Strategy gets most of the attention in a business transformation. Daniele Laratta has spent his career giving the same weight to the people who carry it out.
His near 25-year career in Canadian financial services began at a bank teller’s window. Along the way he has paired the hard measures of business performance with team development and client relationships, while staying active in community service and family life.
Building a career through adaptability
Daniele had planned to become a teacher. A part-time teller job at a bank changed that, when leaders around him saw an aptitude he had not yet seen in himself.
Since then his work has centered on understanding a business problem and breaking it into steps people can act on. His experience spans transformation and customer experience, with a steady focus on meeting the team’s needs while delivering results.
Putting people first
For Daniele, leadership starts with real care for the team. People can tell when it is missing, and when it is present, they give more in their work.
He has applied that to a hard problem: employee satisfaction issues that were affecting customer experience and revenue. Linking cultural change for employees to the experience of clients is work he counts among his proudest.
“If you don’t care about the people on the team, they can feel that.”
A simple method for hard problems
Performance issues and tight budgets are common. Daniele meets them by reducing each one to simple actions: confirm the problem is understood, decide how to address it, then build a plan to execute against it.
Clear communication holds the plan together. He helps each person see how their role serves the wider organization and its clients, so the whole team pulls the same way.
Service that starts at home
Outside his corporate role, Daniele served as chapter president for Cystic Fibrosis Canada, inspired by his daughter, who lives with two chronic illnesses. The profile reports that under his leadership the local chapter raised over $300,000 for CF Canada over three years.
The work deepened his appreciation for the healthcare and non-profit sectors. In his view, he cannot ask the community to do more for his family’s cause than he is doing himself.
Principles that travel
Daniele works from a few steady principles: trust the instinct that experience builds, keep the client at the center of every decision, and make time for what you value.
He sees his skills applying beyond financial services, with an approach tailored to each problem rather than a single formula. His advice to people starting out is to stay open to new ideas and be patient, since his own path would have looked very different had he held to a fixed plan.