Introduction

Cityside Financial Services was a successful mid-sized bank serving the urban

neighborhood that predominantly had a white customers belonging to the local

community (Ely, 2006).

Background

Cityside Financial Services was purchased by a radically diverse group of investors,

including Ron Wilkins, a young black investment banker. By 1999, Cityside operated

two units in the Sales division: Retail Operations and External Deposits (Ely, 2006).

There were mostly black employees hired from the local community in the Retail section

and external deposits hired mostly whites, middle-class college graduates (Ely, 2006).

Problem

By 2004, Ron Wilkin observed that customers are being differentiated by the services

they are offered based on their locality, if they are local to the neighborhood or not (Ely,

2006). Both Retail operations and External deposits started blaming each other. Lack of

coordination has been also observed between both the units, which started affecting

bank’s efficiency (Ely, 2006).

Opportunities

The management had the opportunity to reduce communication gap between both the

units. Rather than hiring whites in the External deposits and black employees in the

Retail unit, management should hire according to their capabilities and provide

individuals a chance to improve their potential in a field of their interest.

Recommendation

Companies should recognize that effective collaboration is critical to future business

success (Morgan, 2013). Secondly, employees should be clear about their roles and

responsibilities and there should not be any perplexity. Managing diversity means

understanding its effects and implementing behaviors, work practices and policies that

respond to them in an effective way (Cox, 2004).

Conclusion

Having diverse workforce is a competitive advantage (Selko, 2008). With proper

collaboration and diversification both the units could have boost each other’s capabilities

and could bring better opportunities for the bank to grow.

References:

Cox, T. (2004). Creating the multicultural organization: A strategy for capturing the

power of diversity. Retrieved from

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Ely, R. (2006). Managing diversity at Cityside Financial Services. Boston, MA: Harvard

Business School.

Morgan, J. (2013, July 30). The 12 habits of highly collaborative organizations [Web log

post]. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobmorgan/2013/07/30/the-12-

habits-of-highly-collaborative-organizations/

Selko, A. (2008). The business case for diversity. Industry Week, 257 (9), 46-50.

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