Organizing Locally by Bruce Fuller

Author:Bruce Fuller [Fuller, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics
ISBN: 9780226246680
Google: a0U9BwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 22859672
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

Nurturing Leaders from Within

Leaders of Handelsbanken don’t readily experiment with novel job roles, as we learned from other second-wave decentralists. Yet from Wallander’s day forward the firm has squished vertical hierarchy and pushed against role specialization. These classic Weberian conceptions of modern organization run counter to the flat, lateral way in which work is organized inside local branches. Everyone must get to know the clients, what makes them tick, how service can become more responsive.

At the same time, the Handelsbanken culture is sustained by mentoring emerging leaders from within. “A vital part of our philosophy [is] to use internal recruitment [when] appointing senior executives,” Wallander writes. “A large number of these executives have imbibed our philosophy with their mother’s milk . . . which is a clear advantage.”12 Or, as Uggla put it, “we must be sure that we have the competence in-house to grow.” He helped to attract Mark Cleary to the new Manhattan branch in 1987, then moved him into a widening set of responsibilities.

Mentoring is deeply woven into the firm’s social fabric. “The culture, the management style tends to be inclusive, it’s not dogmatic, it tends to be more collaborative [than American banks],” Cleary said. “Each of the branch managers who have been here . . . have been valuable in terms of watching how they manage.” The term coaching kept arising in my conversations in New York and Stockholm. “Where you are responsible for a division, you are responsible for coaching,” Cleary said.

The firm distributes a cultural manifesto of sorts, called Our Way, to staff. Among other core norms it “tells you how to encourage respect for other people in the bank,” Cleary said. The operating guideline maps how each staff member creates a development plan, and “the head overseeing that person is responsible for making sure this is followed up,” Cleary said. And “since there’s a pushing out of responsibility, you really are responsible for your own development . . . if you push, it is really answered.”

What happens when a rookie staffer arrives at Handelsbanken, unaware of the firm’s culture-rich backstory? “Yeah, we do have younger guys coming in from an American bank,” Cleary said. “They are used to more rigid, micro-managed environments.” Sharp dissonance flares up when new account managers join the corporate banking section. It’s “where there is the most culture clash,” according to Cleary. “We have a pretty conservative, a strong credit culture. We won’t look at it [lending possibility] just because it’s a profitable transaction. It’s the relationship that matters in the long run,” Cleary said.

The draw of Stockholm remains strong for rising executives like Cleary, who serve the bank far from Scandinavia. Four years in, Cleary needed to improve his Swedish and benefit from a stiff dose of the Handelsbanken spirit. So the bank sponsored three months in Stockholm for Cleary and his family. “All the Norwegian vocabulary I had,” harking back to college days, “slowly became more like Swedish,” he said. The time “was to understand the culture better, not just the language.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.