Major international bank
Transforming group risk
As part of a wider transformation, the Group Risk function of a major international bank wanted to develop a much more service-oriented business relationship with its internal customers. As in other financial institutions, the Risk function was often perceived as the internal regulatory department required to sanction external financing deals after the fundamentals had been agreed between bank and clients.
The bank was determined to develop its sustainable and ethical approach to finance. To do so meant developing a Risk function which took a proactive role in assuring the fundamentals of external financings as they were constructed. And this meant
reforming the relationship between Risk and client-facing departments such as Investment Banking and Private Equity.
It also meant transforming the culture of Risk to one where the behaviours and processes put Risk executives on the front foot. Engage for Change helped to frame the nature of this challenge and facilitated the executive team to enable them to create a vision or story of how this might look when it was being delivered in eighteen months. Reflecting the conclusions of our research into how organizations create effective engagement – conducted with McKinsey in 2004 – we also encouraged the executive team to consider the balance between top-down change and bottom-up involvement which would add most value and pace to their transformation.
A key element was the involvement of the top 250 people in a learning journey over two days in which they were invited to construct the rationale for the transformation for themselves and to respond with the creation of their own team and individual action plans to ‘make it personal’. The two days began with a scene from a dinner party set among the 250. At dinner were a dozen staff members discussing the progress of the transformation, apparently oblivious of their colleagues around them. No punches were pulled and the 250 were captivated by the drama of change which unfolded over the two days.
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