Our impact

Rapidly transforming leadership development across the organisation

We leveraged our design expertise to create a bespoke team leader development program for a bank and enabled cost-effective, ongoing in-house management and delivery

The Challenge

One of Australia’s top banking organisations recognised that the leadership capability of their team leaders significantly impacted their frontline customer service and operations staff, and therefore their overall customer experience. We were engaged to design, develop and pilot a learning program to accelerate their team leaders’ time to competence to within the first 6 -12 months of their appointment.  

At that time, only 9% of the bank’s team leaders were participating in existing enterprise leadership development programs.  The programs were not explicitly aligned to the bank’s new organisational strategy, plan and values, not focused on developing the capabilities required for the current context, and were costing 30% more than the global average benchmark.

Further, the effectiveness of these leaders was extremely variable. Team leaders – who led over 40% of staff – reported low levels of staff engagement, as did their direct reports. The 25% annual turnover of team leaders meant there needed to be a rapid transformation of team leader engagement and capability to enable an agile, customer-centric culture. The target was set for 60% of the team leaders (the audience) to participate in the program within 3 years.

Our Approach

Through  working in strong partnership with the bank’s team, our discovery phase included focus groups and interviews with leaders at three levels (including the audience and their leaders) to uncover and define their context-specific learning needs and performance barriers.

In this complex and ever-changing business environment, we discovered that it was critical to help team leaders engage with and translate the organisation’s new plan into the right work. Further, to translate the plan, team leaders needed to understand their people deeply, and at a human level. The real game changer would be to establish team leaders’ belief that their behaviours are the single most critical driver of culture.

The 16-week longitudinal program featured multiple touch points to truly embed behavioural change, including workshop days, individual learning goals and on-the-job activities. Unlike legacy programs, the design blended the critical skills of leadership and management.  Accessing a range of learning modalities, the face-to-face workshops wove together key organisational messages and content, with an emphasis on skill practice. Existing online programs were also interlaced in the rollout to derive more value.

Leading global measurement firm, CEB, suggest that a lack of manager support is one of the contributing factors of ‘scrap’ learning (learning that cannot be or is not applied). Our contemporary program design explicitly drew on leader support (through the program launch, one-on-one check-ins and graduation) and peer support (through learning partners and group coaching).

The Impact

Our deep understanding of the bank’s context led to strong program design, and resulted in only minor post-pilot amendments. We led the delivery of the pilot programs and supported the transition to full internal delivery over the subsequent 9 months through co-facilitation and guiding the development and implementation of operational processes.

Participants rated the relevance, application and value of the workshops above benchmarked programs in all corporate universities (against a global benchmark within in the Financial Services industry) (CEB, 2016).

Moving to an in-house delivery model meant the bank now delivers a more scalable and affordable solution that reaches a greater number of team leaders, with 70% cost savings per participant. As the content supports the values-led, customer centric and high performance culture essential to business performance, the bank is now seeing a significant transformation of leadership capability across the broad team leader population.