The Dutch banking giant ING aims to be ahead of the curve – especially when it comes to digitisation and improving customer experience. Its big, bold Think Forward strategy, which launched four years ago, does just that, by creating a single digital platform for banking. The ambitious strategy, among others, means that, in every country, ING’s banks will use standardised infrastructure, data and support – making services simpler for customers and the bank’s operations more efficient.
Think Forward plays “an essential role in enhancing the capability of management: creating better managers and greater leaders,” says Hein Knaapen, ING’s chief HR officer. Knaapen, who has worked in human resources for 33 years, had been involved with a number of good leadership programmes previously. However, none of these programmes had resulted specifically in behavioural changes from managers, so he was determined to try something different.
The process began with utilising sources such as ING’s employee engagement survey and its biannual organisational health inventory. Through these existing data sources, Knaapen and his team identified six capabilities that the company needed at the top in order to drive the Think Forward strategy: self-awareness, personal ownership, collaboration, sustained high performance, talent development and performance transparency.
Knaapen’s team successfully delivered a learning programme for the 250 most senior leaders in the organisation. The next stage was to develop a programme for the 6,000 managers. It was a task that required breadth and depth of both leadership and management expertise – which is why ING approached London Business School (LBS) – a learning partner that has five decades’ experience of building and delivering customised training programmes for large global organisations.
With LBS, and collaborating with two niche learning providers, ING developed the first wave of a customised programme, the Think Forward Leadership Experience (TFLE). It had the intensity of the senior programme and was practical enough to deliver to 6,000 managers in multiple countries, in just over 18 months. Launched in 2017 and continuing until 2019, participants are spending four days face-to-face learning, followed by an e-learning element carried out in their own time. So far, 2,000 employees have completed the programme.
The decision to use LBS has paid off, Knaapen says: “They are quick to learn about the bank, they are quick to grasp the culture, and they are also very reliable operators. Designing the programme, collecting the ideas – that’s essential, but it is also essential to have it seamlessly delivered.”
The focus in the first wave is to enhance the qualities of self-awareness, personal ownership and collaboration in ING’s managers. The aim in those four intensive, face-to-face days is to encourage participants to think about themselves: what is their unique contribution? What is it that drives them? Knaapen believes that companies too often focus on employees’ deficiencies during evaluations and what they need to work on. “It’s questionable whether that gets you to great performance,” he says, and adds, quoting Einstein: “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” By contrast, the TFLE programme “stimulates people to look at themselves from the perspective of what they could uniquely contribute”.
Another part of the programme, delivered both by LBS professors and ING’s own senior managers, is about equipping managers with a deeper understanding of ING’s strategy, and includes exercises in team effectiveness and collaboration. It is, says Knaapen, a “pretty busy programme”. It’s also an excellent opportunity for groups of 100 people, who have never met each other before, but are part of the same company, to connect – in Knaapen’s words “to work hard and share a beer”.
Marco Eijsackers, managing director of private banking at ING, has participated in TFLE, and says the programme has helped him think about his strengths and focus on what he could bring to ING. Eijsackers had already taken a six-month advanced development programme at LBS, and found it helped enable him to make the transition from being a functional manager to a general manager. He was able to identify his own ability as a “kickstarter”, someone who could have a vision and then work to realise that vision – a talent that will soon be put to the test when he sets up a new banking operation for ING in Germany. As well as taking part in TFLE, he acted as a facilitator on some of the courses, and was able to see how the experience changed people. “What I’ve seen, is that things really started to happen in just a couple of days, when people really started digging a little bit deeper into: ‘When was I at my best or how do I face challenges?’” he says.
When managers have completed the four-day programme, they continue their participation through e-learning, which they do at their own pace, but with email reminders to complete, for example, 30 minutes modules with deadlines of three weeks away. There are also plans to make the e-learning element more personalised, Knaapen says.
ING is already seeing the difference that the TFLE programme has made. Its organisational health inventory, which measures 37 management practices to produce a health outcome, has seen an increase in all scores relating directly to leadership. “At an anecdotal level I’m getting reports of people saying: ‘This is really very good, I think this is going to help me’, but the real data cautiously points to the success of the programme.”
There’s another year to run before ING starts the second wave, but what Knaapen has seen of the programme in action has been very satisfying. “I’ve got the best operators in my own team working on this together with LBS, and they delight me with the delivery. It looks good, it feels good – there are no complaints.”
