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JFK asked a man he met in the corridors of NASA what he did there. He answered “I’m the janitor. I help put men on the moon”.

How many people in banking, irrespective of the department they find themselves in, would confidently answer “I’m here to better people’s finances?” or “I’m here to make money easy” or “I’m here to help people live better lives”? 50%? 20? 1%? Anyone?!? And yet it’s what that bank proclaims to customers and prospective customers on TV, isn’t it? The assurance of emotional investment from the bank jumps at us from every one pager in the newspaper, every annoying Facebook ad and every advert on the tube, we, the general public are expected to buy into it being this organisation’s ethos and true intention, why won’t its own employees?

Trouble with bank’s own employees? They don’t watch the ads.

How do we make them buy the same image that a marketing department created with the external comms guys?

But hold up, why was it these guys that created the image? Why do we have internal and external comms for that matter in banking? Shouldn’t communications just be a support operation function that cuts across the organisation? Marketing will have have stuff to communicate to the outside world as much as management and HR should have plenty of stuff to communicate to the inside and certainly they need the channel to do so but what sense does it make that the same people in charge of the processes and tools used to do so would be the ones deciding anything on message? Why do some banks allow their communication departments to craft the contents in lieu of remain focused on the delivery?

It’s just another organisational ailment. Communication being internal and external is wrong. Communication being involved in crafting the message that either builds or reveals the soul of the organisation is even worse. 

Worst of all – the notion of external versus internal brand. The distinction between employer brand and corporate brand is a dangerous one born out of organisational dynamics demands and not a natural, logical one and it should never have occurred.

If we think of “external” brand as superficial image then there is indeed rom to split it into the type of image the organisation projects on the outside through marketing, built almost in a vacuum that puts it in the most favourable light and not reflecting the  “real” view of what that organisation truly stands for. If we instead give the term the justice it deserves “brand” is the DNA of the bank, what exists in its core, its very soul and as such there can be only one. (Yes, banks have souls, and that’s a Highlander reference, go ahead and laugh it off.)

Fundamentals aside, when we take a closer look atwhat is understood as “employer branding” in banking today the findings are often dire. In many banks, those in charge of “internal brand enhancement programs” (yes, that’s a real thing and no, no need for organisational FOMO, it’s not of value, don’t propose you get one of these in your next meeting) are working in isolation and must dissociate from the notion of brand being about the core of the organisation and focus on what they can actually affect – ask  questions and then timidly propose changes to improve how the employees see their bank. This is measured in the same dry surveys of the 70s that we have added an extra political correctness layer to and that vaguely tell of satisfaction regarding compensation and work environment.

None of these questions are even close to probing what these employees honestly feel about their bank, if they grasped what’s in its soul and are emotionally invested in it.

In the same way that banks don’t investigate people’s feelings about their money (which is the indignant impetus behind Emotional Banking), they don’t don’t do much at all to really investigate their own employees feelings about the brand or even each other. We’re working fervently to change that but I have to admit the more we unravel of the unhealthily tangled web a bank’s organisation has come to become, the more we sometimes wish a magic wand of cowboy-management-consulting would be waved that would nuke the whole festering structures and replace them with clean, honest, curious and empathic newness.

I say this often – we don’t have that luxury. We can’t send everyone home close the doors, give the place a deep clean and only let those back in that have the heart, the mind and the bravery to use them and desperately want to do so because they deeply believe in the soul of what the bank stands for.

Instead, we have to walk around bottle of anti-bacterial disinfectant in hand and grow the knowledge, passion and courage of the people we do have, ensure they know and love our soul, then pass them the microfiber cloth then they can help us place our own kind of moon flag – customer experience.

Who has “soul” on their P&L?

Let me tell you what HR does in most banks today: PR/Internal Communication and Admin. Loads and loads and loads of admin.

Recruitment and selection is a series of process driven tasks with little to no input from good old fashioned intuition; retention, talent management and performance are antiquated exercises in paper pushing with no understanding of market context that are designed to meet a quota and have no expected transformative results, and leadership development plans are almost never a profiling and bettering honest exercise but mostly ticking a box or at best, a recreational activity, etc. In essence, they do what a future version of Sage or Xero will accomplish with little to no human intervention very soon.

Now let me tell you what HR *should* be in charge of: the health of the organisation and its people. They are the keepers of its soul.

So if the organisation needs to be something aka “Brand” or be something else aka “Transformation”– they ought to be in charge of driving that. Not Marketing, not Service Design, not the Change departments (!!! – yes, some banks have separate divisions), not Operations. How this fundamental truth has gotten away from us in many big organisations but particularly in banking is the tragic mystery.

Why HR ever said “Yeah sure, you go ahead and fundamentally change people – decide on how they should work and what they should be like, I’ll be over here putting out ads and calculating vacation pay” is beyond me.

Today HR has no seat at the table when the bank talks about strategy and consumer and that’s outrageous. How will the bank deliver any of its promises to consumers if not through its greatest asset – its people? Who is the one who brings in the right people and makes the people they have right? HR. The reason lies in the above. No one thinks of HR as more than an admin function today, including themselves.

This needs to change and change fast.

Culture – less about equal gender pay, more about the DNA of the shop 

Real change to the very bone counts as basic hygiene in an organisation as complexly stuck as a bank.

If you want the thinkers and the imaginers to work out how a certain financial operation can be turned into a fun one from a drab, painful one, or how a customer may be spared pain and discomfort and instead be given (gasp!) joy by a banking product (remind me to tell you about an excellent session about “Squirrelling” we had with a bank the other day) then they need to have the fundamental freedom to do so unencumbered by the organisation.

That’s not to mean design thinking ought to take place in this vacuum of suspended reality, on the contrary, just as it’s necessary to turn everyone in every department into a designer, it’s crucial to employ designers who understand the numbers, the resources, the internal and external hurdles and opportunities.

Building a strong, clean, genuinely honest and collaborative internal culture doesn’t mean removing all impediments, but it does mean making sure none of those impediments is politics, office ego or systemic negativity and fear. This last one is where the HR of the future has its biggest challenge: how to extract fear from the organisation. Not by removing any regard for risk and throwing caution and process to the wind but by using those as foundation to let people know it’s ok to be themselves, to care and to build.

In with the New…

Almost none of what we preach at Emotional Banking is about new people. We like a challenge so we spend very little time with banks’ HR discussing our core attributes – Knowledge, Passion and Courage in the context of new employees because that’s simply a reframing then logistical challenge in the recruitment process and it’s an easy one to fix. Once the Banking Superheroes and Heads of HR are in place, they can fix recruitment to pipeline only that right type of individual in easily, by simply setting the  tone.

A bigger challenge than recognising the seeds of those core attributes in new comers, is finding them in the thousands of existing employees and then cultivating them and making them grow while ensuring them they live in a brave new world and not a PR exercise and that this world, is fundamentally better for themselves and the consumer.

…NOT out with the old

There’s no contest that the core attributes we advocate are sine qua non conditions of success and that having them be pervasive part of the culture and deeply ingrained in every individual, would project us into functional organisation heaven but the bulk of the work for that to be achieved, is in the existent employees.

No organisation has the luxury of a tabula rasa where everyone gets out and only those with the brains and the heart to match what they are building gets back in. That would make it too easy would it even be desirable which we don’t believe it is.

While you’ll hear some banks claiming they have attempted to clean their plate – in particular in light of the Agile reorgs where everyone’s job is open and up for grabs once a year, on close inspection this invariably proves to be a lot closer to a reshuffle than it is an honest clean-up and sadly the only people who don’t return into a position or other, are often those who get courageous enough to admit they want real change and are fed up with the charade.

One of the most infuriatingly puerile lines of discourse in our industry -almost as absurd as the advocacy for digital flanker brands as the answer- is the “bankers are dinosaurs – they can never comprehend this new reality where technology lives and ways of work enable it, thankfully many are not going to be around much longer so let’s wait them out and replace them with these new kids who get it“. Anyone insisting on that is far more interested in the sensationalist nature of the proclamation and possibly too intellectually lazy to explore the complexity of it being the wrong premise and the wealth of experience and knowledge these banking “dinosaurs” have being invaluable to progress.

Acquiring new stuff is always easier than fixing the stuff we previously had but should we buy the Primark jacket instead of sewing the loose button on the Burberry one?

Fastening worthwhile buttons. Battling invisible demons – the inner workings of a sick organisation crippled by years of paralysis and office politics while finding the beating heart of dinosaurs and constantly ensuring the foundations can support them jumping and reaching and taking off for flight is the only job bank HR has. Easy.

Whose job is this?

Today HR in banking is a support function with administrative tasks. All about the forms and the numbers. None of it about the growth levers of passionate human beings and the way they interact in a healthy and productive constellation.

There are only two parties that can make HR great again: management and HR themselves.

To change, HR must recognise its current position in the team first. Admit they’ve been benched and are intensely replaceable and go back to their core skills that are impossible to replicate by machines then advocate them to their respective organisations to better the perception of their role.

They must enter those boardrooms where the strategic real conversations are happening and announced they have arrived and why they must be there to drive branding and change and keep the soul of the organisation. And once they do, Banking Superheroes need to pull out a seat at the proverbial table and have their own Commander Troi’s help them “boldly go where no one has gone before” – to a bank who truly puts people first.

The history of Coutts and Co. reads like a romantic novel and is worthy of the silver screen – if you have never read up on it before do so now – it has all the ingredients of a success – drama, betrayals, scandal, forbidden romance and changing fortunes all set against the backdrop of holding and growing money for others.

Photo courtesy @CityBoyBen

As I passed its headquarters on the Strand this week and marvelled at what their building looks like in preparation for London Pride this weekend I wondered: will history think of this time and see it to be the period when Coutts reinvented itself and became a bigger and stronger player ready to shed its exclusivity mantle and open up to a wider audience?

Sadly, that’s unlikely. The million pounds in investable assets excluding property will remain the minimum requirement to join them and they probably have little ambition to reach the more modest segments (although one would claim they are the profitable, ever growing ones). So why they big display then? Was it simply to delight the LGBT community as a whole, as a positioning exercise for their clients (and if so one has to wonder why they felt it was needed) or as a box ticking formality in some social responsibility policy?

Coutts is the 7th oldest bank in the world dating from the 17th century. They have had plenty of time to have worked brand out – and, as is the case for every private bank, their exercise of doing so is certainly less complicated than that of retail banks that have to appeal to a much wider audience. So why does their reduced audience need a hashtag and to have a whole building painted in rainbow colours?

Answers on a postcard but likely the reasoning behind the campaign is appropriately mysterious and based on Bank Internal Logic – a special breed of collective thought and resulting action that often veers from strategic and intentional into random and bizarre due to the inner workings of the organisational machine-.

“Cui prodest” aside, let’s consider the hashtag “#BankWithPride“. Now that’s juicy and we should sink our teeth into it.

Anyone who read me before knows my Emotional Banking™ method is largely based on my obsession with the fact that banks are not brands. I’m not going to rehash the long dismantling of counter-arguments around marketing, nor dwell into the arrogant and/or ignorant reasons behind why this is the status quo here as much of it is on this blog and in my book but the reality stands. No bank is a beloved brand that is firmly part of their client’s identity and as I said many a times before, that is both a deplorable state of affairs and an immense opportunity for those ready to see it.

The further we move from retail banking into private banking on the spectrum of Money Moments™, the more important this intense association and its basis of trust and hope becomes, so, in the land of high net-worth, there has been somewhat more effort put into creating true brands but even there, the effort is unjustifiably insufficient and shy of making an intense impact and so much more can be done with leveraging data but that’s another story for another time.

Now back to the hero of our story. The hashtag. “Pride” in itself is a very powerful term. It evokes achievement, strength, hard work, positive reinforcement and communication all in one. To be proud of something you must own it and, depending on your moral compass and cultural sensitivities – have earned it. This is straight forward when it comes to physical possessions but when it comes to identity and ownership of what makes us who we are, things are a bit more intricate. The LGBT community have done extremely well to have claimed the term with gusto and courage but other areas of the social dialogue seem shy to use it at times.

At a more superficial level there’s clearly a hefty dose of pride in anything we do electively that we think represents us well – we drive a certain make of car with pride, we wear a certain brand of clothes with pride, we proudly support a sports team or other, the list goes on. There’s much to be said about loud pride versus its covert counterpart and how the degree of manifestation doesn’t necessarily correlate with the intensity of brand loyalty but before we get to that level we must ask ourselves – do we ever bank with pride? Does anyone? And if not, and let’s face it, the answer is a resounding “no” – why not?

A few years ago in one of my many articles on the topic I was exploring the lack of connected identity to our banks:

We’ll hear what people drive, what they wear and what they drink every day, but never who they bank with.

‘I bank with Lloyds’ should say so much about someone. It should say ‘I’m conservative in nature and careful with my money (yet, not as far backwards as to be with the biggest bank in the world) and I like my bank to give me some digital convenience (yet, I don’t appreciate the sci-fi pie charts or the all-black browser experiences, and don’t mind the maddeningly tedious password entry experience). I like how they occasionally try and keep up with the times (yet, don’t want them to be trying too hard and give me doggy treats or video banking for mortgages). I like that I can send money to my spouse (but don’t care how much it costs or how painless it is to do so), and hey, I even like green.’

If Lloyds were a true brand, customers would say it, be proud of it and expect it to mean something.

I don’t see that much has changed, in fact we seem to have collectively regressed with indicators and measurements that were going to help bankers see the effects of their hard work in constructing new, bold and addictive digital and physical experiences that would have resulted in better connected emotional relationships with their users such as NPS, Brand scoring and others having slowly faded from the discourse.

More worryingly, branding has been thrown back over the fence as an afterthought for the Marketing and Communications teams while bigger bigger themes such as “Human Led Design”, “Customer Obsession”, “Identity Fabric-Making”, etc have fallen out of favour in the boardrooms of many banks in our fickle industry obsessed with looking for answers in technology, which ultimately means consumers are further than ever being proud about their affiliation to a bank.

Pride – used in the context of the LGBT movement’s annual parades, almost every self respecting brand jumps on the waggon with Campaign magazine quipping last week that “There are a lot of rainbows out there so like any good drag queen will tell you, you have to either go big or go home” so that fits with what Coutts have done when they went big but the question is – why didn’t they go home instead as they always do?

As ever, to me, the burning question remains: can banks turn the ship around, elevate their people and their understanding of their customers’ feelings to build addictive experiences and become powerful brands we can be proud of, or will the already existent powerful brands such as the likes of Facebook and Amazon take the cake when they enter the financial services arena?

If we’re lucky and enough banks get their a-ha moments, be it caused by more luminous orange cards etching themselves in the consumer mind or Alexa learning to read our mind and take the pain out of our MoneyMoments, just maybe one day we will get follow-up hashtags to the #BankWithPride such as #iHSBC or #ProudlyNationwide or #IHeartSantander and a proud, emotionally connected dialogue of fans and advocates around them.

I haven’t yet met anyone willing to deny that ours is an industry like no other. Of the many ways that sets it apart, the one that fascinates me most is the banker/consumer duality.

I’ve written about this in the book and also here when I spoke about the Banker and the Sour Grapes

“[…] no other industry behaves quite like ours or has been affected by the sharp advent of technology and its effects on customer experience in quite the same fashion so we’re experiencing unprecedented levels of discomfort […]”

At the intersection of Financial Services and Digital, for bankers, Art-of-the-possible experience wise, things are equally crystal clear as they are are mudded and nebulous. For customers? They are, for the most part, cumbersome, unsatisfactory or even unpleasant and nearly painful with every interaction.

And bankers are customers. They know both the possibilities and the impossibilities. Intimately.

This is what makes it possible that you can have a conversation with any of your friends who works in banking who would be naturally as up in arms as you are when the latest failure to service has occurred – be it something as small as a rogue ATM or something as big as a major disruption in all services- as they are bemused when you seem to think they have anything to do with either causing it or fixing it.

When we do our Emotional Banking change work with banks, one of the hardest things to do is encourage them to take on the discomfort by staying with it instead of dismissing it by swerving completely into either direction. This isn’t pleasant of course. As humans, we are wired to avoid what makes us feel uncomfortable and do our best to minimise it but realistically, nothing new or worthwhile is created in comfort, much less in our industry.

A simple exercise we do in most of our workshops is the hats one. We have two sets of baseballs hats, one marked “Banker” and one market “Consumer” and we pass them across the room, offer an example and ask participants to give us a phrase they would say about a Money Moment™ (interaction they have with their bank) either as a banker or as a consumer. Needless to say the language is abundantly more expansive and natural when the Consumer hat is on but that’s another “Keep it real” story for another episode.

What’s fascinating is that, with each passing example, the Customer hat stays on for longer but the sentences are shorter, punchier and more irreverent where as the Banker hat is swiftly and apologetically passed on after a stiff, businessy expression that sounds forced and apologetic.

Example: “You need to send a transfer to an ailing relative in dire need – you decide to do it on the train on your commute to work. The process ends up taking twice the time you envisioned it would and ends abruptly with a screen saying “Done” and you have no clue how to check if it “went” – What do you say to yourself?”

Customer: “What the hell is wrong with these people?!? Why has this taken my whole train journey and I ended up never reading the news on my phone because of this?!? Why did the app need to update before I could even log in?!? Why has it taken forever to find the “transfer to another account” button and then I had to register a new recipient for ages?!? What’s the point of logging me out of the app every goddang time that I need to flip to email to find the account details?! Why is there a bloody “daily limit” so I have to do this tomorrow again?!? How do I know if aunt Gertrude even got this?!? She’ll be calling mom and making her think I’ve not done it. Oh gosh, she said she needed it this afternoon or they’ll postpone that bypass, when is this arriving?!? Where can I see if the money was even transferred?!? Why can’t my bank at least tell me when they send it if not when she picks it up? Gosh I wonder if I’ll still have enough left for my water bill direct debit to go now that I sent it – how do I check that? I wish I went to a branch over lunch!”

Banker: “Our ability to transfer to a non-registered recipient on the go is finally ready and live to consumers with the newest release of our award winning mobile app. No other competitor executed this feature as well. We have redesigned the customer journey with the imperatives of the technologically savvy customer in mind offering them unprecedented seamlessness while maintaining the highest standards of compliance and security.”

In our bankers’ defence, the above example is sadly still close to Science Fiction for some banks who are struggling to even get their mobile apps to do anything other but point to the nearest ATM on a map.

Have you ever worn two hats? No, really. Physically. Have you ever tried it? It’s not easy. They are hard to balance, heavy and heat you up not to mention make you look rather ridiculous yet that’s what we ask our participants to do while marrying the two and asking them to portray both in the same breath and add a seemingly outlandish postulation at the end i.e. “Why the hell do I have to log in again every time I write down the numbers of aunt Gentrude’s account?!?” – We have to log the user out of the app every time they flick away for their own security. In the future, we won’t do that at all and security would be persistent no matter what the user is doing in their phone so this frustration will be eliminated.”

Empathy is a powerful tool and it works both ways. We have a duty to understand the Customer and equally if not more urgently, we have a duty to understand the Banker. No matter how much of a nuisance we find this fact in a world of numbers and regulations, we can’t get away from how humans who work in banks are both and seeing how they are the only ones able to make it better for the rest of everyone else, that’s a really good thing.

As for whether or not our Customer will still have enough left for the water direct debit to go and how he could have saved more if he used his invisible savings virtual currency account to make this transfer? No one is that imaginative while balancing hats.

Today’s episode is not about a done deal but a series of works in progress. Of the banks we work with, my most favourite sort are the ones that are willing to throw the kitchen sink at doing all they can to instil more Courage in their people. A banking Superhero has to have it by the gallons.

While the other two sine qua non conditions of making Superhero-ism magic, Passion and Knowledge, are hard to kick-start they have the advantage of being self maintaining once they’ve been initiated, while bravery is not. In the banks where we have done the “Build-a-Voice” and the “Keep it Real” or even the “Everyone is a Designer” programs, we see they acted as a spark, they ignite deep industry curiosity and intense care and once they’ve done so, and the habits and processes are in place to maintain the fire, it burns – slowly and independently.

This is great news for banks – it means they get away with simply building an authentic brand that’s easy to fall in love with and then communicating to their people that it’s safe and desirable to fall in love with it and then serve it by investing in it emotionally as well as by continuously learning. Simples, eh?:)

Building and maintaining courage take a lot more work though.

In fairness, it’s the least used of the three in a professional or even personal context. While insufficiently cultivated, bank employees are seasoned professionals who are at times required to be passionate and knowledgeable about their domain of expertise whereas they are almost never expected to be brave.

By virtue of both the size and the mechanics of the organisation, it is never desirable for bankers to exibxit a willingness to take risks and experiment, and this makes up the kernel of why banks have such a tough time innovating and developing software and experiences.

Over the past few years, every new type of technology that made its way into development and every accompanying new way of work, have been created with one goal in mind: obtaining new innovative (and hopefully better) things, faster. Some of these methods and tools are nothing but pure magic and those who know me, know I have a genuine Agile-fetish myself but the reality is that none of them works in the absence of courage.

To really embrace these and make them into the silver bullets they can be, bankers -and really employees everywhere- need to reframe their entire view of a workplace that has been risk adverse and cultivating a culture of diffuse responsibility sprinkled with mediocre expectations of results and recognise that the very opposite is being asked of them now.

Where they were asked to be meek, sheep like executioners before, they are to be courageous, entrepreneur-like owners of products (or projects, programs or even opinions) that embrace the unknown, can withstand uncertainty and acknowledge full personal responsibility. Quite the leap, isn’t it?

This dramatic shift in what’s expected is why it’s so hard for banks to even recognise they need to demand and encourage Courage. Once they understand the need, the ride to obtain it from their people is far from an easy one and once they have obtained it, as said before, unlike Passion and Knowledge, it isn’t a self-sustaining resources but it has to be replenished and its flames stoked with great care.

What does that mean in concrete, non-people-development-mambo-jumbo-terms you ask? Well, in short it means that to innovate by delighting their end consumer with WOW experiences, banks needed to get faster at making good software and to do so, they have rightfully turned to agile methods of work. Which self-respecting banks can you quote that hasn’t done something about introducing it to their IT departments or at the very least promised to do so soon? The problem with that, is that in the absence of the ground work to reframe their employees minds towards courage and making it part of their DNA, these remain empty re-org exercises that are painful to implement and yield none of the velocity of good results that is expected.

Our methods allow them to retrofit a foundation of Courage, Passion and Knowledge to realise on the initial promise and as mentioned above, we find in more and more banks that Bravery is the one that needs most work. We start by ensuring everyone who is working in these new ways understands the core of their intention and genuinely falls in love with the motivation behind these methods and philosophies. Often times, this is a job for HR and Internal Communications departments and it’s fairly heavy lifting. Having people truly internalise the principles as opposed to mindlessly nod or space out as they have been accustomed to, is not easy.

With the right effort and intelligently constructed campaigns that communicate the honesty behind the bank’s newly discovered need of their employees becoming Superheroes, people start believing it and with the right “a-ha!” moments in place be them hackathons, internal ideas competitions or bank specific events, banker start awakening their appetite for risk. What we’ve learned though, is that this is not where the work stops, but instead, in some cases, this is where it truly begins because to maintain the initial spark, banks need not only to keep their Intrapreneur-star-search going by constantly thinking of new stimulating ways to engage creativity and encourage innovation, but, maybe more importantly, their top management needs to invite HR to the boardroom strategy big boys table and together get their thinking hats on and reimagine the way they quantify results and measure people’s performance.

I spoke about Courage KPIs before, in some cases it’s as easy as recognising bravery in  its many forms as part of the usual appraisals elements to keep it going. Ideally, existing P&L-based measurements should be completely abolished leaving room for ways to constantly ensure a steady supply of passion, knowledge and courage but this remains a distant desiderata so introducing Courage as one of the usual KPIs bolted on -but prioritised- on the existent employee lifecycle performance programs is, is a good first step.

An HR Banking Superhero who found themselves working with us to retrofit Bravery on a fully rolled out Agile reorg effort that didn’t have much to show for itself, asked me an ace question a few weeks ago and it’s sparked an interesting piece of investigation in our practice: “Do these Courage KPIs have to be clearly expressed or can we keep them a secret?“.

At first I was up in arms, immediately defensive presuming this question to be part of the ongoing semi-subconscious resistance to introducing these uncomfortable values and re-engineer them in the bank’s DNA. Then I realised their question wasn’t trying to minimise the importance of courage but rather wonder about recognising it where it occurs naturally without the overt KPI being the driver that makes people pretend to be courageous for the sake of it, instead of actually embody it in their actions.

We’re in the midst of researching with this bank if the answer is not perchance, a combination of overt and covert measurements when it comes to Courage. Some we communicate clearly and expect and some we reward when they naturally occur because that employee was Superhero-y enough in ways we haven’t even anticipated.

So answers on a postcard please- if you were Mega-Bank-CEO and decided to change your bank’s DNA to be built upon encouraging heart, curiosity, honesty, expertise and above all bravery, would you always tell your employees what you are looking out for, or ask to see the one who had the impromptu initiative to change something/didn’t ask for approval/stood up to their boss/disagreed with a senior colleague/made a prototype/put together a work team/started a side-company/inflated a backlog/helped another team/etc/etc/etc, and give them a raise telling the they smashed their secret courage KPI?