Assignment 1

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...