Banking on Future Leaders: Tonality and Timing
in conversation with Ilka Dunne and Liza Stead of Rand Merchant Bank, South Africa
Bringing Water to the People
Ilka Dunne, Group Lead for Leadership and Coaching in FirstRand recalls a moment from 2015: “I remember sitting in a room in Oxford having a conversation with global leaders around what we needed to consider when conceptualising smart cities, and a Tanzanian government minister standing up and saying:
“You know, this is a really lovely conversation but I’m not certain what to do with it, because I’m still trying to work out how to get water to my people.”
It came as a blinding realisation to Ilka that they were not really listening to each other in that room and that they needed to find new levels of listening to truly embrace an eco-systemic perspective. It dawned on her that finding new forms of dialogue would require a whole new set of leadership skills. Ilka was already noticing the differences of on-the-ground realities for people from parts of the world as far apart as the UK, India, and Africa. This moment of realisation drove home acutely for Ilka a sense of how a new approach to leadership would require really opening up to seeing and sensing far beyond the usual perimeters of noticing.
Flash back to 2010. Ilka had been wanting to bring Theory U into her company as a means of helping to transform approaches to leadership, at a time when the previous way clearly wasn’t working, and something new needed to be tried.
This is how the System Mastery experience was co-shaped together with the Presencing Institute and implemented inside RMB, and has continued to be run, pivoted and adapted, to ensure that the programme evolves to best serve the bank’s needs as shifts in focus occur over time.
After our first introductory glimpse into leadership transformation in the financial services sector in South Africa (read article part 1 here) Ilka Dunne and Liza Stead share with us how they have witnessed, and contributed to, approaches to help nudge the traditional banking system towards incrementally innovative leadership shifts: towards operating from a more systemic mindset that also takes into account the societal and ecological, and paying attention to both the inner and outer facets of transformation.
Biding Time: knowing how to wait
In the RMB organisation as a whole, there had been since 2010 an ongoing quest for new leadership modalities to push beyond old patterns of seeing and acting. The 2009 financial crisis had significantly impacted banks worldwide. Many institutions had suffered losses and some had even gone bankrupt, causing a ripple effect throughout the financial system: systemic failures in risk management, corporate governance, and ethical leadership were painfully revealed.
RMB understood that to stay relevant and robust in a context of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, it was necessary to investigate new approaches to leadership. Everyone realised they had huge blind spots and that something was missing, but the bank as a whole was still focused mainly on individual leadership development — save for a few future-oriented individuals, who had already seen beyond, and were sensing the need for weaving systems thinking into their work.
Back then, one of the approaches that was put on the table was the organisational development work around the notion of ‘presence’ that had been researched and written about by a group of organisational learning experts — Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer and coauthors Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers.
But the timing was not favourable. Ilka recalls: “When we first brought that as a proposal, there wasn’t a level of readiness in the system to actually even really have a conversation about building a greater level of ecosystem thinking.”
Leaders first needed to be able to work better internally within the organisation. So how did the shift even begin to occur at a time when such concepts were not immediately resonating within the corporate environment?
Adaptability: one step back, two steps forward
This is where Ilka, Liza and some other forward-thinking key players inside the bank got smart and proactive: they found very intuitive, very organic ways to ‘warm the system up’ from both the outside and the inside, and to prepare the terrain for opening up to the much-needed transformation of mindsets: from an ego-based perspective, to a holistic, ecosystemic one.
Ilka muses: “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 first met Martin Kalungu-Banda, one of the Presencing Institute’s Faculty, in 2015 whilst she was attending a program in the UK for her own personal leadership development (remember that conversation with the Tanzanian Minister). She was struck by Martin’s framing and illustration of how leadership could be approached as more than an individual journey, but also as being in service of something much greater. In order to get company buy-in, and for the new Theory U-inspired frameworks and methodologies to take root, it was crucial that framing and relevance be on point, and calibrated to have the right ‘business tonality’. That’s how Ilka decided it would be key for Martin to come and talk to the group. She says, “We arranged for him to do a keynote address at one of our senior leadership strategy conferences and he blew our leaders away.”
Post that, she and Liza arranged for a group of their internal coaches to attend the Presencing Foundation Programme being run in Cape Town in 2016. Having spent a few days in a cohort composed of participants from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, the coaches, many of them senior leaders in the organisation themselves, left feeling deeply invested in the work. “They became our partners in spreading the word about the value of Theory-U, they helped us co-design the internal programme and became our first community of coaches on the programme,” says Ilka.
She looks back at how things were seeded in multiple places and how it wasn’t all smooth cruising. On the contrary, getting overall buy-in was a lengthy process, not devoid of setbacks or awkwardness (remember the story about the coloured pipe cleaners and plasticine lumps?). But something starts to shift. Ilka concludes:
“And then, when the system’s ready you don’t have to push too hard, because then there’s a lot of pull.”
As a result of increasing traction for the new approaches to leadership that have successfully been infused into the bank’s culture, Liza Stead, Coaching and Mindfulness Lead at RMB, describes the shifts in behaviours and habits inside the bank — practices and new routines that once upon a time would not have been possible. There is now a new acquired understanding of what the Theory U practices can do in terms of encouraging new business innovation, like including moments for pausing: “Just being able to take those mini-retreat opportunities, like micro-opportunities in the course of a day or a week. And people are willing to disconnect and take some time out to retreat and go deeply within to figure some stuff out, and to come up with good ideas, and so I think there’s been personal and an organisational benefit through that.”
What’s interesting is that they are now reaching the point of exploring what it would mean to take the System Mastery programme, co-developed with the Presencing Institute, to an enterprise-wide scale: “We are in an exciting place in terms of how we make that happen.”
Relationships and Influence: connecting to the right people
Ilka and Liza, in working to bring in a concrete Theory U program to transform leadership methodologies and culture at RMB, seeded and watered the shift at several levels — not just in broad daylight through identifying, connecting to, and leveraging influential figures, but also below the ground, by helping to inject calibrated doses of secret fertiliser into the right pockets of soil: in the context of a bank culture, this meant operating indirectly and via the backstage, to secure individual buy-ins for getting experimental, from players at all levels of power and authority inside the company.
Ilka for instance leveraged goodwill and enthusiasm by calling in as programme speakers powerful and authoritative voices from the ecosystem, such as that of Nicola Galombik of Yellowwoods Holdings. Yellowwoods is a successful business entity with a very strong investment arm, so it got many people quite excited about what other work they could do in partnership with Yellowwoods. Says Ilka: “We’ve often found that you introduce something in the formality of the program, and once people have had that introduction, then they take those relationships and deepen them, and do something more with them.”
Influence and shaping also took place backstage. Ilka and Liza reveal to us that there are a lot of partners helping to sense what’s going on in the system. These are coaches, colleagues involved in organisational development, and business partners that they can rely on to provide input and feedback. “That’s been really useful in terms of having greater clarity as to what is needed at different points in time.”
Ilka has an almost mischievous air as she shares one of her strategic moves, about how to cultivate influence indirectly towards creating the conditions for leadership maturity:
“When people aren’t looking, you can invite a friend and bring them on board, and then they become your partner somewhere else in the organisation: you just have to make sure you’ve got enough friends and then all of a sudden, you get traction, and you all own it together.”
From my conversation with Ilka and Liza, it seems that the success of the transformation process has hinged upon staying attentive to getting tonality and timing just right. So it’s a subtle combination of knowing: how to wait; when to step back or course-correct if the moment does not feel sufficiently ripe; how to tap into the realities on the ground to meet the moment in a manner that will unlock opportunity; and last but not least, how to connect with the right people, and say the right thing, in the right way, at the right time.
Deeper Dives — coming soon
Read more about how the leaders of Rand Merchant Bank have been sculpting their own future and that of their industry:
Part 1: A glimpse into leadership transformation in the financial services sector, in South Africa [published Dec 2022]
and in the next articles, soon to be published.
Part 3: Developing a Culture of Care within the System: in conversation with Dawn Philip and Kim Holmes of Rand Merchant Bank, South Africa [coming later in 2023]
Part 4: A banker’s social responsibility: in conversation with Alistair Brown and Sylvester Selepe of Rand Merchant Bank, South Africa [coming later in 2023]
Part 5: On inclusive growth and shared value: in conversation with Jerrod Moodley of FirstRand Ltd., South Africa [coming later in 2023]
Part 6: Listening from different perspectives: in conversation with Julia Phillips of FirstRand Ltd., South Africa [coming later in 2023]
