ABSA Capital

 

“Temisan Ofong, the head of Corporate and Investment Banking Coverage and Corporate Distribution at Absa Capital, the South African affiliate of UK based Barclays Capital, was tasked with creating a project leadership team for a programme touching multiple parts of the investment, business and retail bank.

The vision of the programme was to improve the revenues, operational performance and market share positioning of the banks’ foreign exchange and global trade business within a targeted 3 year period. Collaboration was a key requirement for such a diverse group of people, functions and roles. TPA was brought in to Team Coach them on:

• How to function as a high performing leadership team
• How to efficiently and effectively manage and balance the programme’s demands with their day jobs
• How to manage change within the business
• How to get discretionary effort from their people to deliver this critical project for the bank

Quarterly team coaching sessions were held with the various foreign exchange and global trade front and back office leadership teams to encourage the right working environment to crystallize the project strategy, behaviours and attitudes and work streams that would deliver the ultimate vision of Absa’s leading FX platform in South Africa.

Ofong said, “The coaching sessions served to drive team collaboration and alignment of messaging throughout the business. We continue to work with TPA coaching select leaders 1:1 and our leadership teams, holding us accountable for our best practice to each other, our people and the project.”

In addition to the team coaching, TPA facilitated the development of an Advanced Learning and Solutioning Course for the front office foreign exchange and global trade salesforce. The course was designed to galvanise the newly formed team, to encourage a change in mindset from product-push selling to solutions selling. The course emphasised coaching-based skills and the adoption of behaviours and techniques that would enable better conversations with clients and colleagues and better solutioning of clients needs by understanding and leveraging the ‘One Absa’ strategy.

During the last quarter of 2010, over 150 foreign exchange and global trade sales specialists, Regional Managers and Relationship Bankers completed the tailored 3 day Advanced Learning & Solutioning Course.  In the following quarter this team not only met but exceeded their new targets.”

Julia Kerr
Head of Change Management & Project Communications
Project FoeniX, ABSA Capital