Cultivating the critical mindsets

Client need

An international bank was facing serious competition from Fin Tech firms, fast-changing customer needs, digital innovation requirements, and an old, slow, constraining structure. To stay relevant they needed to quickly shift to Agile and stand up streams that would drive change at pace. This required structural, procedural, and organisational change, as well as mindset shifts for leaders and teams.
To achieve this goal, the organisation partnered with BTS to devise a coaching solution that targeted mindset shifts at a deep level, creating a disruptive moment for leaders to accelerate the rate of change.

“Our engagement survey increased by six points. Our target was 77, and we exceeded that with a score of 79. This is a significant improvement. We have a highly engaged team and I have no doubt that this experience contributed substantially to the result. There is now more transparency in speaking up when things aren’t going right; we have really seen this happening in the last month. I attribute this change to the program we did with BTS.”

– Leader of bank

The solution

The company set a target to shift mindsets so that:

• Employees saw customer and enterprise success as the goal, not just personal and individual gain.
• Healthy risk was considered natural, and failure was an opportunity to learn and grow
  – a better option than playing it safe.
• Resources were seen as shared and owned by the enterprise, instead of seeking personal control as the only way to succeed.
• Embracing conflict and tension were considered constructive and creative challenges that led to better customer outcomes.

There were several experiences that helped to disrupt and shift the mindsets, which included:

• A digital, virtual, moments-based simulation experience, which helped employees explore specific moments when they would be challenged to implement new agile behaviors. This approach was team-based and surfaced the true moments of tension so that they could be addressed and planned for.
• Virtual, personalised 1:1 coaching to create deep mindset changes on topics such as engaging others, building commitment and support, influencing, personal authority, speaking up, and challenging the status quo.

Results

The experience leveraged a control group to measure the mindset changes for those receiving the 1:1 coaching. Across the six critical mindsets the firm sought to address, there was an average 17.3% gain in the coached group in comparison to the control group.

Coaching groups’ confidence in their ability to lead and influence others increased by 11%.

In the simulation experience the average score was 9.03/10, and 24 respondents reported an NPS of 75.