Enabling Values Based Leadership With A Global Bank

YSC Consulting partnered with a multinational banking and financial services company, who is seeking to create a significant shift towards values based leadership and to highlight any gaps in capability that would prevent the bank from reaching it’s goals.

There were three areas the client wanted to address:

• Determine which senior leaders were capable of leading through this transition.
• Understand at an aggregate level what they were missing in their current leaders that they need to reach this goal.
• Support senior leaders in their own journey to align with the wider business vision.

Each senior leader went through a developmental assessment. In these assessments, consultants focused on the individual’s strengths and development needs, working with them to pull together a personal development plan.

An additional form was created for consultants to complete after every assessment to collect aggregate insights around:

• Individual themes
• Senior leadership team themes
• Business unit themes
• Organization themes

After the assessment, individuals were sent in groups to a development workshop. Here, they were given feedback on their strengths and development needs. Individuals were asked to reflect on how they could use this self-insight to fulfil their leadership role – creating the conditions for the business to achieve its vision.

As this was a large population to assess in a short period, a broad consulting team was used. To ensure consistency across consultants, regular calibration meetings were set up to discuss assessed individuals and provide evidence for judgments.

The lead consultant attended all calibration meetings to collate all themes or hypotheses. Once all the assessments were completed, the themes from the consultant insight forms were used to create some hypotheses.

These hypotheses were then tested with the data collected on individuals in the assessments (benchmarking ratings, internal client ratings, psychometric scores and reports.) Initial findings were presented to the client team and further hypotheses were suggested. After this, a final aggregate report was sent to the client to review.

Using this data, we worked with the client to come up with four categories of leaders they needed to achieve their goals.

To populate these categories, we asked consultants to provide a few examples of leaders they would put in each category. We then looked at the ratings these leaders received to see what set them apart from the population. Criteria for each category were set using this method. The rest of the population were categorized based on this criteria.

We were then able to show the client clearly the types of leaders they have right now and recommend the characteristics of talent they would need to succeed in future.

This data was shared with the CEO, who now feels there is sufficient data for this senior leader population to make informed decisions for the future.

We are now working with the client to repeat the process for their leaders at the next level down.