Transforming the Performance of Strategic Alliance Managers

Challenge

In a dynamic and rapidly growing financial services business many customer service functions had been outsourced to strategic partners.

The team responsible for managing the network had recently restructured, and set itself the goal of becoming a ‘centre for excellence’ but lacked objective data from stakeholders to understand their effectiveness and plan development. We were tasked to:

 » Provide impartial data-based analysis on the effectiveness of their stakeholder relationships

 » Help the team to understand their feedback and determine priorities for development

 » Facilitate an actionable performance improvement plan

Method

 » We developed a bespoke 360 survey from our in-house question bank that addresses the core team competencies we associate with high performance.

 » An online survey was delivered to nearly 150 people at 6 month intervals.The second survey was supplemented by structured interviews  of the key stakeholders.

 » We presented detailed final reports identifying strengths and areas for development then engaged the business through workshops with the leadership team and coached them to lead workshops with their direct reports.

 » We facilitated workshops helped the team to understand how they are regarded by stakeholders and to identify and commit to improvement opportunities.

Result

 » Stakeholder analysis is a tool but also an attitude of mind.

 » Our work embedded much greater awareness of the need to engage with customers and suppliers, and to see things from their point of view.

 » Our work identified priorities and helped the team to develop strategies for success. The team scored significant improvements on all major development areas and maintained or increased performance on their strengths at the second survey.

The team has committed to a self-improvement programme, leadership of which has been distributed to team members.