Early in my management career, I inherited a team that looked excellent on paper and was quietly falling apart in practice. The CVs were strong. The output was adequate. And yet meetings were guarded, information moved slowly, and the most talented person in the room had mentally resigned months before her letter arrived. It took me the better part of a year to understand what had gone wrong — and the answer had almost nothing to do with skills, processes or organisational charts.
Banking has a particular talent for building teams that function without flourishing. The industry attracts capable, ambitious, disciplined people; it pays them well; it gives them clear structures and measurable targets. And then, too often, it manages them in ways that spend their capability without renewing it. After years of building and leading teams across business functions and control functions alike, I have come to believe that the difference between a team that functions and a team that lasts comes down to a handful of things — none of them complicated, all of them demanding.
Trust is a working condition, not a soft value
Every discussion of teams eventually arrives at the word "trust," usually accompanied by a slight embarrassment, as though we were straying from serious management into sentiment. This is a mistake. In banking — where the work involves judgement calls, sensitive information and genuine consequences — trust is not a soft value. It is a working condition, as practical as a functioning IT system.
Consider what happens in its absence. A junior analyst spots an anomaly but is not sure; in a low-trust team, she says nothing, because being wrong is punished more reliably than being silent. A portfolio manager disagrees with a decision; in a low-trust team, he executes it without voicing the disagreement, and the decision loses its last chance of being corrected. A compliance officer senses that a client relationship is drifting somewhere uncomfortable; in a low-trust team, that intuition never becomes a conversation. None of these silences appears in any management report. All of them are expensive.
Building trust is unglamorous work. It means being predictable in your reactions — the leader whose response to bad news cannot be forecast will stop receiving bad news. It means defending people in rooms where they are not present. It means admitting your own errors with the same directness you expect of others. I have found that a team watches how its leader handles his own mistakes far more closely than how he handles theirs.
Hire for the team you want, not the vacancy you have
Banking recruitment tends to be vacancy-driven: a role opens, a profile is drafted, the closest match is hired. It is efficient and it is often wrong. The question worth asking is not "who best fits this role?" but "what does this team need that it does not have?" Sometimes the answer is technical. More often, in my experience, it is temperamental: the team has five drivers and no integrator, or five analysts and nobody who will make a decision at 80% certainty, or a culture of impressive individual work and no instinct for sharing it.
The strongest teams I have led were deliberately unbalanced in skills and deliberately balanced in character — different strengths, comparable standards. One hire can shift the chemistry of an entire team, in either direction. It deserves more thought than a profile match.
"A team is not a collection of individual performances. It is a system — and systems are built, deliberately, or they assemble themselves badly."
Feedback is a habit, not an event
The annual performance review is one of the stranger rituals of corporate life: twelve months of observations compressed into a single conversation that both parties approach with mild dread. I have sat on both sides of that table many times, and I have rarely seen the format change anyone's trajectory.
What changes trajectories is frequency and honesty in small doses. The two-minute conversation after a meeting — "that intervention was excellent, here is why" or "you lost the room at the third slide, let me show you where." The habit of separating the person from the work, so that criticism of a document is never heard as criticism of its author. The willingness to have the uncomfortable conversation in week two rather than month eleven, when it is still a correction and not yet a verdict.
In control functions especially, this matters doubly, because the work itself is judgement-heavy. A compliance officer's development is not primarily about learning more rules; it is about calibrating judgement — and judgement calibrates only against feedback. A team that reviews its own decisions honestly, including the ones that turned out fine but were reasoned badly, develops faster than any training budget can buy.
Protect the team's time as fiercely as its budget
Somewhere in the last two decades, banking developed a meeting culture that would embarrass a medieval court. I have watched talented teams spend the majority of their week performing coordination rather than doing work — status meetings about progress that the meetings themselves were preventing.
A leader controls two scarce resources: the team's budget and the team's attention. Most manage the first carefully and squander the second. The discipline is simple to describe and hard to sustain: fewer meetings, shorter meetings, agendas that end in decisions, and blocks of genuinely protected time in which people can do the deep work they were hired for. Every hour you reclaim for your team is a direct investment in both output and morale — because nothing demoralises capable people faster than the feeling of being busy without being productive.
When the team is tested
Every team is eventually tested — by a difficult market, a regulatory examination, a restructuring, a failure. These moments reveal the team you have actually built, as opposed to the one described in the strategy documents. And they follow a pattern I have seen repeatedly: teams do not rise to the occasion; they fall back on their habits. The team that has practised honest communication communicates honestly under pressure. The team that has practised mutual protection protects each other. The team that has practised nothing in particular fragments into individual survival strategies.
This is, in the end, the strongest argument for treating team-building as a permanent discipline rather than an off-site event. You are not building for the calm weeks. You are building for the week when the examination letter arrives, the market turns, or the institution announces a merger — and the habits you have cultivated are suddenly the only thing holding the room together.
The teams I remember with the most pride were not the ones with the most impressive collective CV. They were the ones where people did their best work, told the truth, covered for each other's weaknesses without resentment, and stayed — or, when they left, left better than they arrived and remained allies for years. That, I think, is the honest measure of people management in this industry. Not the org chart. The alumni.