Building a Culture of Leadership

Allianz Partners, one of the world’s largest insurance and assistance services companies, is built on a strong foundation of caring and the courage to continuously reinvent to better serve their clients. Headquartered in France, the organization has more than 21,000 employees operating in 37 countries, with four lines of business: Allianz Travel, Allianz Assistance, Allianz Health, and Allianz Automotive. Although the company had experienced double-digit growth in the previous 10 years, each line of business had been operating under a different business model. Senior leadership wanted to unite the four divisions and create an organization with a shared culture and leadership philosophy.

“Our CEO wanted to foster a company culture based on strategic alignment, engaged employees, andcollaboration,” explains Claudia Reichmuth, human resources and change management director at Allianz Partners. “But each line of business was using a different leadership style. We realized the first thing we needed to do was introduce a consistent leadership methodology that could be used throughout the company.”

Reichmuth partnered with Philippe Mailleux, global partner Blanchard® in Belgium, to design and deploy an ambitious training program that would include SLII® training for the top 450 executives and Self Leadership training for the top 400 individual contributors worldwide. Mailleux and Averil Brown, a resource trainer from Blanchard, co-facilitated the series of 34 classes. “We knew if we were going to teach new leadership skills to our leaders, we would also need to provide training for their direct reports so the learning could be embedded into the culture,” says Reichmuth.

To kick off the culture change initiative, a comprehensive week-long program was designed that included sessions on Allianz business issues, industry and market knowledge, and company knowledge. SLII® training was delivered to teach the new leadership language that would be used throughout Allianz Partners. Participants were required to complete prework that included reading an article about SLII® to become familiar with its concepts and taking the Leader Behavior Analysis II® assessment to gather information about their own leadership styles. The DiSC personality profile was also part of the program.

“Knowledge of self is great place to start leadership training, so we built the Leader Behavior Analysis SLII® and DiSC assessments into the program. Participants were able to learn about their own personality traits and leadership tendencies. It served as a perfect baseline for learning and growing their skills,” says Reichmuth. “The most impactful parts of SLII® training for us were the conversation starters. They provided sample questions for leaders to use with direct reports at all four levels of development, as well as instructions for holding one-on-one meetings. The explicit directions for those activities helped our leaders use their new skills back on the job immediately.”

Initially, there was some concern that a week-long program was too much to undertake, but Mailleux and Reichmuth incorporated real work into the design. In addition to learning new skills, the groups worked on specific business challenges. This allowed them to use their new skills on various projects during the training to support and communicate the new culture and strategy.

“Being trained and working on real projects at the same time worked very well for us,” says Reichmuth. “It got everyone on the same page working toward common goals and building partnerships with colleagues.” The design provided a very powerful experience for employees from different locations to learn together. The evaluations were strongly positive, with a 92 percent Net Promoter score.

Sustaining and Expanding the Learning

To make sure people were using their new skills back on the job, Reichmuth worked with locally based human resources departments around the world to deliver follow-up training. They created Boost workshops as an important part of the sustainability plan. “We involved local HR staff to deliver the Boost workshops so they could be a resource for the leaders in their own environment. The workshops provided a review of the SLII® concepts including setting SMART goals, diagnosing development levels, and matching the appropriate leadership style. This helped us make using SLII® skills a daily business practice,” explains Reichmuth. Each participant also received access to the SLII® app, which allows managers to quickly diagnose development levels and prepare for conversations with team members. This tool is instantly available for just-in-time application of the skills.

The next step to fully develop the company culture involved training 400 top contributors. “The sales, marketing, underwriting, and operations staffs were trained in Self Leadership. This way, they would learn to use the same leadership language as their leaders and be able to ask for the proper amount of support and direction they needed to accomplish their tasks,”says Reichmuth. The week-long training program also provided the foundation for these four departments to begin to work together cross-functionally. After the training, participants were much better equipped to collaborate in addressing market challenges as well as attracting and retaining clients. They also teamed up to identify sticking points and ways to overcome them while they developed skills in self awareness, ownership, and accountability for goal achievement.

“Evaluations for this part of the program were even higher than the executive sessions, receiving a Net Promoter score of 93 percent,” says Reichmuth. With executives and frontline leaders trained in the language of SLII® and Self Leadership, the groundwork was set for supporting the culture Allianz wanted to create. “Using SLII® and Self Leadership was the perfect combination. Both programs are strong—but together they are magic. Managers and direct reports are able to communicate better than ever while they build trusting relationships.”

Since Allianz operates in an agile environment, the company has recently started Team Leadership training from Blanchard®. Based on the SLII® model, this program uses the same language to help team leaders diagnose their team’s development level so they can offer the right leadership style to keep operations running smoothly and people performing at their highest level. “The Team Charter is an especially valuable tool for us. Teams are able to align because they define their purpose, goals, specific roles, and norms right up front. They can understand explicitly how to work together to achieve goals. It is just great.”

In addition to the Net Promoter scores, results are still being monitored. Allianz is seeing significant increases in one-on-one meetings and coaching conversations. This is a strong indicator that the new SLII® and Self Leadership skills are being used and becoming standard business practice. The Allianz Engagement Survey showed an increase of 2 percent on leadership criteria. “The 2 percent increase globally on these criteria is significant for us, because not only are we widely dispersed geographically, we are also undergoing a massive organizational transformation,” says Reichmuth.