Salz Review - Wall Street Journal

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Salz Review
An Independent Review of Barclays’ Business Practices
To develop newfound trust in our banks, customers need a better understanding of what
they can expect from banks; employees need a better sense of what it means to be a good
employee of a bank; leaders need a better sense of what both their customers and
employees expect from them – and they need to be held to account. This will be a journey
in which open dialogue and shared experience of continuous improvement will count more
than pronouncements. Employees and customers must have a voice that is heard and leads
to a new and better banking experience.
Alignment, learning and systemic reflection: Developing a global universal banking
model which works will not be easy. The proposition involves uniting people with very
different cultural and professional backgrounds around a common framework of values.
At the heart of getting this right will be a culture that emphasises systematic induction,
careful promotion, continuous personal and professional development and systematic
review and reflection. When learning stagnates, the old constrains needed evolution.
Induction, first promotion and on-going personal and professional development ensure
cultural awareness and stability. Systematic and regular independent review ensures that
stability is maintained, but necessary change is thoughtfully pursued.
In organisations, we systematise culture by the way that we share a collective sense of
purpose; through how we develop new services; through how we develop people to do
their work through socio-technical systems; through how we communicate our successes
and our failures; through our systems of performance management and reward; and most
notably, through the people that we chose to hire, promote and to fire. There is both
power and danger in systems in that we can easily forget the purpose for which they were
designed. Organisational culture needs to be reviewed and challenged by its adherents to
ensure that the assumptions upon which it is based are still suited to the environment in
which the organisation exists.