Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change Ina Toegel spearheaded the impactful program which focused on the leadership development and inspiring a more cohesive and empathic culture.
The bank entered the 2020s in strong position having notched up its best-ever annual result. To maintain this performance in an increasingly complex financial services market, DNB realized that it needed to foster stronger internal collaboration to develop world-class, end-to-end consumer experiences and anticipate its customers’ needs. This meant working as ‘One DNB’.
Working together with DNB, IMD came up with a 10-month action learning journey based around cross-functional shadowing for the company’s top 230 leaders. Broken down into four stages, the program involved a self-awareness stage, a half day of shadowing a peer from another department, and individual and group coaching sessions to debrief and share perspectives.
“Together with IMD, we have created a whole new culture of learning across the organization,” said Katrine Kalelic, DNB Senior Vice President – Head of Leadership, Talent & Team Development. “The combination of action learning methodology with virtual sessions and internal/external coaching has produced new ways of learning – efficient, creative, exciting.”
The program developed a renewed sense of empathy across business units and allowed them to better understand how their actions affected other parts of the organization. Two-thirds of participants said the program contributed to a more effective end-to-end customer journey, while 91% said they collaborate better as a result of the shadowing.
“Partnering with DNB was a very rewarding experience for the IMD team. DNB made a bold choice by opting for an unconventional learning design that included cross-functional shadowing, which took place virtually for 230 leaders. This was a more challenging but ultimately much more impactful learning journey,” Professor Toegel said.
EFMD is the largest international network association in the field of management development. IMD has previously won EFMD Excellence in Practice Awards, which celebrate impactful learning and development partnerships, for case studies on Valmet, OCP, Stora Enso and Siam Commercial Bank.
