption that the people know how to execute on that. And then we see behaviors that we don't want. We start tolerating things we shouldn't tolerate. Our standards drop. because we're tolerating. And we have a fricking mess all across the bank, even though the numbers look like we're doing really well right now because the loans are coming in and there's a little bit of a deposit growth that's actually happening because some people are conserving cash right now, not knowing what's gonna happen with the election, the economy, all of those things. There's nothing wrong with that. But here's what you gotta get to as a board, as an executive team, a definition of winning, which is critically important. Without guardrails is giving the permission, giving permission to the people around you that have to take that story to the community, the permission to win the wrong way. And then we complain that they're not doing their job. They may be doing exactly what they think needs to be done because there's no connection from their department to what winning means for the organization. So what do we do in a situation like this? Well, let me walk you through quickly a handful of questions that I continued to ask this group. And I frustrated them. In all transparency, I frustrated them. The CEO and the one board member, actually the chairman of the board, that were kind of the most aligned, they kind of sat back and they laughed. We obviously have talked numerous times since. I can't say the name of the bank. They asked me not to. But I said I was going to talk about it, and they gave me the approval to do that. Nobody knows. Let's just say that. But I started to ask them additional questions to understand, to get them to think about what they've done so far, how that fell short. Again, the bank is doing well, but under pressure, my sense is we would see the clink, the chinks in the armor. And it was already causing confusion. As I said, I talked to many of the leaders of the different departments. So here's a handful of questions. Look, guys, look at it this way, guys and gals, 'cause there was a mixed group there. But what has to be true 12 months from now for us to say we've won? What has to be true? That's a different question than just, well, as I started off, what is winning? What has to be true really 3 months from now or 4 months from now, the end of the year, and then 16 months from now, the end of 2027, because really that's where we should be. planning for? Number 2, what result matters the most? I didn't say results. What specific result matters the most? Not these 3, not these 5. And how do you actually measure it? That's kind of part 2 to that same question. Number 3, As a board, as a leadership team, what are you unwilling to sacrifice to achieve that score, to achieve that win, to achieve that thing that must be true at the end of 2026 and into 2027? What is it? And this isn't paragraph after paragraph. This should be clearly aligned, just like a scoreboard at a basket— an NBA game or an NFL game. It's very clear. Here's the score, winning, losing. Here's some of the guardrails, fouls, time left, and so on. There's some guardrails that you have to operate within even in professional sports. It's the same damn thing here. Number 4, what behavior must become normal? Now let that sit for a second because we're leaving strategy language And we're focusing on behavior. What do you expect your leaders to actually do and not to do to achieve this definition of winning from a behavioral perspective? Will branch managers use a certain amount of evidence they've learned from the customer before discussing pricing, or are you just going to let them talk about pricing? And you'll say, well, of course they need to know. Most don't because they weren't taught. They weren't— the process wasn't installed in them. Will branch leaders address drift from the goal within 24 hours, or are you okay if they bring it up monthly in their branch meeting? Like, what's the behaviors expected that supports the overall definition of winning for the bank? I haven't met a bank yet that goes that far. And then when we start getting behaviors that are not quite what we expect, we jump right into accountability, but yet we don't sit back and say, well, wait a minute, I was— yeah, even if I was really clear about winning, clear about what I'm not willing to give up in that guardrail, what I'm unwilling to compromise in that guardrail, but their behaviors and how they're approaching it is not what I expect. And then we get into the accountability conversation. Well, crap, you weren't clear about what the behaviors were. If you can't cascade that down— To this is what's expected. You have nothing to bring them back to. There becomes zero standard in the process, and this is part of the problem. We jump, as I said earlier, to accountability because we're not achieving it even when we're clear. Most of us are not clear, but then we have nothing to take their behavior back to if you haven't defined that ahead of time. This is how we do what we do. We expect all problems with customers to be surfaced and solved within 24 hours. At least that's the goal. But we allow it not to happen. Nobody gets back to the customer for 3 days. And we continue to allow it. But we haven't said that the behavior needs to be we respond and we take care of every customer within 24 hours. And they don't do it, and then we want to hold them accountable. But if we don't have the standard clear in the beginning, we have nothing to recover them back to. And I'm not talking about the crazy difficult conversations. I've said this in previous sessions. If we have to have a difficult conversation, we waited too long and we didn't have the recovery conversation Back to the standard of behavior that aligns with what winning means or the standard for the bank. We don't think that far. So what behavior has to be normal? Question number 5, what behavior do we need to stop tolerating? We do a— we have this tool called an engagement audit, not an engagement survey. I think engagement surveys are the most Biggest waste of money and time that you will ever spend because it all talks about how you feel. We created specifically for this particular thing an engagement audit because it tells us what behaviors are specifically being tolerated within the bank, observable behaviors. Asking this question, I always do this. What behavior must we stop tolerating? I ask it of the board, and I did. I ask it of the leadership team, and then I go ask it of everybody else within the organization, within the bank core, down to the teller, down to the admin person, down to IT, down to the janitor. It doesn't really make a difference. There's a big distinction between the two. Oh, we don't tolerate anything up here. Oh. They sure do tolerate it because they keep letting this person do this and they keep letting this person do this. And then they talk about the goals and the values of the bank, but it's deterring from the standard. If we tolerate behaviors that do not help us to win, along with the guardrails that keeps us winning honestly, and we keep tolerating it, we are basically given the approval to keep doing it by not addressing it. And I am not talking about a difficult conversation. I'm talking about the recovery conversation. that I just talked about. And then number 6, and this is what the part of governance— what evidence should appear every week? What are we looking at every week? Not every month, not at every board meeting, not at every quarter, every week. What are— what's the evidence we're going to look at to make sure that we're not tolerating things we shouldn't, to make sure that the behaviors are aligned to what we laid out there, to make sure that the guardrails are being held to, and Making sure that the definition of winning is being supported. Alignment is not just a written exercise like I did with the bank. It's a choice, but we have to give them the right choice to make, or at least a— well, here you can either do this and here's all the parameters, or you cannot do this. That's a completely different conversation. So what was my point in all this? We're at 11:37. I was trying to keep it to 30 minutes. Number one, in your community bank, I don't care how well you're doing, go ask people what the definition of winning is. Specifically, when somebody says to be the bank of choice, what does that mean? How do you know we're the bank of choice? What's the specific measurement? If you can't do that, you don't have a scoreboard. You might have a scorecard with a bunch of crap on it, But that bunch of crap is probably not allowing you to do anything except keep changing your mind about what you're going to keep people accountable to. Therein lies the challenge. And if you don't have the scoreboard and the guardrails attached to it, and I'm going to guess, but 90% plus of you will not have those things as clearly as you think you might have in the past if you actually ask some of these questions. You've got to be clear. about the behaviors. All of these pieces come together and it starts at the board and goes down. If you don't have a board, it starts with the CEO and his or her executive team, and that's expected to be cascaded down to every individual contributor within the organization. Things like, we're the bank of choice. How do you know? You've got to get clear. Things like, the behavior we want is good communication. What the hell does that mean? Does that mean I want to report twice a week at 3 o'clock? Does it mean— what does it mean? We live in a world where as leaders we think we're clear, especially within community banking, and we give all of this ambiguous stuff out there. It makes sense to us when we're given it. We're not doing anything with ill intent. We're not doing that. But the reception of it is through the eyes of the beholder, the eyes of the person looking at it, which is probably completely different from you because they're They're sitting in a different seat. Like, here's the thing. Let me, let me just close it and wrap it up with this. Community banking has such a frickin' opportunity right now because, again, there's a place for the big banks, but too many of the big banks have left customers in the lurch going all the way back to the last financial crisis. You know that and I know that. We have the data behind it that actually supports that. But just being local by address, doesn't mean you're local, that you truly, truly want to be part of the community and serve the community with decision-making at the level that it should be at. In order to truly do that, if you really want to do this, you've got to be clear all the way from the top. What is winning? What are the guardrails? How am I going to measure it? What's the behaviors that I expect? What am I willing to tolerate, not willing to tolerate? And that's what's going to help us. And if you don't do that, you'll never become the bank that you want to become. There's my tirade for today. If you want to take a look at what I described earlier in terms of the 6-step performance engine, which is really the structural side and the behavioral side, David's put up a QR code. Snap that. That'll take you to the Guide, Don't Drive OS website where you can learn a little bit more. There's some free resources across there. Awesome. And I'm telling you, if you're a board and you answer like they answered, test this at your next board meeting, your actual leadership team meeting, your retail meeting, what the definition of winning is. And if you have opportunity to improve, which I guarantee you, you will, it can make an absolute difference in the performance of your bank, the quote unquote engagement of your team, the satisfaction they feel of doing things that actually support a win. I mean, When you're on a basketball team or a football team and you're losing, you feel bad about it and you want to go out there and kick somebody's butt. But that doesn't happen in corporate America because the alignment to clarity where everybody understands it, where everybody can see the scoreboard and measure it and knows how their position ties into it. Whether I'm on offense or defense in football doesn't matter. It's still about Winning the game because it's that clear. It's your opportunity to become that clear and take your bank to places you probably never thought you could, or you thought you could, but you didn't know how. This will actually help you get there. Thanks for listening. Again, if you got comments on this, banking is, is not my only industry, but it's definitely something I'm passionate about. Community banking in particular, I think, can serve such a huge part of the population in ways that they're just not doing, but they have the opportunity to do so. If I can help you in any way, please feel free to reach out. Again, cell, text, whatever, 734-837-8500. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Make sure if you're in banking, subscribe to the new— there's 2 newsletters that are available. One's kind of general leadership and other human performance, and one is specific to the banking world. Make sure you follow those. Banking comes out every other week. Will It Hold? comes out every single week. And then I come on every Thursday at 11 o'clock and spout off all kinds of things like this. Thanks for joining us. Can't wait to see you next time. Thanks for joining us.