Risk Management
Here is the question I would put to any board or executive committee: you can audit your capital, stress-test your portfolio, and pass every regulatory exam, but have you ever stress-tested your team? Because when the pressure comes, and it always does, your team won ' t just manage the risk. It will be the risk. Or the reason you survive it. had little to do with talent. It came from redesigning how the team worked as a system.
Risk Management
Reuben Kisigwa
When The Team Becomes The Risk
In the past years I have built teams, managed teams, coordinated teams scattered across different towns and regions, rebuilt teams that had veered off their mission, and tried more than once to bring together people who were never really designed to work as a unit. Some worked remarkably well. Others struggled even with capable people in the room. A few failed for reasons that had almost nothing to do with technical skill. I still find myself asking that same question when I sit with boards and executives across different industries: what if the team itself is an organizational risk?
Most institutions spend enormous amounts of time assessing financial risk, operational risk, technology risk, regulatory risk. Far less attention goes to the team that is actually expected to manage all of those risks. And yet a team ' s quality is a risk factor in its own right. A poorly designed or poorly managed team creates execution risk, conduct risk, people risk, concentration risk, succession risk, innovation risk, and eventually strategic risk. A strong, diverse and adaptable team, on the other hand, can become one of an institution ' s most important risk controls.
The Team We Think We Have
As senior branch manager of one of the largest tier-one banks in Kenya, I inherited what looked, on paper, like a solid team: a main branch in western Kenya with four satellite units under it, close to 95 staff in total. In practice, each unit was doing its own thing. Sales had its targets, operations was busy protecting its process, credit guarded its policy, and accounts kept an eye on controls. Every individual was competent. The hub simply did not move as one. The problem wasn ' t incompetence. It was fragmentation.
That pattern is common in banking. A credit committee may bring Relationship Management, Credit, Risk, Legal, Operations and Finance around the same table. Technically they all serve the same institution. But if each person is only protecting their own function, the institution doesn ' t really have a team at that table, it has functional silos sharing a room. That ' s a risk issue in its own right. A high-performing team combines different perspectives while holding a shared objective.
What I took from this role is that team cohesion isn ' t a soft, nice-to-have goal. It ' s a control. When the business team booked a large agri-lending portfolio without pulling credit in early enough, early-warning signals slipped straight through the gaps. When operations in a satellite branch processed high volumes without real-time feedback to customer-facing staff, complaints piled up quietly until they hardened into conduct risk. Pulling the hub together meant joint huddles, shared dashboards, and cross-functional problem-solving sessions. The turnaround
Here is the question I would put to any board or executive committee: you can audit your capital, stress-test your portfolio, and pass every regulatory exam, but have you ever stress-tested your team? Because when the pressure comes, and it always does, your team won ' t just manage the risk. It will be the risk. Or the reason you survive it. had little to do with talent. It came from redesigning how the team worked as a system.
When Talent Does Not Add Up to Team Performance
You can put brilliant analysts, experienced managers and strong performers in one room and still end up with poor decisions, because team performance depends on what happens between people, not just on what each person brings individually. Trust, coordination, communication, accountability, constructive challenge and complementary skills are what decide whether talent actually turns into sound decisions under pressure.
As team leader in a high-end branch in Nairobi ' s CBD, within the same tier-one bank, my team and I ran a pilot covering new business models, operating structures, branding( both the physical ambience and the behaviors behind it) and new processes. The branch carried close to 70 staff and reported into multiple head-office functions: operations, credit, ICT and the executive team. Capability was never the issue. The real risk was the temptation for each function to optimize its own piece at the expense of the whole. A team of stars can still lose if the stars are competing with one another rather than for the same result.
One example I still think about is this. During the rollout of a new digital onboarding process, the ICT team celebrated a flawless technical launch. But customer-facing staff hadn ' t been properly trained to handle exceptions. Within two weeks we had a spike in incomplete applications and a rise in customer complaints. The cause wasn ' t the technology, it was a design flaw in the team: ICT, operations and branch staff weren ' t working as one unit with shared accountability for the end-to-end customer experience. We fixed it with a joint task force, clear roles, daily stand-ups and a single escalation path, and performance recovered. But the exposure, while it lasted, had been real.
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