Best Trust has grown to one of the world’s top 25 banks by building on its broad name recognition and reputation for integrity. Its 73,000-employee workforce spans 47 countries.
One of those employees is Paul Wysinsky, who in the 1980s took an entry-level job as a bank teller. Paul developed a track record of satisfying customers, working efficiently, and cooperating well with others on his team. He took business courses during the evening, earned a master’s degree, and worked his way up through middle management positions. Twenty years later, he was offered a vice president’s job in the human resources division, responsible for recruiting and retaining Best Trust’s employees in Houston, Texas. Paul tackled the new responsibilities so well that he was soon promoted to run all of HR.
The nature of Paul’s work communications changed considerably as he rose through the ranks. When Paul was a teller, his favorite responsibility was greeting customers and listening to their needs and concerns. When customers were upset about a problem, he would initially get nervous, but with experience, he became an expert at listening attentively, helping the customer find the best possible solution and speaking in a respectful tone that almost always soothed any frayed nerves.
Now that Paul is an executive vice president, he rarely talks with Best Trust’s customers, and more of his communications are structured and formal. Although he cares about attracting, motivating, and retaining employees in all positions, he knows he cannot possibly have a dialogue with 73,000 people in dozens of countries. In fact, he can’t even have personal conversations with all of the HR employees—Best Trust has more than 800 of them, including several at each facility.
Consequently, Paul looks for a variety of ways to communicate.
He meets weekly with all the department and functional heads involved in formulating strategy. The meeting’s agenda includes reviewing HR issues such as leadership development, succession planning, diversity management, and employee satisfaction. Paul is well prepared because he meets at least weekly with each of the managers who report directly to him. In these one-on-one meetings, Paul and the manager review progress on the issues handled by that manager. Paul also uses these meetings to learn what challenges the manager is facing so he can offer coaching and encouragement.
Talking one on one to employees can feel like an escape from one of the chief annoyances of his job: poorly written messages from many of the bank’s middle managers.
It seems that Best Trust has excelled at finding people with strong analytic and customer service skills, but many of these people stumble at presenting an idea or summarizing their progress in emails and reports. Paul feels intense time pressure, and if he gets a suggestion but can’t figure out the main idea in the first couple of sentences, he simply passes it to one of his managers for a possible follow-up.
Paul suspects that good ideas and real problems are being missed. Rambling reports and long-winded presentations loaded with jargon seem to have become a norm at Best Trust, and Paul is thinking about adding a new training program to improve writing and communication skills.
To report news about the bank’s policies, benefits, and other initiatives, Paul uses a variety of media. He gives presentations at events such as the employee recognition gathering and at branches around the world. Four times a year, he records a video that is posted on the bank’s intranet.
Also on the intranet, Paul leads regular town hall meetings, a live video feed that allows employees to post questions and ideas, which Paul and other executives answer in real time.
Paul also has a whole set of policy concerns related to employee Internet use, such as whether to allow employees to access social media and how closely to monitor blogs and other public information for company-related posts.
When Paul thinks about it, he realizes that his communication skills have barely grown as fast as the communication demands of his work.
QUESTIONS 1. How has the media richness of Paul’s communications changed since the days when he was a teller? Why do you think he misses communicating one on one with customers?
2. What sender and receiver skills are described in this case? Which ones need improvement? Offer suggestions for improving the weak skills.
3. How might Paul improve upward communication and the communication culture more generally at Best Trust?