We partnered with a high-growth regional bank to align its leadership team, enabling them to balance rapid acquisition-driven growth with strategic focus on organic initiatives and execute with greater cohesion and effectiveness.
Client profile
A high-growth regional bank with $15B in assets under management, expanding rapidly through both acquisitions and organic growth.
Challenge
The bank was experiencing rapid growth through acquisitions, creating exciting opportunities to expand its footprint across the region. At the same time, the leadership team recognized the need to balance this growth with a deliberate focus on organic initiatives, ensuring the organization could fully capture new market opportunities and execute its long-term strategy. Additionally, their track record of rapid expansion through acquisitions had strained the organization’s capacity to pursue organic growth and to mature internal systems and processes, making leadership alignment and coordinated execution increasingly critical.
Insight
Our analysis revealed that management routines—structured around two layers of leadership—while promoting transparency and engagement, were overcomplicating decision-making. The most important discussions and decisions were occurring outside formal meetings, leading to misalignment and inefficiencies. Additionally, the bank’s rapid growth had introduced multiple subcultures and diverse talent pools, creating variability in leadership approaches.
The leadership team needed a structured process to reestablish high-quality dialogue, debate, and decision-making, and to align around common standards of leadership and management.
Solution
ExecLead partnered closely with the CEO, CHRO, and the leadership team to realign leadership and management processes:
Conducted one-on-one interviews with the CEO, CHRO, and all leadership team members
Advised and coached the CEO and CHRO on management team structure, routines, and decision-making processes
Administered a Team Confidence Survey to assess alignment and perceptions of effectiveness
Facilitated an Organization & Talent Review (OTR) during a leadership offsite to identify gaps, clarify expectations, and create actionable alignment plans
Impact
The Confidence Survey and OTR led to meaningful organizational changes:
Redesigned management routines that improved the quality of dialogue, debate, and decisions
Upgraded talent and clarified leadership expectations
A more aligned and cohesive leadership team, capable of engaging in courageous conversations
Clear action plans and higher-quality decisions, enabling faithful execution of both organic and acquisition-driven growth initiatives