Achieving Cultural Transformation at a Global Investment Bank
Client Situation
Our client called us when he assumed the position of the Head of Fund Services at a global investment bank. Accepting the position and its challenge would be a huge step for our client, who had excelled at the creative side of financial product development. He asked us to coach him to become a leader who could deliver a cultural transformation of Fund Services while also making a step change in its market share and profitability.
VISION Helps
VISION coaches helped our client
- Diagnosis the cultural causes for persistant underperformance
- Create a 5-year vision for a turn around on which our client staked his leadership and identity
- Design the execution of the plan in 100-day steps with clear benefits at the end of each step
- Build a high-trust, highly motivated team
- Identify and grow allies and ambassadors for the vision.
Our client determined to move his unit from a siloed, low risk culture into a highly collaborative, entrepreneurial culture.
Approach
VISION coaches and consultants performed extensive interviews of our client's team, colleagues, his senior managers, and the key influential stakeholders.
We coached our client through the analysis and creative processes in developing a vision and a strategy.
We trained our client in new collaborative practices for getting work done in his unit and across other units. These practices include making, clear, direct requests, negotiating, and the receiving of personal promises for performance. We facilitated his mobilization meeting and follow-on review meetings. We helped with the nuts and bolts of firm accountability where before there had been much appreciation of talent with little accountability.
Most important: VISION coaches helped our client see that he had to take a stand for bringing the future he wanted forward. He had to show his personal commitment even more than his intellectual capability in justifying the plan. He came to see how people trust commitment, not ideas.
We also helped our client to use alliance forming techniques to build a strong coalition.
Value Delivered
Our client's senior manager two steps up said that the vision and strategy was the best he'd seen at the bank. His team started taking risks, developed new creative solutions, and personally promised to implement them in short timeframes.
Our client, his allies, his key stakeholders, and his team are fully committed to success and learning to change the way they work.
Creating leadership breakthroughs
Leadership coaching techniques
- Taking a stand for an improbable future
- Trust building with a shared intention
- Promise-based management
- Using style to accumulate power
- Managing team moods.
Client satisfaction
VISION removed me from the immediate challenges of my business and allowed me to define a clear and ambitious strategy. With clarity of purpose, my team and I set-out a bold plan of action to realise that ambition.
