Leadership

Leadership development in global investment bank

Challenge

The Investment Bank has grown extraordinarily fast as a company in the last four years, and the IT function had to change processes, scale of operation, attitudes about goals of the function, etc amid this huge growth spurt. In the growth, the ‘front office’ relied upon having access to leading edge technology and systems. IT also had to rescale their platforms to cope with exponential volumes of trading in front office.

Our challenge was:

• To get people who are see themselves as technical experts to see the bigger picture, value and practice behaviours that build customer value and resilience
• To help them to shift to structures that would be fit for purpose for the future and not just replicate what had worked in the past

Solution

We worked with the global IT function to help it shift its ways of working, so that it both created a stronger customer service focus as well as growing a ‘mature’ IT function from a small and maverick team a few years before. We helped the senior teams find ways of being robust and challenging with each other rather than being siloed and competitive. The current management splits, between UK, US and Asia Pacific are being addressed and work is being done that helps them confront some of the ‘undiscussable’ elements of their current activity, such as the UK-centric focus of the senior leadership, the western ‘macho’ style of management, the male/female imbalance at senior level, and the tension between task delivery and development of their staff and business offerings.

Outcomes

Our work with the senior teams across the three elements of the IT function has really enabled them to move from siloed operations to integrated business activities. It got them to restructure their teams so that there was a sharper ‘connection’ between the key aspects of the functions and a clearer strategic focus where, in the past, leaders had become sucked into operational problem solving at the expense of a broader set of business priorities.
 

Developing leadership culture in one of the world’s leading professional services organisations

Challenge

The UK branch of the business was facing internal issues. Whereas other international offices had merged with another business, propelling the organisation to the number 1 or 2 spot globally, the UK firm had not and remained in the number 4 spot. The incoming UK Chairman had been elected on a platform of growth via change in the partner behaviours to better match the corporate values. He also had to deal with a perception from other regions of the firm that the UK business was underperforming.

Solution

Bath Consultancy Group were brought in to run a Partner Leadership Development Programme for all 400+ partners in the UK practice. This would be the first major, systematic piece of partner development that the organisation had ever embarked upon. Although culture change was not a contractualised part of the programme, there was an expectation that the development programme would concentrate heavily on the values. This in turn would lead to improvements in partner recruitment and retention, which would drive growth.

The design called for partners to attend a Foundation Event in cohorts of 24. Each partner had a 1:1 interview with a BCG facilitator prior to the event, to ensure that their personal learning requirements were being met. The event then involved a mixture of plenary learning and small Learning Group coaching, again allowing further individualised development. Evenings involved further learning at dinner events, where senior leaders from within the firm and major clients were invited to give live opportunities for practicing the learning in a safe environment. The Learning Groups continued to meet over the next few weeks, ensuring that the learning was taken back into the workplace and bedded in, and giving an opportunity for further coaching on significant issues.

Over the next weeks, participants were then offered the opportunity to attend a selection of 1.5-day specialist workshops, again depending upon their personal development needs. These included modules on: Personal Leadership Capacity; High Performing Teams and Client Relationships; and Transformational Coaching. Finally, four cohorts (96 partners) were invited to a Leadership Summit where they were able to compare stories of their successes and build them into viral motivational techniques.

Outcomes

By the time the programme came to a conclusion, over 450 partners had taken part from the now integrated UK and Ireland practices. Bath Consultancy Group was also asked to roll out similar programmes to South Africa and India, as part of the move towards greater integration within the EMEIA region.

People Metrics: At the start of the programme in 2006, the organisation was ranked 12th in the Sunday Times 20 Best Big Companies to Work For. Improvement in this was seen as a key recruitment objective. By 2007, they had moved up to 4th place.

Internal metrics also reflected the improvement in morale, with the Global People Survey showing increases in trust (up 10 percent), living the firm’s values (up 4 percent) and retaining talented people (up 6 percent).

Fiscal Performance: Another key performance objective was seen as being closing the gap between the organisation and the other Big 4. Again, this was achieved in 2009 when they found itself better placed to weather the recession than its rivals.

Participant Satisfaction: Events were rated by participants on a variety of points, as part of an ongoing quality control regime, and consistently scored highly (with an average rating of over 8/10).

At the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development conference held in September 2008, the head of partner
development in the organisation, spoke about the program’s successes. He stated that the partners committing to the program was a success in itself as this had never been achieved before. Since the program has been running, feedback has been continuously positive. He spoke about the real and sustained change that he has witnessed at a personal level and change at a group (collective) level.
 

UK colleges transform leadership in OD project

Challenge

How do you take a further education college that is an average performer and mobilise the impetus, capacity and the desire to transform itself into a centre of excellence?

Bath Consultancy Group was selected to initially work with three colleges who were identified by and where the senior management team of each college were keen to participate.

Solution

The programme focussed on developing the leadership within the college and importantly helping to shift their own capacity to improve.

Bath Consultancy Group has been working with two middle performing colleges. The key objectives were:

• Accelerate the progression from satisfactory to good and then onto excellent, in particular shifting the college’s own capacity for improvement
• Raise achievement levels that feed economic prosperity
• Achieve better OFSTED ratings
• Create a greater educative capacity amongst the staff leading to an enhanced experience for learners
• Develop better local partnerships on skills and economic improvement

Outcomes

September 2008 - The latest OFSTED inspection of the college has praised the strong leadership of the principal and senior managers recognising their aim of becoming an outstanding college over the next four years.

‘The college is accurate in its assessment that leadership and management are good across the college. Strong leadership from the principal and senior managers has brought about much improvement since the last inspection. Senior managers and governors have set a very clear strategic direction, which is well understood and shared by staff. Managers have set challenging targets to achieve the aim of becoming an outstanding college over the next four years.’ OFSTED 2008

The college, which had previously been deemed satisfactory, is part of a pilot project initiated the former Chief Executive of the Centre for Excellence in Leadership. For the past six months, Bath Consultancy Group has been working with the college to accelerate the change from a satisfactory college towards an outstanding establishment.

The Bath Consultancy Group team, led by John Watters, provided just 30 consultancy days support to the college, helping us to align our leadership and organisational culture. The college used the Organisation Workshop as a catalyst for developing leadership potential at middle and senior levels in the college.

An independent company, using both quantifiable and qualitative criteria for assessing change, evaluated Bath Consultancy Group’s contribution to the college’s journey to excellence. Some of the significant shifts that had taken place were:

• Moving beyond functional silo based working to collective cross functional and cross level working
• Moving away from a top driven organisation to more distributed leadership in which people hold an awareness of, and need to work with, different perspectives
• Growing the habit of ‘saying your truth’, including owning up to vulnerability, whilst also reducing the tendency to blame others, both within and beyond the leadership team
• Releasing potential and experimentation at different levels to build a contagious appetite for improvement
• Making learning not just classroom based but an integral part of leading effectively in the moment
• Switching from habitually problem focused conversations to more solution focused ones in which appreciation and asking questions is a key feature

Bath Consultancy Group has just completed work with a second FE college and will be starting a third college shortly.
 

From good to great at Gloucestershire College

Reflections from the Principal on being part of a pilot project in helping colleges deemed satisfactory move towards excellence...

When Lynne Sedgmore, chief executive of Centre for Excellence in Leadership (CEL), asked me whether I would consider being part of a pilot project aimed at helping so-called ‘satisfactory’ colleges develop high performing cultures, I jumped at the chance. I had been at the college for nine years, joining it at a time when it was nearly bankrupt. Since then, the leadership team had turned the college around so that it was once again a viable entity. We had built new, state-of-the-art college premises at Cheltenham, and our Ofsted inspections were generally satisfactory or better. But I was concerned that the rate of improvement was not great enough; the challenges were forever getting tougher and I felt the management team was already stretched to its limit, pushing and working harder, but not getting the progress they deserved. The question keeping me awake at nights was how on earth could we reach a consistent standard of excellence throughout the college without driving people to an early grave by pushing them ever harder?

CEL had appointed Bath Consultancy Group (BCG) to work with three colleges as part of its consultancy development work, because of their track record in working with organisations on the softer side of change.

I was a bit sceptical at the beginning because I wasn't totally clear about what I was buying. But my instincts were telling me that the college was capable of a lot more. If only we could get more people to take responsibility for change at all levels in the college.  When two of the consultants came down to meet the leadership team and me, their idea of working with the college as a whole system - not just the top team, or middle managers, or teaching staff, but across all levels and functions - really appealed to me. I also liked the idea of working with an appreciative enquiry approach. I didn't want another report telling us what was wrong and what we needed to do about it, but  was attracted to a proposal to identify, connect and learn from existing pockets of excellence.

John Watters, the lead consultant from BCG, drew distinctions between planned and emergent change and explained how both were necessary to shift performance. He also drew on the difference between technical problems (which had an answer) and adaptive challenges (which required the whole system to find a way through a messy situation) in positioning the work. He and his colleagues helped us realise that we were over reliant on the three Ps of procedures, paperwork and processes, trying to keep the external stakeholders happy, and under focusing on leadership and core motivators. Over nine months, through a series of facilitated away days, meetings, one-to-one coaching and occasional workshops, we went on a rollercoaster of a journey. John introduced us to the book ‘Must-Win Battles (by Killing and Malnight pub Prentice Hall). I believe that the explanations of underlying theories really helped some of my leadership team colleagues to feel more confident about the approach.

It hasn't all been plain sailing. In fact, it has been quite uncomfortable at times. Early on we were challenged in terms of our own working inside the management team. I had to face up to the fact that the college had become very ‘principal-centric', and that even within the management team people were not speaking up freely to challenge each other and me. But the relationship I had with John, our consultant, really helped me stand back and listen more, lead in a different fashion, show more of my own vulnerability at times and, most importantly, stay with the journey and encourage others to do the same when it became confusing and challenging. I was really surprised at the effect this had on the college. Its positive impact was one of the main messages from the external evaluation that CEL commissioned and was delivered through Quality Improvement Process Ltd.

One workshop that had a profound effect on the college more widely involved a day spent with about 80 managers, from both support and curriculum, doing a culture simulation, based on the work of Barry Oshry. We had all been warned that this was a risky thing to do, and that potentially sceptical managers might not engage with a learning process that was highly participative and quite challenging. But it was a huge success. It gave people a real understanding of organisational dynamics and a very straightforward language with which to talk about it.

I remember vividly being a ‘bottom' at one point in the exercise and how quickly I slipped into feeling powerless and ‘done to'. The design of the workshop afforded us short times for reflection, enabling us to talk about what was going on at each point in the system. Everybody recognised those unhelpful patterns into which we all fall - blaming others, opting out, stepping in when we should be helping people to take accountability, and so on. Just as a computer has default settings, which one can choose to override, we all have more choices than we care to admit and can, more often than not, choose to take a different stand.

"I will remember my experience of being a 'top' for the rest of my life - it wasn't a role play. An amazing microcosm of life - the lessons will stay with me."

Peter White, Director of Customer Services and Marketing, Gloucestershire College of Arts & Technology

"I found the day of real value, despite being the biggest sceptic before I walked in."

Andy Arkell, Head of School, Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Gloucestershire College of Arts & Technology

Nine months later, one of the big changes for me is that I am now much more conscious about what I do. I had seen my job mainly as decision making; now I see it as providing the conditions for other people to make decisions. I have had lots of feedback about the importance of being visible in the college, and this has become a much more significant consideration in how I spend the week. I feel better equipped to help others in the leadership team raise their game, and am certainly more able to listen when my own blind spots are pointed out. That means being brave enough to let decisions go out of our hands and happen at appropriate levels. It's also clear to me that this isn't just me. About 72 per cent of the managers who responded to the external evaluation said the project had had a specific positive impact on them personally. And in many ways that is what I was after.

What about going forward? BCG has helped us to frame a significant investment that we now want to make in leadership development across the college. We have formed a relationship with another college in the pilot, and are using that to exchange, support and challenge each other in the way we do things.

We have not finished the journey. The feedback from staff shows that we have more work to do within our senior management team and college management team to show the leadership that the college needs. I do feel, however, that our involvement in the pilot has enabled us to see things which we couldn't see before, and to have renewed confidence in our ability to sustain the rate of change.

In particular, we are resolved to listen more to staff, learners and customers, and to have the courage to say we disagree. When we do that, we will work collaboratively for a solution. We will also be more creative about considering the possibilities. Sometimes this might mean being willing to do things very differently; and looking for the positive.

About 75 per cent are confident about the college creating effective improvement, and scored at least 6/10 for each of the following:

• That the college will build its capacity to improve in ways that achieve noticeable impacts on learners over the next three years (Q.5)
• In the ability of senior managers to plan change well (Q.6)
• That the college takes stock of the success of its initiatives (Q.12)

"A head of school left my section and we were not able to replace them, as the section was contracting. A number of support staff were asked to take on much more responsibility for the section and to take a key role in setting up courses. When the situation was explained to them, they were pleased to take on these extra tasks. This shows that when people are given full information, they are normally happy to help find a solution.

My manager now trusts me to make informed decisions about the running of my department. I do not have to justify every decision made and my budget is my responsibility. This is a departure from previous experience, and could be a result of the project or the fact that he is now more settled in the post.

There has been no single incident, but I discern a general increase in supportiveness and cooperation across the college and a real sense of one team working together, rather than a range of teams working in isolation.

Top management is taking an active role in operational events. During the enrolment week, all the senior managers were on duty to support the process. Each day, they made improvements to the process, increasing customer service and the process for the rest of the enrolment period. My team volunteered to support the process, which they saw as being important function, because they had seen SMT involvement. This was a very positive experience for my team."

Greg Smith - Principal, Gloucestershire College
 

G4S - Strategic Leadership Network

Client

G4S plc is a global security Services Company headquartered in the United Kingdom. It is the world's largest security company measured by revenues and has operations in more than 110 countries. Its services encompass manned and electronic security solutions, care and justice, cash management and various outsource solutions. Having grown through a series of mergers and acquisitions, it now has nearly 600,000 employees making it one of the world's second-largest private sector employers, with a consistent record of profitable growth.

Challenge

G4S is pursuing a market leading strategy, integrating its capabilities to provide business solutions for its diverse customer groups as well as expanding its core services in emerging markets. The challenge is to integrate its various businesses to create new customer solutions while sustaining the local focus and innovation that have led to its success. It was recognised that an essential part of the route forward was to connect the strategic and leadership development agendas, engaging the leadership population in the business challenge and using the processes to develop their capabilities to meet the needs of the strategy. This meant connecting the senior team and many of their immediate reports in an exploration of change, their role in making it happen and generating the initiatives to move forward. In addition the talent development programme was re-worked to align to the future leadership behaviours needed to achieve the strategy.

Bath Consultancy Group were invited to work in collaboration with the in-house team in designing and delivering an approach to achieve these goals. 

Solution

The Senior Leadership Network was established for the senior talent population. The group has met through a series of sessions, with a number of the Executive Team. A foundation session was designed and facilitated by the combined team to make the connections between strategic shift and leadership development. As part of this we engaged a Professor of Strategy from a leading international business school to set the strategic challenge in context. At the foundation event a series of action learning groups were established to tackle a projects to focus on cross-business strategic issues. The topics emerged from the group and have been pursued over time, with recommendations for change endorsed at a subsequent summit event. The group continues to meet as the changes are implemented and new challenges emerge.

The Global Business Leadership Programme targets a talent population at the next layer in the business and uses the same foundation design but then develops its leadership capabilities through a further 2 modules held at different locations around the world. Participants undertake a variety of work to apply their learning in their roles between modules. In addition to strategy the programme includes leadership, coaching; team leadership, change leadership, client relationship management, innovation, personal resilience etc. The process is highly participative, with a focus on changing behaviour through the work people are doing. It includes the use of coaching in learning groups on real, personal issues that connect with the programme content as well as increasing their coaching skills through immediate feedback. In addition the participants work with the local business on current client challenges, offering consultancy which draws on their experience and also their learning from the programme. This has made some significant differences to business performance in these local offices. The two leadership populations have also been integrated to maximise the learning impact, with SLN members mentoring GBLP participants.

Outcomes

The work of the SLN population has helped to deepen and develop the strategy, finding the places and processes for creating global inter-connection, (e.g. around account management processes) maximising buy-in and keeping accountability as close to the customer as possible. It has helped to generate a leadership population that bridges the strategic and operational agendas and drives performance in the business.

The GBLP continues to develop leadership capability through a series of cohorts. It has achieved very high levels of feedback for its impact on the leadership contribution of its participants and on the performance of their teams. This has led to significant achievements in change management in the business and client relationships grown and developed that has had real bottom line impact.