Nicolas Ceasar (PCC), reports on an award-winning internal coaching initiative at NatWest bank
It’s a crisp autumnal day in early October 2019 and we’ve been invited to take part in a panel interview in the City of London. The bank I work for has been shortlisted for a coaching award with the Training Journal.
The interview is in the Shard on the 11th of its 87 glass and steel-clad floors and as we sit down one can’t help but notice the breath-taking view as floor to ceiling glass frames the iconic square mile. Across an oversized white gloss boardroom table sit the judging panel. As we begin I unhelpfully picture Alan Sugar sitting in their place in his role as The Apprentice adjudicator. I stare forebodingly down the barrel of his career-limiting index finger.
One of our senior traders starts to talk about the experience of our coaching activity. He describes the frenetic, high-pressured and competitive open-plan environment of our trading floor, with its predilection for quick thinking, fast talking and split-second decision making. Then he turns his attention to our coaching activity.
Having been in the business many years and experienced several development programmes and interventions, he points out the difference between what we might say are more traditional training experiences and the coaching interventions which aim to facilitate better thinking and enhance self-efficacy. He talks about how the training of leaders to coach has not only helped him improve the performance of his direct team but how conversations across the floor have improved in quality and sophistication and moved from something that could be perceived as combative towards interactions that provide an improved ability to think and build solutions together for individual, team and client success.
The trader had received coaching from an internal leadership coach, trained in coaching practice via our Coaching for Leaders (C4L) programme and attended several coaching ‘clinics’ currently available to all UK and US colleagues on a regular basis. With clinics he mentioned how by learning to coach he had become a better coachee and was obtaining even greater value from the time he spent with a coach working through the questions and dilemmas he was faced with on an ad hoc basis. He’d yet to try our team coaching robot, which we’d initially focused on in our technology business.
On hearing this, ‘Lord Sugar’s’ finger was steadfastly replaced by a glowing sense of pride and appreciation for the tenacity, resourcefulness and creativity of the team behind this coaching work. We’d learned a great deal from giants such as GSK, EDF and PwC but we’d also learned from our own application in an investment banking environment.
How did we get there?
As with many internal coaching initiatives, the team’s work was initiated by the need to support a strategically valuable behaviour change requirement.
In 2015, our then group CEO introduced a tried-and-tested leadership and service methodology to the banking group. The approach required all people managers to upskill and to apply the methodology in its entirety without adjustment. The case for doing so was, and still is, compelling. We would all manage our teams and performance in the same way, which would make it easier to execute and cascade our key priorities, reduce friction across the different units and give us all a common language to use. Embedding would be done via dedicated teams of skills coaches who would observe, feed back and correct application of the tools and techniques in service of business outcomes.
The investment bank was no exception though we made one small addition to the approach – we added development coaching to the coaching toolkit. The idea was to loosen the guard rails a little and give more choice to our leaders in terms of choosing what, from the toolkit, worked best for them. This was to mitigate what we perceived could be a defiant response from our colleagues in relation to the prescribed change, or perhaps worse, an unthinking, robotic and compliant one.
Between 2015 and the Training Journal interview we went through what can be thought of as three distinct phases of maturity as part of building the nascent coaching culture we have today. Stage one focused on ‘gaining legitimacy’, stage two on ‘professionalisation’ and stage three on ‘scale’.
Gaining legitimacy
Despite endorsement from our executive team, we knew that getting genuine buy-in and sustained local support for the behaviour change work would be harder in a characteristically more individualistic, critical and competitive environment.
Gaining and maintaining legitimacy was achieved in two ways.
First, rather than recruit coaches unfamiliar with the business we recruited business people and then gave them coaching development and supervision. We interviewed instead for the ability to be client-centred, empathic and interested in others, adaptable to different personality types, committed to personal development and growth and having an outcome focus. As a result, some of our more successful recruits had plenty of client-facing experience and were adroit in many of these areas. They simply needed nudging towards a coaching approach.
Second, we built an ROI and ROE (E for expectations) process that looked to capture and monetise (where possible) quantifiable benefits at the individual, team and business levels. We borrowed heavily from Mary Beth O’Neill’s approach (2000, p.105) for this as well as adding additional confidence weightings to make the returns as conservative as possible. ROE gave us narrative to further sell our services and the insight to adjust course as needed.
Over the first year the team supported more than 400 leaders from offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, New York and Europe. Our largest ROI was in the tens of millions, with averages in the tens of thousands, so we were more than covering our costs. We quickly understood that coaching was providing one of the most valuable and yet finite resources our leaders had and that they were benefiting hugely. It was dedicated time to think and with a thought partner.
Upon sharing the ROI and ROE findings with our executive team, few could deny that some of our most vociferous leaders had put pounds, dollars and yen to their coaching experience. Extraordinary. The CEO agreed to have lunch with a number of coachees in order to further understand.
Professionalisation
With our legitimacy established we were able to move away from being composed entirely of business people to recruiting coaches from different backgrounds. Some of the new coaches were OD, L&D and coaching professionals from within banking but we also hired a performance psychologist from British Olympic Sport and the CEO of a management consultancy, both with little to no banking experience.
While this felt risky, we believed that a coach with four Olympic medals under their belt was unlikely to feel out of their depth for long and would quickly see the parallels between their old context and the new one.
Another component of professionalisation was to make better use of our data. By this stage it was clear that non-attributable and yet frequently cited issues and themes from coaching and group supervision offered potential strategic insight. We began using this insight in support of other activities around conduct and culture, having monthly sessions with the operations team for example, in order to give a regular temperature check on the organisation. Commonly recurring topics also helped to inform wider L&D and OD interventions. In 2017, for example, our top five topics were: stakeholder management/influencing, prioritisation and focus, client relationships, team effectiveness and leadership impact. Each of these could then be investigated further in order to build more scalable solutions as were deemed necessary.
Scale
The lunch with the CEO and coachees went well. Perhaps too well. And so in July 2016 and knowing our cost constraints, the CEO asked that we make coaching available to everyone in the organisation. With a goal this big we were forced to take a step back, look at what we were doing more fundamentally and turn to technology and process changes for help. At the time not all of these changes were welcomed by the coaches.
Here are a few examples.
Contract length – one of the first things we looked at were coaching contracts. Almost all of these at the time were for one-to-one coaching and 12 hours in length which could be used in different ways according to the client. Could we be as effective with nine hours? Or with six? The coaches were much more experienced by this point and given that the contextual aspect of the coaching was broadly similar, perhaps we could.
In addition, who we coach with contracts such as this and how coaching is allocated would need more scrutiny through tighter partnering with the business. We would further align the coaching to key strategic priorities, critical role holders and/or high performers.
Coaching clinics – conversely, and to make coaching more accessible, we launched coaching clinics. These are 50-minute coaching sessions held face to face every Tuesday (in the case of the UK) and bookable from the intranet. Nothing stops someone booking a series of sessions to create a ‘contract’ style experience but with coaches potentially differing each time the onus is on the coachee to bridge sessions.
For some of the coaches, adapting to this ‘rapid coaching’ format challenged their view of what ‘good coaching’ consists of and they engaged sceptically. Pretty soon though we learned that as long as the session contract was clear, expectations managed, and time set aside to end the session cleanly, significant impact could be made in a small amount of time.
Of all of the OD and L&D interventions undertaken in the business, clinics persistently attract our highest Net Promoter Scores (measuring customer experience and predicting business growth) with open text feedback such as “it’s having opportunities provided like these to help me think about my work and career that make me proud to work for this organisation”.
Coaching bot – something that didn’t directly replace or augment what we were already doing but helps us to support an increase in global and virtual team working was the integration of the team coach bot service provided by Saberr. Saberr’s technology is attractively low-tech and not intended to replicate a human. It nudges a team to pay ongoing attention to the ‘how’ as well as the ‘what’ of the team by actively diagnosing the extent to which team members are aligned around priorities, behaviours and purpose, three areas Saberr’s research point to as critical enablers of high performance. The potential of coach bots, both in terms of cost and scalability, make them something we will continue to experiment with, and our sense is that in our organisation something a little higher touch will be required medium term.
Looking ahead
Over this period neither the rest of the bank nor the coaching industry have stood still. The wider bank has come to realise the value of building on the skills coaching approach already embedded across RBS Group while coaching as a whole is more broadly recognised for its foundational contribution to more empowered colleagues and healthier cultures. The ICF establishing an organisational membership offer for the first time is a notable indicator of such recognition.
As the panel interview ends, I am asked why the award is so important for us. I respond expectantly: “The banking sector is in a perfect storm of change just now and there are many things that we need to be better at in order to win. From sharing and building on ideas, to design thinking, to creating psychologically safe environments that engender increased speak-up, to building inclusive leadership competencies. I believe the work we have done lays the foundations for getting better in all of these areas and the award provides us with a halo that says so, and a torchlight with which we can light our onward journey in the wider group.”
We received a Bronze award for our efforts, conceding to some excellent work in the public sector from a nursing community and a police constabulary. A serial award nominee told me: “You are a bank and you need more of a social purpose to win an award here.” “Perhaps”, I said, “and maybe coaching can help us get there.”
- Nicolas Ceasar (PCC) is head of learning, development and coaching at NatWest Markets Plc, part of RBS Group. Prior to this he was a consultant and faculty for Ashridge Business School
- Ceasar will be sharing this story at the Coaching at Work annual conference in London on 8 July