Standard Bank’s Commitment to Leadership Development

Standard Bank Group’s Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB) is committed to providing banking and financial services to meet the needs of individuals, businesses, institutions, and corporations in Africa and abroad. They understand the importance of building leaders to support the mission, and measure their leaders on how well they grow, challenge, and nurture the people they lead. To provide their leaders with foundational leadership skills, they launched a rigorous request for proposal process and eventually partnered with Blanchard to create a unique development solution.

“We wanted to equip our leaders with knowledge and tools to drive our manager-as-coach competency, and we used a rigorous process to select a partner who could deliver the solution we needed. Blanchard was selected to create our Leading Performance program,” says Paul Lotter, head, CIB people and culture. “The program is a learning journey that combines the time-tested frameworks of SLII® and Coaching Essentials® with innovative custom learning designs. The program teaches leaders skills and gives them tools they can put into use immediately. They are able to have more effective coaching and development conversations with their team members, which improves performance for individuals and for the organization,” says Vish Sanghani, head of learning, corporate and investment banking at Standard Bank.

When Sanghani piloted the program, he included the HR leadership team across the group. “I wanted to share the model we were using in the CIB business unit because I knew when other stakeholders saw the potential for growth they would want to roll it out in their locations, too. Our HR Director for Africa regions became an evangelist for the program and helped it go viral in other countries.”

SLII® teaches leaders how to set goals, provide the right amount of support and direction to each team member as they navigate certain tasks, and give feedback effectively. It focuses on helping leaders have productive conversations using a common language that empowers direct reports to achieve their goals. The Coaching Essentials® module presents a coaching process to help leaders accelerate the development and performance of their direct reports. They learn how to connect to build positive relationships, focus to clearly identify goals, activate to collaborate and develop a plan of action, and review to clarify and discuss accountability.

Upon completion, they receive information about how to access support materials that are available on the Degreed platform. One week after training, leaders share the learning with their teams. “We ask the leaders to share the models with their teams a week after they’ve been trained themselves. This helps sustain the learning for them and enables the leaders to bring a common language to all their team members,” says Sanghani.

All team members also have access to resources on Degreed to further their knowledge and reinforce what they have learned. As part of the extensive follow-up program, leaders receive reminders four weeks and eight weeks after completing the course. This ensures more application and sustainability of the leader skills and helps embed the common language of leadership. “We follow up with the leaders to remind them of the models and to encourage them to use the support materials that are available to them,” says Sanghani. He also developed a one-half day refresher session where leaders have the opportunity to work on real-case scenarios to apply the models.

Sanghani and his team captured several metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of the program. “We have trained more than 1000 people in 23 countries. More people have been through this program than any other one offered by Standard Bank, so that is something to celebrate. We also captured data from the delegates to understand what they felt was most helpful to them.”

Survey results from delegates include:

• Knowledge and skills will support me to do my job better: 100%
• Worthwhile investment of my time: 98%
• Facilitator was knowledgeable about content and engaged audience: 98%
• Good balance of content presentation and audience engagement: 97%
• Pre-work provided a good foundation for the program: 95%
• Virtual delivery was well structured and engaging: 94%

The company also surveyed delegates after the refresher session and received these results:

• The Leading Performance Refresher session was helpful and practical and will allow me to take immediate action: 96%
• The Leading Performance Refresher session was a worthwhile investment of my time: 94%
• After attending the Leading Performance Refresher training, I feel confident to share and embed the philosophy with my team: 89%

Additionally, all employees were surveyed to capture feedback about their working environment in a program they call Are You a Fan (AYAF). The results have improved consistently since the beginning of the Leading Performance program.

Results from 2022 are:

• I feel empowered to shape the way I work: 82%
• I feel heard when I voice my views: 78%
• I feel like a valued member of the team: 82%
• I have a caring immediate leader: 86%
• I have opportunities to grow and advance my career: 85%
• In conversations, my immediate leader listens to understand my perspective: 85%
• In my work, I have the opportunity to promote and try new ideas or new ways of doing things: 81%
• The feedback I receive from my immediate leader enables me to do my job better: 85%

“The program has been successful because people see that it is an easy, practical and actionable framework. They can use the skills immediately,” says Lotter. “The results are impressive, but the strongest indication of the learning is hearing people use the languag consistently and knowing that employees see a positive difference in their leader. It’s proof that we are making a positive difference in people’s lives,” concludes Sanghani.