A COLLABORATION between Commonwealth Bank, management consultancy McKinsey & Company, and international not-for-profit organisation The Hunger Project has developed a unique leadership program that not only changed the culture in one CBA division, but delivered a new funding model to The Hunger Project.
The Hunger Project uses leadership training to empower people in Bangladesh, India, and eight countries across Africa to lead their communities away from hunger and dependency on aid and towards self-reliance.
Its work is based on giving women, as the key drivers of change in communities, leadership skills and and skills to create a new vision for their community.
So far the project has resulted in water, electricity and eventually more food being brought to thousands of villages and millions of people.
The work THP does in developing nations seems a world away from Australia’s corporate banking sector, but a year-long leadership program based on learning from THP’s work in India was developed for CBA’s corporate financial services division with pro-bono support from McKinsey; and the effects on the bank’s front line have been significant.
Staff engagement is among the highest across CBA, staff turnover is down significantly, the number of employees from other divisions wanting to join commercial finance has grown, and 40 per cent of the division's customers are recommending its services, up from 20 per cent before the training started.
CBA national head of corporate financial services, Symon Brewis-Weston, who gave a presentation in Perth last week, said while there was still work to be done, the risk of engaging in an unconventional leadership-training model had paid off.
“I absolutely saw the parallels with The Hunger Project, that we were trying to create sustainable, long-term, cultural change for the benefit of staff, our shareholders and our customers,” Mr Brewis-Weston said.
“At a high level, without knowing any detail, we tend to look down on the third world, and think we know better. But when we went there and saw the obstacles these women had overcome and how they did things in action, it was a cathartic experience for managers to see what can be done … how the way you approach something can absolutely change the outcome.”
McKinsey and THP worked with CBA to gain an understanding of its goals and benchmark measurements before 20 of the division’s executive managers went to India in February. After the trip, months of ‘embedding’ sessions and post-trip training sessions were held to ensure the leadership model flowed down the organisation.
The managers visited three villages THP works in – one that had a long-standing THP-led leadership strategy and was thriving, one that was just starting out with the leadership program, and a third somewhere in the middle.
“Then we synthesised what were the three key cultural changes we would like to bring back; hence we came back with courageous, visionary and expansionary,” Mr Brewis-Weston said.
On return, each participant acted as a ‘change leader’ and was given the task of instilling the cultural changes throughout the division.
With McKinsey’s pro-bono support, The Hunger Project received the full fees for the leadership training, and the organisation plans to further develop that revenue stream by engaging other corporate organisations in tailored leadership programs.
