A medium-sized U.S. bank's leadership team was unconvinced ERM was a real discipline. Here's how the program earned their buy-in instead of demanding it.
A medium-sized U.S. bank's leadership team was unconvinced ERM was a real discipline. Half the executive committee thought it was box-checking for examiners. The other half thought it was overhead the bank couldn't afford to bake into operating cadence. The CEO, however, had been told by the board that risk governance needed to mature — and had budget for one engagement to find out whether the skeptics were right.
This wasn't a technical problem; it was a cultural one. The risk-skeptic faction included some of the bank's strongest performers — line-of-business leaders who'd built the institution and were not enthusiastic about new oversight. Standing up an ERM program through executive resistance is how most ERM programs die in the first year.
We threw out the standard ERM playbook for the first six weeks. No framework, no risk register, no committee charter. Instead, we ran a series of one-on-one conversations with every member of the executive team — focused not on risk theory but on the specific decisions each of them found hardest to make. Where was information missing? Where did they wish they had earlier warning? Where had they been blindsided in the last 12 months?
That listening tour produced a program design organized around the executives' own pain points. The risk taxonomy was built backward from the decisions the executive team actually made, not forward from a generic framework. Risk appetite statements were drafted in the language each business leader already used.
By the end of the engagement, the previously-skeptical LOB leaders were quoting the framework in their own staff meetings — using risk appetite language to defend operating decisions back to the board. The CRO described the executive shift as "the cultural breakthrough we'd needed for three years."
The board formally approved the ERM program at the next quarterly meeting. The framework remained in active use 18 months later — the survivability test no Big-4 framework had ever passed at this institution.
"Amit's skillfully and patiently led our leadership team through the ERM process, despite initial skepticism from some members. He understood our business and tailored the program specifically to our organizational context. The leadership team found the process genuinely valuable and transformative."
The cultural skepticism wasn't an obstacle to overcome; it was information about how the program needed to be designed. Standard ERM rollouts assume buy-in. When buy-in is missing, the framework needs to earn it — by speaking the language of the decisions the executives are already making, not by importing the language of a generic risk-management textbook.
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