Enhancing psychological safety
How Metro Bank equipped senior leaders to re-energise people and performance following a period of organisational change
CLIENT STORY
The challenge
The bank’s leadership team faced a pivotal moment following an organisational restructure.
Although widely understood by employees from a strategic and commercial standpoint, morale was, unsurprisingly, affected. In a company with consistently impressive employee engagement scores and whose identity has long been rooted in honouring people through trust, fun, inclusion and connection, the transformation had generated an emotional response.
It would be critical for senior leaders to be able to facilitate impactful conversations, re-energise relationships, and galvanise performance around the refreshed strategy.
KCM’s key objectives were to:
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Prompt leaders to take ownership of decision-making and strategic implementation.
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Foster honest dialogue among leaders and with their teams to address the impact of recent changes and to reorient themselves to the future.
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Restore psychological safety to drive commitment, accountability and long-term performance.
Our approach
1 / Employee feedback
Detailed review of the company's latest employee surveys to understand patterns and indicators of trust, accountability, and psychological safety.
2 / Leadership workshops
A series of workshops with all senior leadership team (SLT) members, working in small groups. These were designed to challenge leaders to examine their own beliefs and recent behaviours, discuss their current challenges, and create actionable plans for leading their people through the next phase. The sessions were carefully integrated into a sequence of SLT interactions with the Chief Exec, Comms team, and wider Executive team, helping to unify leaders around real-time goals and data.
3 / Cascading tool
To enable leaders to have impactful conversations with their own teams, we designed a custom card game for leaders to keep. This tool enabled team discussions around critical but hard-to-broach topics such as trust, culture, accountability, and psychological safety.
4 / Self-serve resources
Understanding the challenges that leaders would face when implementing new strategies, we developed a suite of bonus resources. Available online, they provided leaders with practical advice on how to overcome common obstacles, communicate vision, and structure team meetings during times of change.
5 / Insights and recommendations
A detailed report summarising the culturally meaningful aspects of the workshop discussions and offering recommendations for supporting leadership, performance, and culture going forward.
Participant feedback
The impact
Immediately:
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100% of senior leaders said the experience was relevant and helpful.
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100% of senior leaders said they would use the insights from the workshop in their role.
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Teams continue to use the card game across the business (as evidenced by leaders and managers requesting more sets from the Talent team) over three months later.
One year later:
“Over the year, we’ve definitely seen a shift in leaders owning the message more clearly.
In response to our most recent set of announcements, for instance, the professionalism and presence we’ve seen from this leadership population has been exceptional.
These sessions have absolutely created positive shifts in their ability to face into difficult stuff and lead people through change in a positive way – which is really strong at the moment.”
– Head of Talent Management and Leadership Development