The research site is ‘Best Bank’, which is one of the leading providers of financial services in Ireland. Established in the early 1970’s, it is part of a major European financial services group (one of the World’s Top 50 Banks) and has its Irish headquarters in Dublin. The Bank is fully owned by its parent company and its focus is on providing a wide range of financial services to both personal and business customers. The Bank is a retail savings and loans bank and has been a leading provider of mortgages in the Irish marketplace. The bank has established smaller offices elsewhere in major cities and towns in Ireland.
During the financial crisis, Best Bank faced a number of significant business challenges and set out to develop a leadership cadre in the organisation that could assist with these challenges. The business required leaders who could lead change, transform the business and get the bank back on the path to profitability. It also required leaders to be authentic, as the view of the banking sector in Ireland during this period was particularly poor; the level of trust in banks among customers and among the general public was critically low and customers did not believe what they were hearing from banks. This was evidenced in the Edelman Trust barometers in 2011 and 2012, which respectively showed that only 6% and 9% of the general public in Ireland trusted banks. In 2011, the then Chairman of the Ethics Committee of the Association of Compliance Officers in Ireland stated that ‘trust in the financial
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sector – and particularly in the banking sector - has been eroded’ (Appleby, 2011). On that basis, Best Bank required leaders who could build the bank’s reputation in the market place, while leading change and supporting its survival through the crisis. The CEO at the time compared the bank to a ship and suggested that the bank was ‘in the eye of a storm being bounced across the ocean’ and that the goal of senior management was ‘to navigate the ship to shore’ to secure the future of the bank.
In order to achieve this goal, Best Bank invested in a leadership development programme for their senior management team focused on developing authentic leaders and enhancing competencies in the organisation in areas including: managing change; thinking and operating strategically; innovating and continuously improving; managing people including coaching and delegating; and networking. The modules of the leadership development programme were designed to develop levels of authentic leadership and an overview of these modules is provided next.
5.6.1 Overview of the Leadership Development Programme
To achieve the development of future leaders, Best Bank engaged with an external provider to deliver a leadership development programme. The programme was designed to facilitate and maximise the developmental journey, and was logically structured over 5 workshops of 1- 2 days per session, with approximately 6-8 week intervals between each session to facilitate integration of the learning and on-going development of the participants. Table 5.2 presents an overview of the modules of the leadership development programme in Best Bank, the authentic leadership construct that each module related to and the competencies that were targeted for development via that module.
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Table 5.2 - Link between LDP, Authentic Leadership constructs and Competencies
Best Bank Leadership Development Module Authentic Leadership Construct Competency to be Developed
Session 1 – Leading Yourself (2 days): Theme: ‘Effective leaders have an effective mind set’. The authentic leader must first know, understand, and be able to lead him / herself before they can lead others.
Self-Awareness & Internalised Moral Perspective Thinking and operating strategically and managing change.
Session 2 – Leading Tasks (1 day): Theme: ‘A truly effective leader can manage people and tasks equally adroitly’. This session explored the principles of having good vision and goal setting, while also equipping participants with the tools to make effective decisions and manage effective meetings.
Balanced Processing of Information
Managing Change
Session 3 – Leading Others (2 days): Theme: ‘One to One engagement’. Having identified and understood how participants could lead more authentically, the programme examined those around them and focused on inspiring, motivating, and leading the thinking and behaviour of both their subordinates and their peers. Relational Transparency Managing people including coaching and delegating; developing networking skills
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Best Bank Leadership Development Module Authentic Leadership Construct Competency to be Developed
Session 4 – Team Synergy (1 day): Theme: ‘If nobody is perfect then a team can be’. During this workshop the participants were provided with the tools to build high performance teams, capable of delivering more than just the contributions of individual, thereby cultivating a culture of synergy.
Relational Transparency
Managing people including coaching and delegating; and networking
Session 5 – Innovation in the business (1 day):
Theme: ‘Tapping into a team’s latent creativity’. During this session participants developed the skills necessary to manage innovation at both operational and strategic levels and were provided with the tools to develop their team’s creativity.
N/A Innovating and
continuously improving
The programme of workshops included a mix of learning and provided a variety of practical, intellectual and visceral experiences to ensure maximum transfer of learning. Development was facilitated between the sessions through a mix of practical assignments, one to one coaching with the external provider and peer coaching. Each session commenced with a review of the development journey since the previous session, and concluded with action learning for development before the next session.
A diagnostic tool - Human Synergistics Life Styles Inventory™ (LSI) - was introduced by Best Bank to capture the participant’s leadership styles and effectiveness prior to the programme. The LSI which was developed by Lafferty (1979), is a 240 item self-report survey that measures 12 thinking styles (20 items for each style). Lafferty (1979) developed a
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‘Circumplex’ model, which represents a circular graph for organising and profiling the 12 thinking styles. Based on research by Cooke and Lafferty (1983) the Circumplex and its 12 styles was modified to reflect the three clusters of styles identified in their research: (a) constructive styles, (b) passive/defensive styles, and (c) aggressive/defensive styles.
Examples of statements for each style are:
Constructive styles: Willing to take time with people; high personal integrity; communicates ideas easily.
Passive/defensive styles: Leaves decisions to others; Upset if not accepted by others; Obeys too willingly.
Aggressive/defensive styles: Likes to be seen and noticed; tries hard to prove self; gets upset over losing.
Scores for the LSI are based on a three point Likert-like scale ranging from “like you most of the time”, “like you quite often” or “essentially unlike you” (Lafferty, 1989, p.4).
The LSI was issued to participants via a secure online login and each participant was presented with a graphical profile upon completion of the survey. An accredited LSI coach must complete the interpretation and debriefing of the Circumplex, which in the present study was conducted by an externally qualified LSI coach. The LSI was also available to participants as an option to complete at the end of the leadership development programme. This was the first time that any such tool was used in the organisation and therefore there was some level of concern amongst participants about how it would be used and whether the output would be shared with senior executives and line managers in the organisation. As a consequence, only 19 of the 30 participants’ in the study completed the LSI at Time 1 and Time 2. The surveys that were returned were analysed to ascertain if there was any correlation between constructive development as measured by the SOI and development as measured by the LSI. This analysis did not identify any correlation between LSI results and constructive development. This is most likely due to the limited data available for statistical analysis at Time
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1 and Time 2. However, it may also be that the LSI is not an appropriate tool to measure constructive development. The LSI measures behavioural styles and provides an assessment of personal strengths and areas for development (Lafferty, 1989), whereas the SOI provides an assessment of the individual’s stage of constructive development at interviews between Time 1 and Time 2. For these reasons, the LSI was not incorporated into the study.
The overall purpose of the programme was focused on embedding learning to encourage development at an individual level in order to achieve higher performance for themselves and among others. The research population involved in the leadership development programme is outlined next.