The financial services industry is heavily impacted by market pressures such as government regulations, economic shifts, competition, and technology innovation. Where such external forces are plentiful and ever present, banks and other institutions must be prepared to respond rapidly internally as well to deliver results Faced with new market pressures, our client needed to quickly integrate 8 different sales and service support areas into one shared service function.  Of particular concern to executives was the transition team’s ability to lead change, integration of the senior leadership team and maintaining manager and employee engagement.  Results exceeded expectations.

The Solution

We provided the EVP with a multi-pronged solution to address his key priorities. This included the following:

• A custom change workshop The workshop provided a framework for implementing change successfully, creating buy-in from stakeholders and setting the stage for the necessarily rapid integration.
• Interviews and working sessions. We interviewed all leadership team members individually to assess their perspectives on the integration and the team itself. Based on findings, we designed and facilitated two working sessions to help the leadership team become a high-performing team. As building trust and commitment are key with any newly integrated team, this was also the focus of our work sessions. This included aligning all around the vision, enhancing each leader’s understanding of everyone’s social styles, and emphasizing the value each brings to the team. We focused on their roles as change leaders and the translation of their work as a team into how they were leading change within their organizations.
• Advice and support for the EVP. We coached the EVP around the integration and change leadership during the project.

Results

The key priorities were all addressed successfully and the firm achieved exciting results:

• In less than 6 months of our initial engagement, the integration of the 300 + person shared services organization was successfully completed.
• Engagement survey results showed that engagement was not only sustained but increased during the integration.
• Employee perceptions of the leadership team during the transition were positive and perceptions of the EVP as a change leader were very high.
• The leadership team became aligned around the new vision and with each other — and they developed the change skills to tackle new challenges in the future.