Barclays UK Retail Bank

Barclays UK Retail Banking (UKRB) is a business unit within Barclays Global Retail Banking. They serve more than 15 million individual and business customers with current and savings accounts, mortgages, insurance, loans, credit cards and investment products.

Overview

Barclays UKRB wanted to cut external recruitment costs and improve promotional prospects for a specific tier within their middle management population. A review of retention feedback and recruitments costs showed a reliance on hiring external talent, as they had not addressed the development needs of their internal talent. Whilst this brought in new perspectives and knowledge, recruitment was costly and they were not utilising experienced and loyal employees.

Barclays’ Talent Management Process - part of each individual’s personal development plan (PDP) - clearly identified a number of behavioural skill gaps. Managers were technically high performing, but they needed to demonstrate increased leadership capability to prove they were ready for promotion.

Objective

Impact were challenged with devising an Emerging Leaders Programme (ELP) programme to develop these managers into transformational leaders, able to energise and lead change within Barclays. Development requirements included:

• Leadership action that gets results
• Ownership of development
• Management of self and others
• Building, leading and coaching a team
• Personal effectiveness.

Solution

Impact UK has worked closely with Barclays to develop a challenging and innovative modular experiential learning event. Barclays support the modular programmes internally with senior sponsorship, workplace mentoring, PDP reviews and online reading.

Launch: The launch event places emphasis on the ownership of personal development and enables participants to have performance-focused discussions with their own manager.

Leadership & Team Working Skills (Leading Self): This four-day learning journey combines current thinking on leadership and organisational performance with experiential projects, business discussions and in-depth feedback sessions. Participants are challenged to use their leadership abilities to deliver results.

Leading High Performance (Leading Others): During this two-day residential each participant creates a movement based performance. This innovative project demands that each participant operates effectively as a leader and coach whilst under pressure themselves. It looks in detail at the leadership actions that individuals contribute and draws on elements of Emotional Intelligence.

The ELP makes each participant responsible for driving the performance of themselves and others. Impact facilitators challenge every individual to engage in the process and take this level of commitment back to the workplace.

Result

The ELP has positively impacted on Barclays UKRB, drastically improving the participants’ day-to-day leadership performance. Individual and organisational benefits have completely exceeded all of our expectations.

A recent ELP participant survey shows:

• 100% integrated the learning into their day-to-day business activity
• 97% state team productivity has improved
• 92% state team engagement has improved.

Return on investment

Key performance indicators set by Barclays UKRB for the ELP included:

Increase development/promotional opportunities: To date 22% of ELP participants have achieved promotion or developmental moves within their tier. 12 months prior to the ELP, external appointments were filling 62% of promotion opportunities. 12 months later and 62% were filled by internal promotions.

Reduce recruitment costs: Taking into account industry standard recruitment costs for this tier, the cost of the entire ELP programme has been offset by the savings made in external recruitment costs.

Original programme aims have been exceeded and the UKRB has benefited from unexpected ROI, directly attributed to the ELP participants’ leadership actions. The ELP has established itself as a flagship programme receiving over 50 nominations for the 20 places in each cohort. It fits at the heart of Barclays’ business strategy vision: ‘lives made much easier’.

‘In all my time in Barclays this has been the most challenging, stimulating and thought- provoking event I have been to. It has provided great inspiration to achieve and progress further.’
Programme participant

‘The success of the Emerging Leaders Programme has exceeded my expectations. The content is relevant, the selection process is rigorous - and it delivers. We are seeing a clear increase in leadership capability within this talent population. This is now coming to fruition as we see more and more individuals who attend the programme going on to take on more demanding roles - be that within their current level or to more senior roles. The programme is recognised by our Executive Team as talent enabler.’
Lynne Atkin
HR Director

In 2010 Impact and Barclays won a UK National Training Award for this Emerging Leaders Programme - to read more please click here.