Leadership alignment across high potential Directors, VPs and SVPs

Client need

A leading financial services company identified leadership alignment as a key strategic goal. They aimed to widen their leaders’ perspectives of the business and their strategic decisions. Additionally, the organization wanted to address critical leadership skills gaps, enhance trust and empowerment levels, and cultivate a talent development mindset.

Solution

The organization partnered with BTS to design and deliver a customized learning journey for their SVP and high potential Director and VP populations.  The solutions, depending on leader level, were between eight and 12 weeks long, and included:

• An Enterprise simulation in which participants compete in teams to build a strategy and run the bank using the strategy over a three-year simulated timeline.
• A moments-based leadership simulation based on Liz Wiseman's Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, which helps leaders tap into their teams’ natural genius to produce better business outcomes.
• A series of small group coaching sessions that:
• Create shared learning and act as follow-up for leaders’ commitments to operate as Multiplier Leaders.  
• Challenge participants to recognize the “signals” they send that may make it harder for other leaders to operate as Multipliers.
• Go deeper on adjacent topics like trust and driving a culture of Multipliers.

Results

The results of the organization’s engagement survey showed that participant’s teams rated their leaders more favorably in the following areas:  

• 11 percent improvement in the "opportunity to learn."
• 10 percent improvement in the "safe to speak up" factor.
• 9 percent boost in "effective collaboration."
• 6 percent increase in the overall employee engagement index.

Furthermore, most of the leaders’ managers (81 percent) rated their employees' performance improvement as a result of the learning journey as “high” or “very high.” Due to the program’s success, the organization decided to expand the use of Multipliers, incorporating it more deeply into the organization.

Participant quotes

“Having the team debate the issue, trying to see both sides, discussing, then all agreeing to a solution led to higher collaboration, more buy-in, and better execution.”

“I have noticed progress in the way that the team presents issues to me now. It is no longer just a presentation of facts and then a pause while they wait for me to suggest a solution. They come in prepared with their own views and we talk though each item.”