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Leadership Programme for Santander

'Be the Best Leaders' Leadership Programme

CHALLENGE

To develop a brand-new leadership programme to drive forward a cultural shift by instilling positive behaviours and giving leaders permission ‘to be the best leaders they could be’.

The success of the Programme would be measured through the people sentiment scores within employee surveys conducted in the business. An equally important measure of success would be what people were saying about the Programme in the business and whether people were scrambling to be included in the second wave of the roll-out.

OUR APPROACH

Following a period of intensive consultation with key sponsors and stakeholders in Santander, it was agreed that the new programme would consist of a modern, innovative, mixed-media programme, consisting of a cohort-based schedule of development activity over a 10-month period, including:

  • A core Programme of 3 x 2-day collaborative workshops, designed to be highly immersive to ensure a very personal experience for learners that challenged them to stretch their thinking.
  • Signposting participants to relevant internal e-learning and bitesize modules
  • A campaign of weekly ‘pokey-coach’ communications to encourage Learners to reflect on key messages from the workshops and as a prompt to maintain their efforts to embed the learning
  • An underpinning social media learning community for participants in the Programme to share their successes and challenges and to expand on topics from the Programme
  • Workplace projects to encourage innovation, reward proactive action and demonstrate agile approaches.

A robust evaluation strategy to inform ongoing refinements of content and approach in order to optimise the success of the Programme.

“The Santander Leadership Programme is an inspirational, powerful and innovative programme. It has matured enough to reap measurable rewards yet remains truly ground-breaking and exceptional in its field. The programme’s innovative delivery and unique attributes have had an ongoing business impact that will only continue to expand in reach and influence.”

Santander L&D Project Lead

Outcomes

c1300 leaders completed the programme and evidence showed:

  • A statistically relevant positive shift in people sentiment scores
  • 100% of line managers believed the programme had been a good use of their learner’s time
  • 92% of learners said they would recommend the programme to one or more of their colleagues
  • 92% of Line Managers said they had noticed improvements in the learner’s leadership behaviour
  • c1000 leaders were actively involved in the social media learning community
  • c255 leaders were identified as ‘High Potential Talent’ for the business as part of the Programme.

Wave 2 of the programme achieved a wait list of over 100 before enrolment commenced.

More significantly, over 200 high-impact innovations were introduced in the business; increasing efficiency, improving customer experiences and making meaningful differences to people’s lives.

The Programme went on to be recognised as ‘People Development Programme of the Year 2016’ (Gold Award) in the LPI Learning Awards

Allow Us To Improve Performance Through Leadership...

We have asked people why they choose to work with us and keep coming back, and overwhelmingly they told us that no one else works so effectively to improve performance through people.