Banking on Future Leaders — Part 1
A glimpse into leadership transformation in the financial services sector in South Africa
Bankers… Making Sculptures?
Imagine many bankers gathered in a large air-conditioned conference room, clustered in small groups around tables using coloured pipe-cleaners and plasticine lumps and various other colourful objects to create visualisations of where the organisation found itself and what it needed to unlock strategically to enable its next phase. Ilka Dunne, Head of the Global Leadership team at Rand Merchant Bank (RMB), a leading African corporate and investment bank, remembers the scene vividly: “It was in March 2018, and we had about 180 people in the room. It was a nerve-racking day as we had taken a leap of faith that although we knew the method would feel strange and possibly uncomfortable to many in the room, it would be a powerful enough experience that the leaders in hindsight would see deep value. I think I’ve still got a photograph of that moment.”
“You know, there were one or two people in the room who came to me afterwards and said: “We are never doing that again.” And then other people came to me and said: “That was incredible. We unlocked a different level of conversation in the room today, like we’ve never done before.”
Of course, the bankers were all but playing. They were engaging in the systems mapping methodology of 3D Mapping that enables teams to get to the crux of systemic blockages and discover new perspectives, ultimately leading to unthought-of approaches and solutions. The motivating factor underpinning this and other practices was an intention to align with, and contribute to, the developing field of values-based banking.
In later parts of this account, we will be looking more closely at the sorts of shifts and results that this practice, and other such Theory U-based leadership methodologies, helped to unlock through inquiries into questions such as: how do these bankers now choose differently from before? How does values-based banking find actual expression in concrete examples of action, across domains ranging from education, to economy, to societal inclusivity, whilst addressing relationships internally (with colleagues) and externally (with clients, society and the environment)?
In the words of Katrin Kaeufer, Director at MIT of the “Just Money” program, and Director of the Leadership Academy for the GABV (Global Alliance for Banking on Values): “The role of financial institutions in addressing the social and ecological challenges that we face today cannot be underestimated. Every investment decision writes the story of our future. But expanding the focus of a bank towards its social and environmental impact requires a new form of leadership. Operating a business with profit maximisation as the sole objective only sets a single measurable goal for the organization, whereas including impact variables entails diversifying the goals of the organization. Understanding impact is complex: what is the social impact on a community? What are workable solutions in this fight against climate change? This shift requires a new kind of leadership. The following case is a wonderful illustration of that.”
A Tale of Unhurried Unfolding
This is the story of how an innovative leadership approach called Theory U has woven a partnership in a potentially unlikely context. Picture a corporate environment, deeply tied to tradition. Their tagline is: “Traditional Values, Innovative Ideas”.
However — and here’s the catch — this is a story of systems sensing and patience. The company’s quest to build purpose driven leaders was already underway in 2010, six years before the first contact occurred between RMB executives and the Presencing Institute. This is therefore a tale of leadership transformation that is more than a decade long, and that continues to unfold now, with its ups and downs. That’s a relatively long timespan, in a world where everything is focused on moving fast and achieving immediate results. How did patience — and some other seemingly counterintuitive attitudes of enlightened leadership — blend to create the premises for cutting-edge human and sectoral readiness? How did this banking company have the foresight to ready itself to lead from an emerging future that continues to reveal itself?
Steps Towards a More Systemic Mindset
“What is mine, and ours, to do?” “What is our role and responsibility in creating a livable world around us?”
In 2016 the bank defined its purpose statement as: Leveraging diverse talent to do good business for a better world. To enable this the bank sought out an advanced Senior Leadership development process that would help their top leaders to lead across boundaries; firstly by learning to listen in new ways to the diversity of perspectives around them and secondly, to learn how to sense the broader context in which they functioned. This would enable them to operate with a more systemic mindset. If the bank was to truly progress in terms of inclusivity and ‘well-being of the whole’ (rather than focusing primarily on the interests of the few), it felt necessary to be paying attention to both inner and outer facets of transformation.
The programme was designed to unfold in three distinct phases, with modules spaced over nine months and ‘learning by doing’ applications in between.
1. Seeing and sensing the system in its full current reality.
2. Pausing to reflect on what mattered most, and what the future was calling them to create collaboratively and collectively.
3. Prototyping initiatives to catalyse the change and ‘learn by doing’ in order to scale.
The first key transformative shift occurred in the initial phase, where participants were taken out of the bubble of their regular function and got to interact with leaders and innovators who were successfully operating out of the box. They also went to the margins of the system, engaging with those largely excluded from mainstream function. Such encounters — like going to sit next to a long-term gambler as a new way to explore a client situation from an expanded perspective, or realising how in an underprivileged area a child cannot learn if their tummy is empty and they’re hungry — shook up the notion that simply doing more of the same inside their own sphere would be the marker of a successful future for the bank. Making sense of these experiences activated individual and organisational self-reflection, and deeper questions.
With encouragement to deeply and fully activate the intelligence of head, heart and hand, participants identified points of greatest potential and leverage for transformative action. They co-created prototypes that offered opportunities, both internal and external, to the bank to ‘explore the future by doing’ and to generate early and low-risk, low-cost system feedback to help illuminate where to take things to scale.
These senior leaders have reported the most profound shifts of thinking and behaving — including the experience of reconnecting with their deeper sources of motivation, inspiration and purpose, and a much clearer realisation of the bank’s role as a generator of societal well-being and economic inclusion.
The program has spawned a range of related activities geared towards deepening well-being both inside and outside the company, and more deliberately focusing on a more inclusive economy and effective cross-sectoral collaboration around tackling some of society’s most urgent challenges.
Nodal Points
From the many eye-opening conversations I have had with these bankers over the past months, I have noticed five nodal points emerging, each of which we shall look at, in turn:
- The importance of tonality and timing: knowing how to wait, how to connect with the right people, say the right things at the right time, tap into the realities on the ground and meet those moments. “You nudge a little bit, and you get a little bit of traction, and then sometimes you nudge a little bit too far, and then you get a bit of an allergic reaction, and you have to take a step back” — Ilka Dunne;
- The invisible thrust of deep partnership and discretionary energy: “My manager used to say “worry about the people, the work will get done” says Kim Holmes. It’s also about doing more than “just what the job is”;
- The awakening of a banker’s social responsibility: moving from a negative general public perception of “greedy bankers who try to get themselves paid as much as they can” to asking and acting upon questions like “how do we prepare a future for our kids?”;
- The actioning of inclusive growth and shared value: getting more “cutting edge” for what? Is it about making the bank bigger? Or about a search for meaning? Jerrod Moodley dives deeper into what it means to “create sustained shared prosperity for all” and how the “contract with society” idea translates into action through initiatives such as student finance and home finance projects;
- Taking the time to listen from different perspectives: “How can we be more creative, how can we be more human-centric? But it’s really about asking ‘which master are you serving?’” — Julia Phillips.
As a story-harvester, I am always on the lookout for living examples of how Theory U may have been applied successfully by people in their work areas, after they have undertaken a course, programme, workshop or learning journey with us at the Presencing Institute — whether as individuals, as teams, or at an organisational level. What I usually discover, time and again, is that it’s always both much less and much more than about applying tools and methodologies to get measurable outcomes. It’s ultimately about very human, very personal stories, where the real magic is in the invisible, in the places where we perhaps aren’t looking, or are paying less attention.
Ilka has remarked, interestingly: “This has never been a programme, it’s been a partnership and as we have co-learnt from the system, so we too have pivoted and adapted to ensure the programme evolves as the bank shifts its focus.”
Deeper Dive 1
Read more about how the leaders of Rand Merchant Bank have been sculpting their own future and that of their industry. Let’s first dive deeper into conversation and personal stories with Ilka Dunne and Liza Stead: where they share with us how crucial tonality and timing have been to masterfully nudge the old system towards innovative leadership shifts.
