Forum

Accelerating Leadership Transitions at a Financial Services Company

The Situation

One of the world’s best‐known names in financial services, our client provides financial and travel services to individuals and small businesses. Driving growth in such an organization—one that serves millions of customers in 138 countries—requires robust leadership at all levels. Each year the company adds to its leadership cadre by promoting current managers as well as recruiting experienced executives from other companies.

Across all industries and organizations, many managers fail to make critical transitions, or they take longer than expected to function effectively in their new roles. The result is a high cost to the company, in lost opportunity and wasted resources. In late 2007, the company’s CEO aimed to address this issue head‐on by making leadership transitions one of his top‐three priorities. The company had already invested significantly in helping leaders transition into new roles at the highest organizational levels and at the front line. The challenge was to enable mid‐level executives to learn the same skills, and thereby increase their effectiveness and reduce turnover.

The Solution

Forum worked with the company to deliver a learning experience to prepare its mid‐level executives for leadership transitions. The program included a self‐assessment and a facilitator‐led session in which leaders dealt with current transition issues and engaged in action planning aimed at helping them anticipate and manage their transitions going forward. Topics included how to avoid “transition traps,” such as applying old mind‐sets to new conditions, and helping managers become more intentional in learning about their new roles and building key relationships in order to succeed. The goal was not so much to help the leaders avoid failure as to help them achieve success more quickly.

The Results

The company followed the progress of its first participating business unit. A follow‐up survey found that 100 percent of participants believed the program was valuable in helping them set goals, structure and develop their teams, and form the right partnerships and coalitions. In addition, 91 percent believed the experience helped them conduct more effective conversations, and 83 percent reported achieving “quick wins” that established their credibility. Clearly what they learned was not just “nice to do”—it was critical to their ability to perform, and perform quickly. The average leader reported that the program helped shave off more than a month from a typical 6‐months‐plus transition period. The return on investment to the company, in terms of salary numbers alone, exceeded 400 percent.

The Future

Like many other organizations, particularly those in financial services, our client is experiencing tremendous change. The need to adapt as an organization has necessitated defining “transition” much more broadly. In addition to role transitions, leaders now:

• Have significantly expanded job responsibilities or scope
• Lead teams that have changed significantly
• Lead special projects designed to address an urgent business need
• Navigate organizational changes, and gain buy‐in after a large strategic change; in other words, their role hasn’t transitioned—but the organization has

In response, the company is building on the success of the program by expanding it to include more leaders, which will build a wider organizational competence to adapt quickly to transition and change. The company is also broadening the program’s focus from a specific individual role transition to competence in accelerating all types of individual and organizational transitions. Examples of these skills are:

• Diagnosing the transition and uncovering inherent challenges and opportunities
• Creating a shared, clear understanding of the situation and business priorities with manager and team
• Enhancing critical working relationships with peers, team, and manager
• Creating the adaptability in self and team to handle the challenges of the current transition as well as inevitable future change

Leaders then apply these skills on the job, with the aid of transition‐specific coaching and tools. With this approach, the company is developing leaders to add value more quickly through their current transition, and sustain that value through all future transitions.

For more information contact Forum.