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
banks 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 others 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-12habits-of-highly-collaborative-organizations/
Selko, A. (2008). The business case for diversity. Industry Week, 257 (9), 46-50.
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