“Hi I’m Kylie from ANZ bank. Are you the author of the book ‘Playing above the line, Creating a winning team’? This was going to be one of those phone calls that would have a huge impact on my business. Kylie continued...”I’m organising our 2018 Business Banking State Summit and I asked around the office for recommendations of speakers that were memorable. No one could recall the name of any speakers they had seen in the past few years.... except for you. I’ve just read the first few chapters of your book and I’d like to ask if you are interested in facilitating our Summit?”
Kylie later told me that after reading the first chapter she said... I think I’ve found our facilitator, she put the book down and called me. This is exactly why I write books, because by positioning myself as an authority in my niche of creating a winning culture I was attracting some really cool opportunities.
The Issues
The Business Banking team were merging two teams and restructuring. They were merging the rural and metro businesses and were experiencing a lot of friction in the team. Blame, Justification and Drama were really having an impact on the results. And this is what she wanted to address in the Summit. They have about 120 senior employees and about the same number in admin. They also have to work with credit teams and other groups from different parts of the business to deliver a final product for their customers.
Each manager was effectively running their own business and in Kylie’s words “were spending too much time handling day-to-day processing and detail and they’re not building their portfolios.” They were suffering the same problem so many small business owners do. Working in the business not on the business.
The ActionPLAN
We built a summit around the theme of Playing to Win. Just like the Johnny Farnham / Little river band Song. And we focused on 3 pillars.
1. The mindset required to bust through barriers.
2. The team culture and leadership that was required to inspire and energise.
3. The business tools they already had but weren’t using.
We needed to give the 120 attendees a completely different experience to their normal ‘Banking Summit’, which typically was just a very dry download of information.
1. The Mindset
For mindset I delivered 5 principals. To illustrate the final principal of reliance we brought in a guest speaker, who I interviewed on stage and planted a few strategic questions in the crowd to get the guest and the audience connected. We chose Dylan Alcott Paralympic gold medalist and current Australian Tennis champ. He was awesome.
2. The Team Culture
The middle part of the day was about building a Winning Team Culture. I delivered the High Performance team model that grew out of my book but we wanted to bring this to life and give the attendees an experience so they’d never forget it...So we brought in 4 live musicians and turned all the room into a ROCK ORCHESTRA.
We taught them 12 different parts, i.e. lead vocals, drums, percussion, backing vocals, guitar and a host of instruments that helped everyone make a contribution. Within 90 minutes we were able to learn & perform the full song with every person in the room fully participating. No backing tracks, all live.
3. Driving Use of The Business Tools
The end of the day was built around the framework of 5 ways. We created themed booths that reintroduced business tools to the attendees which corresponded to the 5 ways. e.g. generating leads was focussed on social media, increasing transactions showed attendees how to use a customer satisfaction survey & to introduce additional products and surveys. A booth based on increasing margins became one of the most successful with the booth organisers dressed up as doctors and helping people better understand the story that their numbers were telling them.
Results
Playing-to-Win - Follow-Up Program
After the summit they asked me to propose a follow up program so that the learnings of the summit were embedded into the daily activities of the team.
Out of that was born the Playing-to-Win - Follow- Up Program. It consists of a live group coaching call once per month with about 100 attendees and senior managers from interstate. We prepare them for the call by having each attendee complete an e-learning module on my website. That’s called the flipped classroom method and they LOVE it.
And we also created a private Facebook group where they can get help and feedback from me, my team or any of their colleagues across the state. The outcomes have been reported to be exceptional. The team engagement and productivity have increased dramatically. Kylie says that the big difference is the practical nature of what we are doing.
They’ve had many keynote speakers who give them big ideas, like having a growth mindset, but this is the first time they have had practical implementation of the principals. I’ve only been working with them for a few months so there are more results to come.
They are now planning the future development of that culture. While the results for their business have been great, the outcomes for my business have been even better. I’ve now been asked to develop Business Banking Summits for other states within ANZ bank.
I’ve received enquiries from other corporates who are looking for something a bit different to energise their team as well. I’ve been invited to coach a few individuals with the bank to growing their region and there are plans to put me in front of their business clients as well.
How we can help
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