Finance - Standard Bank

The Question:

How to leverage the strengths that existed in the Executive Committee so that people used them more to their greater satisfaction and benefit to the bottom line.

The Client:

Standard Bank, Malawi

The Challenge:

How to shift the “fix the weaknesses” mindset and create the environment in which senior managers were able to recognise, value, develop and use their strengths more effectively.

GLA's Role:

We worked with the Executive Committee to work through the four key stages in a Talent Liberation process, linking the work with strategies and objectives. The outcome was to ensure that talents were developed into strengths and used to deliver extraordinary results.
This involved:

• Individual reflections on personal talents, sense checked with colleagues
• Examples of where these talents had been used in the past and putting a business value on them – usually in monetary value
• Defining a development process to ensure that talents were further developed into usable strengths
• Identifying ways of applying strengths in terms of practical application and quantifying the financial impact of doing so. Importantly this stage also included public commitment to action and agreeing practical support mechanisms to ensure the commitments were delivered.

Results:

The bottom line value-add by simply making the most of managers’ talents equated to several millions of US dollars, representing a great return on the learning and development investment.

Additionally the Executive Committee now has a different paradigm for working together and for developing the capability in the Bank