Strategic Leadership with Impact: Building a Visionary Future for Your Bank

Introduction

In today’s fast-paced banking environment, the ability to develop and implement effective strategies is crucial to ensure organizational success. To address this need, we have designed a five-day training program aimed at top managers and executives who are involved in strategic decision-making and leading their banks through change and transformation.

This Harvard program focuses on the most relevant topics in strategic management for banks, including understanding competitive environments, analyzing innovation investments, leading change, reinventing business models, and the importance of strategic intent.

This program is for you, if your are ambitious, and want to make a significant achievement in your career.

Harvard series for Banking Professionals and Executives is the definitive collection of ideas and best practices for aspiring and experienced leaders alike. This series offer essential training selected from the pages of Harvard Business Review on topics critical to the success of every manager.

Titles include:

1. Strategic Leadership with Impact: Building a Visionary Future for Your Bank
2. Transforming Strategies into Comprehensive Impact
3. Bank Manager Mastery: A Comprehensive Training Program to Power up Your Performance
4. Empowering Bankers: Communication, Decision Making, and Leadership for Success

Who should attend:

Senior executives, directors, and managers who hold leadership positions one or two levels from the CEO and have been identified as central to the company’s succession plan.

Course Objectives:

• Understand the different strategic styles in the banking industry and learn how to choose the right strategic style for your bank, and avoid the traps that can hinder implementation.
• Learn how to manage your bank’s innovation portfolio effectively, including the 70/20/10 ratio for innovation investment, unique management approaches required for transformational initiatives, and iterative development and pipeline management that can help your bank stay ahead of the competition.
• Develop a deeper understanding of the stages of change in the banking industry and the pitfalls unique to each stage, and learn how to boost the chances of successful transformation efforts for your bank.
• Gain insights into the power of a great banking business model, the challenges of business model innovation in the banking industry, and learn a three-step approach to reinventing your bank’s business model for profitability.
• Learn how to foster conversational leadership in the banking context, engage in genuine conversation with employees, and instill a conversational sensibility throughout the bank to build a more cohesive and collaborative team.
• Understand the importance of strategic intent in outsmarting rivals in the banking industry, learn how to define long-term strategic intent for your bank, and turn it into reality.
• Build competencies to analyze innovation investments and returns in the banking industry, manage transformational initiatives, build a diverse talent pool, and fund transformational initiatives outside of the normal budget cycle to drive innovation and growth.
• Learn how to focus on one banking challenge at a time and fuel an obsessive will to win, to achieve sustainable success in the dynamic and ever-changing banking landscape.

Training Program Outline:

Day 1:  Strategic Intent and Planning in Banking

• Matching Strategy-Making Processes to Competitive Circumstances in the Banking Industry
  • The Four Strategic Styles, and Assessing Your Bank’s Power to Change the Industry Environment
  • The four strategic styles: classical, adaptive, shaping, and visionary.
  • Choosing the Right Strategic Style, Developing a Plan for Implementation, and avoiding the traps.
  • The Importance of Strategic Intent in Outsmarting Rivals 
  • Flaws of Traditional Strategic Planning Approaches
  • Defining Long-Term Strategic Intent and Focusing on One Challenge at a Time
  • Fueling an Obsessive Will to Win and Turning Strategic Intent into Reality

Day 2: Managing Your Innovation Portfolio in the Dynamic Banking Landscape

• Understanding Innovation Ambitions and Investments
• Analyzing innovation investments and returns
• The 70/20/10 ratio for innovation investment
• Managing Transformational Initiatives
• Unique management approaches required for transformational initiatives
• Building a diverse talent pool with a range of skills specific to banking
• Funding transformational initiatives outside of the normal budget cycle
• Iterative Development and Pipeline Management
• Focusing on the iterative development of a few promising ideas
• Non-financial metrics for early phases of innovation
• Case Study discussion.

Day 3: Leading Change in Banking Atmoshpere, Why Transformation Efforts Fail

• Transformation is a process that advances through stages, it is not an event, and it takes time in the banking industry.
• Leaders in banking often make critical mistakes, such as skipping stages or declaring victory too soon.
• Understanding the stages of change and the pitfalls unique to each stage can boost the chances of a successful transformation.
• Corporate change efforts can fall somewhere between success and failure, and for specific reasons
• Critical mistakes in any of the phases can have a devastating impact, slowing momentum and negating hard-won gains.
• Even capable leaders in banking sector often make big errors in renewing organizations.
• Case Study discussion.

Day 4: Reinventing Your Business Model

• The Power of a Great Business Model
• Overcoming the Challenges of Business Model Innovation in Banking
• Understanding Your Existing Model: Key Questions to Ask
• The Blueprint for a Profitable Model
• Reinventing Your Banking Model: When and How to Do It
• A Three-Step Approach to Business Model Innovation: From Customer Needs to Profitable Banking Solutions
• Case Study discussion.

Day 5: Leadership with Impact

• Empowering personal branding techniques in boosting your influence
• One-way communication between leaders and employees is no longer effective in the banking industry.
• Leaders who engage in genuine conversation with their employees achieve greater engagement and credibility.
• Digital and social technologies have given employees a public voice that leaders need to address.
• Conversational leaders can retain or recapture some of the qualities of start-ups.
• Four elements of organizational conversation include intimacy, interactivity, inclusion, and intentionality.

Bonus Case Study: Proposing to Redesign a Global Investment Bank

A major, NYC-based, global investment bank is looking to rethink its Systems strategy amid a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

By David G. Fubini. Source: Harvard Business Review