CASE STUDY | FINANCIAL SERVICES
Performance Feedback
Improving employee engagement at Mastercard
Multinational financial services corporation, Mastercard, asked Performance Consultants to design and deliver a global-scale experiential coaching programme to take coaching in the organization to the next level, create a performance feedback culture and deliver an improvement in performance and employee engagement.
“You can change the entire look and feel of a company by making people realize they are not empowered to say no, they are empowered to say ‘yes, if…’ This changes the bureaucracy, the culture, the passion, the purpose. It changes everything. ”
Ajaypal Singh Banga, CEO of Mastercard
The Client
A leader in global payments and a technology company, Mastercard are guided by their purpose manifesto and work to connect and power an inclusive digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere.
The Challenge
In order to support the remit of “competing to win”, managers and leaders needed fully to incorporate coaching skills and behaviours into their management style.
The Global Management Development Lead wanted to create the next step in the coaching journey for their leaders that:
- met Mastercard leaders where they were
- explored strengths and opportunities for growth
- layered in the critical feedback skills that they were looking for
The main objective was to improve employee engagement and measure progress via their annual Employee Engagement Survey.
“One of the key objectives of the programme was to improve our Employee Engagement – we have seen significant improvements and the programme is recognized as a great success by our senior management”
Don K. Carter, Management Development | Global Talent Development & Organizational Effectiveness, St Louis (US), Mastercard
Our Approach
Working in close partnership with the Global Management Development Lead and his team, Performance Consultants designed a modern and leading edge global learning programme and delivered high quality experiential development at scale.
Thorough examination of needs – The annual Employee Engagement Survey was the ultimate test to see how Mastercard were inspiring and engaging their people. The survey included numerous rating questions and a handful of open questions so that employee opinions could be captured. Analysis of most recent survey results covered a broad range of topics including Feedback, Teamwork, Communication, Opportunities for Growth, Work/Life Balance, Fairness, Respect for Management, Respect for Employees, Performance & Accountability and Personal Expression/Diversity.
Developing coaching skills – A tailored coach training programme called Coaching for Impact was developed to enable managers and leaders to incorporate critical coaching skills and behaviours into their management style and address each of the topics in the Employee Engagement Survey.
In the analysis of survey results, feedback was identified as a key area for development so care was taken to equip managers with the practical ability to score highly on feedback survey questions – specifically those orientated around providing feedback to team members to help improve performance and providing opportunities for team members to participate in the goal-setting process.
The programme was delivered via 1.5 day Face to Face workshop followed by 2 virtual workshops.
Train the Trainer sessions – After developing the Coaching for Impact workshops, Performance Consultants trained 42 internal trainers to deliver the programme to all 1,500 people managers globally. The project spanned 15 countries in Europe, the US and Asia-Pacific and was supported by local Performance Consultants team members in each country.
“A person is happy only when he is interested in what he is doing; only then does he feel that the power of his own being is confirmed; only then can he express that power; only then is he not isolated; and only then does he feel connected with the world and not powerless. He can love things, he can love his work and he can love people.”
Author Erich Fromm, Life Between Having and Being
The Results
Getting the skills out to all managers in a timely manner was key to its success – all managers went through the programme in 1 year.
An Employee Engagement Survey was completed once all the managers had gone through the training. It showed an improvement across the board with a noticeable jump in the area of feedback.
After completion of the Coaching for Impact training, Mastercard was externally recognized as one of the best companies to work for by Forbes
Reflections with Sir John Whitmore
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