Webinar Summary – Building a Coaching Culture at Standard Chartered Bank

Guest Speaker: 

Pranav Shirke, Senior Manager of Organization Development at Standard Chartered Bank; Product Owner of Change Agent Programme and Coaching; Coach; Change Catalyst; Facilitator; Management Consultant; Researcher

Moderator: 

Fatima Hussain, Psychologist and Research Analyst, uExcelerate

Overview:

The work environment today is highly competitive and stressful, demanding a lot from employees and allowing very little room for mistakes. Many companies are now seeing the advantage of building their own internal coaching culture that will allow them to develop their personalised coach pool from their internal team; allowing leaders to foster a safe space for their company and employees within to resolve conflicts, learn to manage stress and deal with problems that have been plaguing the company. Listening to the experiences of companies that have successfully built internal coaching cultures will help create a deeper understanding of the process and steps to initiate the process.

Context: 

Pranav Shirke shared his experience, insights and the steps he took to successfully build a sustainable coaching culture at Standard Chartered Bank.

Key Takeaways: 

Developed a mission to democratise coaching through three key levers:

The mission was to make coaching accessible to all the employees within Standard Chartered Bank in moments that matter to them the most while simultaneously creating a coaching mission that would align with their strategy to build their future workforce and strengthen their diversity and inclusion agenda.

The process was undertaken through three key levers:

1, Upskilling the People Leaders: The goal was that all employees should approach their people leaders as the first call for assistance and coaching conversations. Thus, the first goal was to upskill and develop basic coaching skills for the people leaders.

2. Building a cadre of internal certified coaches: The process to build an internal coach pool was initiated a couple of years ago with a small experiment called Ignite. Today they have developed a pool of 180 internal certified coaches.
3. Provide access to external coaching partners: These external partners add more values and bring interventions which can cater across different levels of the organisation.

“When all three levers work in harmony with each other; is when we can create a true coaching culture.” 

Convinced the top management by unleashing the potential of the women leaders

To convince top management about the benefits of building an internal coaching culture a small experiment was started with a pilot group of 10 women leaders. Over the course of 6 to 7 months a great difference could be seen in this pilot group. This became the selling point that impacted the top management  which persuaded the CEO of Standard Chartered Bank to encourage the team to scale up coaching to the next level.

Engage coaches by reinvesting money into their development

Standard Chartered Bank charges internal clients who want to receive coaching a small fee of around $1000.  The money received from clients is then reinvested back into the development of coaches.  Coaches are also given various incentives to ensure that they are always thinking about growth and development.

Engaged employees through a 48 hour Coachathon 

In June, a 48 hour Coachathon was initiated for the employees to help raise awareness around the benefits of coaching. The Coachathon included 100 coaches and 300 coachees engaging in 45 minute coaching conversations. The Coachathon was open to all employees across the global branches including India, Singapore, England, Malaysia, UAE, and America. The employees were encouraged to talk about any topic they wanted. The Coachathon was a great hit with 80% employees saying they really valued the entire experience and would like to engage in more coaching sessions. Awareness campaigns have also been initiated to help encourage employees to engage in coaching sessions.

Success was measured through three levels

1. The Individual level in terms of testimonials from employees on how coaching is impacting them
2. The team level in terms of the changes they have made in the organisation
3. The job changes, promotions, improvement in performance that helped both the employee and the enterprise

The organisation faced two main challenges when integrating a coaching culture:

1. Cost –  It is difficult to provide people leader coaching as well as internal coaches to everyone within the organisation. That is why it becomes necessary to have access to external partners as well. However the cost of external providers can be daunting. The challenge is in trying to make coaching available across the different levels of the organisation in an economical way while using both internal and external providers.
2. The organisation is very large and many problems come up in different groups. It becomes challenging to ensure coaching meets all the diverse requirements and needs of the organisation.

If the coaching culture was to be built again; technology would be leveraged in a big way

When integrating the coaching culture a big void was felt due to the absence of any technology or platform to help in the coaching sessions. Technology would have really helped them accelerate the pace of their mission.

Secondly, championing the coaching cause across the organisation through the practitioners and community of practitioners would have allowed more people within the organisation to come together, giving them a platform to share their experiences and building a community of practice.

uExcelerate as a Coaching Tool

uExcelerate can help you seamlessly integrate a coaching culture within your organisation. Whether you want to develop your coaches internally or hire them externally, uExcelerate can aid you in that process.

Why uExcelerate?

uExcelerate provides on-demand online Coaching to companies, non-profit organizations and government institutions. The services rendered by our experienced and certified coaches can help you or your professionals achieve personal transformation, leading towards tangible organizational goals.

uExcelerate’s cloud based AI enabled platform is a one-stop coaching management tool, designed to manage your client / employee coaching lifecycle and one that allows easy integration of a coaching culture with the help of a coach and your organization. The platform helps you establish and run your customized internal coaching program end to end for effective coaching engagement for your clients/employees.

uExcelerate’s platform is built to help people realise their own potential. It allows you to empower employees from the get go. The platform helps employees, managers, HR teams, and the training and development department all in one place. It allows coaches, companies and clients to come together.

The platform provides you with:

•  Flexible sessions: allowing you to schedule sessions on the day and time that suits you best. It is integrated with a video facility so that you can have all your zoom sessions on the platform itself.
• Scalable: The platform is scalable, so if you want to have coaching sessions for multiple employees at the same time, the platform allows you to do that.
• Data Analytics: uExcelerate provides you with data analytics so that you can measure your behavioural transformation and access your securely stored progress reports from anywhere.
• Customizable: The platform allows you to customise your program to ensure that you get the best out of your learning journey.
• Modular: uExcelerate provides you with modular plans, giving you the option of choosing the solution completely or partly, depending on your need.
• Democratization: It also allows you the ability to democratize coaching by providing different options suiting your requirements such as one-on-one, team or group sessions.

The Coaches

uExcelerate provides you with a curated marketplace with over 150 coaches from around the world for you to choose from. All the coaches on the platform are experienced, certified and specialised in their fields of knowledge. All the coaches are certified from reputed organisations, with a minimum of 5 years of experience in their field of work and at least 500 coaching hours under their belt. The coaches are selected to ensure that they can help you with all your problems and help you grow into a better version of yourself. The AI enabled platform helps you choose the coach that fits your needs best. With the help of your right fit coach you can grow into the best version of yourself that will excel at work and in life.
Pranav Shirke is a  Senior Manager of Organization Development at Standard Chartered Bank. He is the Product Owner of Change Agent Programme and Coaching.

He has expertise in coaching, facilitation, management consulting and research with twenty five years of experience in financial services. Pranav’s previous stints include roles at McKinsey & Company and PricewaterhouseCoopers. He is a certified professional coach from Co-Active Training Institute (USA). 200+ hours of coaching across leadership levels. Pranav holds a Management degree from Welingkar Institute of Management; CFA, Finance from ICFAI and Graduate CWA. He is a core certified facilitator and trainer conducting change agent upskilling, induction, leadership development, coaching, problem-solving and financial literacy programs.

Fatima Hussain is a psychologist and research analyst at uExcelerate. She holds a Masters Degree in Applied Psychology with a specialisation in counseling. Prior to uExcelerate, she has worked with three different organisations and she has acquired good skills in educational psychology and related areas. She is primarily responsible for research in the field Coaching Psychology and helping in conceptualizing the framework for the Applied Coaching Science and Leadership Lab. She carries out research work in the space of coaching science, leadership development, generates high quality & value content related to coaching science & adult learning and builds the conceptual foundation for the product/software development team for building cutting-edge platforms.