A UK based fin tech company processing £5 trillion worth of payments that designs, builds and operates industry-leading bank account-based payment systems. Its technologies power the UK’s real-time payments, settlements and direct debit systems, as well as the country’s network of more than 70,000 ATMs.
Following its acquisition by a well-known American multinational financial services corporation, the business had already undergone change in 2017, successfully implementing transformation to become more efficient, change outdated practices and restructure, and through this process became aware it could not afford to rest on its laurels with a past history of ‘success’ - as it could see on the horizon new competitors from different industries entering its marketplace and pressure from its client and biggest stakeholder the Bank of England.
To support a recently promoted VP to raise the performance of the Software Engineering Division starting with his Leadership team, who’d fallen under the ‘spotlight’. The team’s capabilities, functionality and behaviours were key to the division’s success. The team leader knew that by helping his team to identify and then remove the barriers to being their brilliant best, this talented team could deliver great results for the business.
Team Coaching programme run over 6 1 day sessions spread over 9 months, using 3 diagnostic tools as its basis:
Indicating how well the team functions in 5 key areas: Clarity of Purpose; Clarity of Strategies and Action Plans and owners; Clarity of Roles and Responsibilities; Capability, Resourcing and Motivation; and Efficiencies of processes.
A validated psychometric tool designed to assess the strategic creation implementation and relational capability of top and senior executive teams, based on the principle that leaders are likely to be successful and contribute value if: What they are doing really motivates them, so that they put energy and commitment into what they do. The reports show team strengths and weaknesses with regards to strategic creation and implementation.
A tool designed to highlight interpersonal behaviours (dysfunctions) which stop teams functioning to their full potential. It gauges trust, conflicting ability, commitment to goals, accountability levels and finally the ability to focus on the right results.
The plan was to start with the SLT and then cascade it down into their relevant unit management teams as they see how the process really worked and unfolded.
The results from the team assessments were quite revealing AND hard hitting. The TPP report uncovered mixed understanding of the team’s purpose to an unambiguous strategy, mixed feelings around ownership and accountability, resourcing issues, lack of clarity around roles, responsibilities, interdependencies and capabilities. On a relational level, the TAR assessment highlighted low trust and accountability in the team, as well as only moderate levels of commitment and healthy conflicting ability.
The PROPHET assessment highlighted many things about the way the team that inhibited it’s potential to be a high performing team especially in how they made collective decisions and what motivated the team members individually. They were a goal-orientated team that would achieve goals however individuals’ strong ambitions were out of sync with one another meaning group members pushing in conflicting directions. It also highlighted how some team members with a stronger preference for Driving may be perceived as being overly dominant.
The report also showed that although quality was important to the group, the group displayed a very much lower preference than an average senior exec team for working in an orderly and thorough manner on certain issues, the group realised that they needed to be more structured in their approach and make time to focus more on important details and avoid being distracted by non-critical team political or personal issues, that got in the way of execution. Most of the Directors’ direct reporting teams also needed to raise their game at being better implementers.
The entire team acknowledged that there was indeed much to be done but were hugely positive at the prospect of what was possible If they resolved these issues, most of which were within their control.
Focus was on the agreed key deliverables and the formation and execution of strategies for them, as well as continuing to improve the systemic aspects of the team.
From the understanding of the traits of a high performing team through to the creation of a team purpose in alignment with the business purpose, team values and a manifesto outlining what it meant to be part of that team, to understanding each other better (through the usage of personality psychometrics) and better structured conversations with more time spent as a team, the spirit and outputs of the team grew from strength to strength.
The final session and conclusion gauged progress against the identified deliverables in session 1 and progress within the TAR and TPP assessments – these reassessments showed great improvements as the charts show on the next page.
The programme of 6 sessions lasted 8 months and was deemed to be a success. In spite of 3 huge setbacks - a team member being side-lined for a substantial period due to a heart condition, a huge pitch consuming some of the leads and the VP being pulled into their International Team to deal with some crises, by the end of session 6 the team itself had hugely transformed. Trust and collaboration increased dramatically, roles and responsibility were clarified, a clear top line strategy for getting to the vision and objectives were created, and the team were highly energised and collectively on board on shaping AND delivering the strategic plan for the business’s development over the next 12-24 months.
