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Developing Leaders to Realise Change

Background

A technology department within a leading financial services organisation had undertaken a major change initiative to realise a five-year vision aimed at increasing efficiency and productivity. The Executive Team recognised that a cultural change was needed and that management required enhanced leadership skills to make this happen.

Our Approach

Human Qualities worked with the organisation's internal management development team to facilitate the step change required to embed the new behaviours in the business. We worked with all levels of managers, from the Divisional Director and his Executive Team, the middle managers, through to the team leaders. The involvement of the Executive was particularly important to ensure that the desired behaviours were role modelled and reinforced from the top of the business.

We put together an Embedded Learning Process (an integrated development programme) that focused on:

• Change leadership skills
• Developing and communicating a vision
• Performance management
• Coaching skills

The programme involved a cascaded approach, beginning with the Executive Team and cascading down though the three management tiers. We used an embedded learning process that involved pre-event briefings, pre-course work, modular development workshops and action learning. The development workshops involved a mixture of techniques, including experiential learning, real-play, theory and case study, designed to take participants through the entire learning cycle. A challenging facilitation style was used to ensure that participants took joint responsibility for their development and learning.

In order to embed the learning further, three months of one-to-one coaching followed the development workshops. This also took a cascaded approach whereby Executives coached middle managers, middle managers coached team leaders and so on.

Impact

An evaluation questionnaire used before and after the programme has shown that managers are now dedicating more time to leadership and people management and value these behaviours more highly than prior to the intervention. Equally important, their customers, unprompted, have commented positively on the department's "can do" attitude which they are now experiencing. Another technology department within the business has been so impressed by the changes they too are now undertaking a similar programme with Human Qualities.