Another employee related the following story about his experience working in External Deposits before moving over to Retail:
We were at a staff meeting talking about the problems we were having as a department trying to be all things to all people. And I remembered this thing my boss had said about a year earlier that we have to select the battles that we want to fight, and I took that to mean that we have to decide strategically what we will pursue and what we won’t pursue. And I just happened to think about that quote, and so I said, “I think that we ought to be real careful not to bite off more than we can chew.” And I got the response: “Well, what do you propose? We do nothing?” So I saw right then and there that I was misunderstood. I said, “No, of course not. I’m saying that we need to select the battles we want to fight and fight those.” And being pretty new to the organization then, I felt that it wasn’t the right time for me to be forthright about what I meant. When a white man disagrees, he’s being strong. He’s taken with respect. When a black man disagrees, he’s being negative and whiny, militant and kind of like Malcom X. So you have to be really careful about how you walk that line so that you don’t get labeled and you don’t sabotage your career.
Following the interviews, Wilkins was disturbed by what he learned. He was proud of the firm for having reached impressive numbers of minority employees, even at the highest management levels, and he was convinced that diversity in the workforce had helped the bank attain its excellent customer service record. Yet he was acutely aware of the challenges that lay ahead: he believed that neither local nor national markets were being optimally served under the current Sales Unit structure. With competition increasing in both markets, the problem could only get worse. How could these two units work collaboratively in the future? Would Wilkins be able to solve the problem by integrating the functions, or would a top-down restructuring reveal a host of racial tensions brewing beneath the surface?