Developing a culture of positive management across a population of over 1,000 leaders from a global bank with a large presence in APAC, through the design and delivery of a bespoke people management simulation.

THE CLIENT

One of Europe’s largest banks needed to support its growth strategy in Asia by nurturing a culture of trust, engagement and accountability throughout the organisation. With over 15,000 employees working in 14 countries across APAC, the bank wanted to build a flagship training program for people managers that would deliver measurable behaviour change in their leadership population, by equipping them with the tools and skills they needed to maximise the potential of each team member through the effective use of existing HR tools and processes.

The challenge

Historically, the bank had offered a wide variety of best in class management training programs. Although most prorams had typically been tailored to include industry and regionally specific scenarios, there was a strong desire to take the next step by assisting managers to leverage the bank’s existing HR tools and processes, and embed its culture into all aspects of people management.

The original brief was that the program needed to equip managers with the knowledge and skills to effectively recruit and onboard new team members; develop a high performance team culture; coaching; developing talent, as well as addressing various issues associated with poor performance, while ensuring that they were able to apply existing HR policies and procedures.

The solution

We identified that a management program which focused HR processes may be have been at risk of being dry and theoretical. Therefore, rather than use a traditional approach of a once off face to face training program centred on HR tools and processes, we proposed an innovative multi-phased solution based on the tenets of design thinking. The project included:

  1. Diagnostics to identify and understand the challenges encountered when managing team members at key stages of the employee lifecycle.

  2. Strategic alignment with other initiatives, by consulting to define how the bank’s values and management principles would be role modeled by managers in these important conversations, and identifying the tools, skills and mindsets they would demonstrate.

  3. Rapid prototyping to form real team management dilemmas and possible storylines for an engaging business simulation that would allow participants to “chose their own adventure”.

  4. Production of a suite of videos to introduce key characters in the dilemmas that participants would be addressing, plus video demonstrations of how tools and skills could be applied successfully.

  5. Instructional design that carefully layered core management and communicate skills, starting from the foundation basics such as questioning to more complex skills to navigate sensitive conversations with poor performers

  6. Accreditation of local facilitators to enable delivery in local languages

  7. Development of a pre-workshop video distributed in advance to brief participants and guide them through pre-workshop preparations

  8. A follow up video distributed post workshop to summarise key learning and help sustain new habits back in the business.

Using a blended learning approach, many of the key concepts from the program were introduced in a pre-workshop briefing video and preparation assignment. By commencing the knowledge transfer element of the learning before participants arrived in the classroom, participants were able to focus more of their valuable time on the practical application of skills in real live business dilemmas.

In addition to optimising participant engagement, this experiential learning approach ensured that managers were able to build their competence and confidence in applying new techniques in a safe environment and were able to develop their own authentic style and fluency in realistic and robust conversations.

The RESULT

This program has become the benchmark by which other learning and development initiatives are measured in the bank across APAC and resulted in the L & D team receiving an industry award for program excellence. Due to its success in IT & Operations, it has now also been expanded across all functions and affiliated business in APAC. The program has been cited as being a key pillar in helping teams cultivate and nurture the bank’s culture in conversations, actions and decisions each day and continues to form part of the core management development curriculum for the region. More recently, it has also been piloted in EMEA to assess how the program could be adapted for other markets.