Top team development to enable transformation

The challenge

first direct is widely recognised as the best bank for customer service, topping the Customer and Markets Authority customer service league tables in 2018. As a result, the business is in a period of growth and change, expanding into non-traditional markets and developing its digital capability.

When they approached Talogy, first direct had a newly formed leadership team that needed to rapidly establish new and effective ways of leading and working together. It was vital for first direct to take all of their people with them on the change journey and operating with emotional intelligence (EI) was identified as critical to success.

The solution

We created a bespoke team development programme involving diagnostics, one-on-one coaching and facilitated workshops. Talogy’s Emotional Intelligence Profile and Leadership Climate Indicator were used to enable leaders to:

• Develop their emotional intelligence to engage and lead their teams successfully through transformation
• Work collaboratively and effectively as a team
• Challenge each other and their teams to drive high performance
• Be “positive agitators,” adopting and enabling a growth mindset.

The results

The leadership team experienced improvements in relationships and healthier ways of working, particularly when dealing with challenging situations such as ambiguity, priority tension and conflict. As well as smoother processes, increased self-awareness and improved management have led to the leadership group and their teams seeing consistently better outcomes.

In addition, participants in the development programme have become advocates for the organisational change journey. The business is exceeding all of their growth targets and is on track to achieve the digital strategy. The concepts of emotional intelligence are being cascaded down to fully embed the importance of emotional intelligence into the business.