Our impact

Powering alignment through leadership

Development of new leadership architecture provides a clear path forward aligned to new strategy

The Challenge

We were engaged by a large financial services organisation to support the in-house leadership and talent team, to define the leadership architecture for the organisation to ensure alignment with the new strategy, plan and direction articulated by the incoming CEO.

Our Approach

Much business consultation had already been conducted by our client when we joined this project, and therefore our discovery process involved surfacing the various strategic artefacts that would guide the work, understanding the key messages from previous consultation processes and identifying critical connection points between this work and other activities occurring within the business.

From there we developed a blueprint of the possible leadership frameworks and tested a range of options with key consultation groups and senior leaders, including the Culture Program working group.  Over a period of time, feedback led to refinements which created an opportunity to integrate the leadership framework with the broader capability framework that the organisation was currently refreshing.  This resulted in the creation of a simple and strategically aligned enterprise-wide capability framework which was underpinned by externally validated competencies.  We supported the client through the review of externally validated frameworks and the selection of the most appropriate one for their context.  The architecture also ‘place-held’ the space for technical competencies which were to be developed by the business through various functional stream projects at a later time.

Given the dynamic nature of this organisation, the need for further elements of work surfaced and were requested of our team.  These included the behavioural definition of the recently communicated company values, the creation of leadership and specialist career pathways showing critical enablers for each transition point, the review of existing leadership and talent development curriculum against an external best practice model and the design of a customised leadership development program for a particular leadership level which was deployed through the organisations’ in-house faculty of facilitators.

The Impact

This work has had far-reaching consequences for the organisation as the capability framework has been placed at the core of the People strategy and is in the process of being built into all people activities associated with the employee life cycle.  At the time of writing this process was still underway.  Other aspects of the engagement, such as the behavioural description of values are well embedded and continue to be used as part of regular performance and scorecard conversations, and the leadership development program created has transitioned fully to in-house delivery and continues to be delivered at a standard assessed as higher than global level financial services industry benchmarks.