When Paul Fissel
joined Citizens
Republic Bancorp, the company was working to
integrate recently acquired
Republic Bank into the fold.
And as the new president of
Citizens Bank’s Ohio market,
Fissel was tasked with integrating the former Republic
employees into the Citizens’
culture, which proved no
easy job.
“They have to believe you
have their best interests at
heart and that you are working for something larger than
yourself,” he says.
The Ohio market has been
booming for Citizens Bank,
and Fissel increased his
work force from 64 to 87
employees in the past year.
Smart Business spoke
with Fissel about the challenges of blending two cultures and why sometimes the
results themselves aren’t as
important as how they were
achieved.
Q. How do you handle the
mixing of cultures?
That’s the part of most
mergers that gets the least
attention and is probably the
most critical.
To try to blend two different cultures is often a real
challenge. People are used to
doing things one way. Not
everybody runs a branch and
tries to provide a customer
experience that is consistent
with what we’re doing.
Some folks we’ve hired
have been very successful in
their prior roles with another
institution. But they’ve done
it differently, and that’s not
the way we want it done. So we look at our people and
evaluate them on a regular
basis, not only from a results-oriented standpoint but also
are they exhibiting the kind
of behaviors we find necessary for longer-term success?
Achieving results is certainly important, and something
we focus heavily on, but how
they get there and how they
conduct themselves on a dayto-day basis with their customers and with their fellow
employees is also a critical
part of our evaluation
process.
Q. How do you
convince acquired
employees to adapt
to your culture?
It’s not like, ‘This is
the way we’ve done it.
We were the acquirer,
so we know what’s
best.’ We truly are
looking for the opportunity to create the
best in our operational
side and in the back
office that we can be.
That may be that we
borrow and steal from
somebody else, but we
do engage our employees in that process. We
make them part of the team.
That’s a big key — we look
at focusing on our people and
letting them know that they
are the people who make the
difference. We all have checking accounts, savings accounts
and investments to put our
clients into. It’s the people
who are the key, and they really do make the difference.
