Bank of America Makes a Surprise Management Move

Sometimes success in management is about knowing who the better manager is. It can be a tough

call for a company, but one thing is absolutely certain, you can’t make the call too late. There

may be no coming back.

In an effort to avoid that result, Bank of America recently cleaned house, replacing its CFO and

other top executives shortly after barely passing a Federal Reserve stress test. According to

reports, Bruce Thompson, who has been the CFO and chief risk officer for more than five years,

will be replaced by Paul Donofrio on August 1.

Donofrio is not an unfamiliar face. He currently helms the consumer banking and wealth

management business for BOA and has been with the company for 16 years.

So, if the company passed the stress test, why is Thompson getting the boot? After all, the entire

national economy was in the toilet for years, and Thompson helped steer the bank out of those

very troubled waters. The unspoken answer, it seems, is that he did an okay job … but okay was

not enough.

That’s the lesson for other managers here. You might be doing a “fine job” with whatever you’ve

been tasked to manage, but it’s simply not good enough. You might not even realize it, but your

supervisors certainly do. And guess what, it’s really not their job to tell you. If you want to be

worth what you want out of your gig, you need to be the one who sets the bar — and it better be

higher than what they expect.

A few years back, HBO ran a miniseries called Generation Kill. It was about a group of Recon

Marines invading Iraq at the outset of the war. Some of the leaders are good, others are not. In

one poignant scene in one of the episodes, a major who made a terrible judgment call asks his

battalion doc to shoot straight with him. Doc says, “Well, sir, you’re incompetent.” The major

fires back: I’m doing the best I can. Doc’s response: “It’s not good enough.”

That’s exactly how it can be in management. Your best may not be good enough … and you may

not even be aware of it. Regardless, you have two choices: get better or move on. If you don’t

pick the former, eventually, someone else will choose the latter for you.

Roman Temkin is a real estate developer in NYC.