Leadership and Executive Development 6-month programs in Financial Services

Industry: Global Financial Services

Project: Equipping Leaders with Tools and Strategies for a Cultural Transformation

The Challenge

A prominent multinational bank, renowned for its extensive financial services, strong global presence, and dedication to community development, approached Kirke Leadership with a few challenges:

Enhancing Work Culture: Employee engagement scores indicated a need to improve the workplace culture and the perception of leadership among team members.

Leadership Development: The senior leadership team identified that their financial leaders, often promoted for their technical skills in finance, would benefit from tools and learning opportunities to enhance their emotional intelligence, leadership capabilities, and influence.

Equitable Talent Strategies: With global operations, it is crucial for this large organization to ensure that their talent strategies align with their values of equity and inclusion, enabling them to effectively manage a global workforce in a complex, dynamic, and fast-paced environment.

The Partnership Approach

The official partnership commenced in late 2019 when Kirke Leadership Inc. (KLI) engaged with the Bank’s Learning and Development leads to discuss strategy, objectives, target audience, and desired outcomes. With the onset of the pandemic in early 2020, the context drastically shifted. We swiftly adapted, transitioning to virtual meetings to plan and deliver the leadership program throughout the year. The programs were modified for virtual delivery, fostering opportunities for participants to learn and grow together despite the challenging circumstances. Throughout this journey, KLI developed robust programming for the virtual space and increased our leadership toolkit with even more engaging tools and simulations to ensure that the development programs would have a global impact and that each participant felt personally invested in the outcomes.

KLI’s Competitive Advantage

Kirke Leadership (KLI) is recognized for our expertise in leadership development along with our ability to partner with consistent warmth, professionalism, and a relentless commitment to success for our clients. We deliver exceptional quality content and leading-edge simulations, assessments, and resources for leaders to navigate through change in both the in-person context and the virtual environment.

Our process involves the following steps to ensure every learning experience is relevant to the client context:

• Program Discovery (to understand your objectives)
• Program Design (based on our Discovery findings)
• Program Toolkit for each participant
• Virtual Kick Off Session with organization sponsor and Kirke Leadership
• Information for Leaders of Leaders to support participants
• Program partners identified
• Assessments + debrief
• Workshops that align with program objectives
• Mid-way check-in to ensure success, alignment
• Learning partners are assigned to practice applying new concepts and provide feedback to each other
• Certificate provided for the program

The Solution

With the input from the Learning and Development Leads at the Bank, KLI designed and successfully delivered 2 levels of leadership programming. One 6-month program for the Leader/Director level and one 6-month program for the Managing Directors/VPs.

A sample of the Leadership Program:

A sample of the Senior Leadership Development Program:

The Outcome

Kirke Leadership’s approach ensured that Leaders at both levels were equipped with the skills necessary to lead effectively, drive innovation, and foster a positive organizational culture. KLI’s programs, tailored to the specific needs of the Bank, have resulted in significant improvements in leadership acumen, employee engagement, and overall organizational performance.