For HSBC, the move into a Managing Director role was not simply about becoming a more senior leader. It meant widening the field of view: from leading a team, function or business well to understanding what it means to lead for the enterprise as a whole.
Working with HSBC and Imperial College Business School, MJA designed and programme-directed Shaping Your Leadership, a focused face-to-face development experience for Managing Directors. The programme was delivered in the UK, Hong Kong and New York. Over time the design was tightened from four days to three, but it remained a single integrated module, supported by a virtual launch, pre-work and peer learning.
The programme was deliberately not built around a conventional curriculum of leadership content. Its developmental spine was a simple four-step framework: Purpose, Insight, Openness and Wisdom. Each step built on the last, creating a pathway from understanding what matters to you as a leader, through greater self-awareness and curiosity about context, towards better judgement and choice.
Purpose asked leaders to reconnect with what they stood for, how that connected to HSBC’s purpose, and how purpose could become a practical compass when the context was messy or uncertain. Insight turned the lens inward, using Korn Ferry Styles and Climate data to help participants understand their strengths, development edges and the climate their leadership created for others.
Openness turned the lens outward. Leaders were encouraged to become more curious about the world around them, challenge assumptions, seek different perspectives and spend more time ‘on the balcony’ noticing patterns, tensions, opportunities and changes in context. At this level, development was less about filling the cup with more ideas and more about making the cup bigger — increasing the capacity to hold complexity.
The final step, Wisdom, brought these strands together. Participants explored the narratives that shape behaviour inside organisations and the choices leaders make when pressures, values and competing demands collide. The emphasis was not on finding a universal right answer, but on exercising discernment: making choices that were consistent with purpose, informed by self-awareness and responsive to context.
The programme also connected explicitly to the HSBC Way as a practical expression of enterprise leadership: leading with purpose, creating the conditions for others to flourish, and driving performance. Personal leadership stories, senior-leader fireside conversations and Peer Learning Groups created the social learning environment in which participants could test what those expectations meant for them in practice.
The international delivery mattered. Hong Kong brought the realities of leading within a highly connected Asian and cross-border banking context; New York foregrounded the challenge of being an MD in the US market while still leading as part of the wider enterprise; and UK cohorts explored many of the same questions against a different organisational and market backdrop. The context changed, but the central invitation did not: how do I need to shape my leadership for the work this role now asks of me?
The value of Shaping Your Leadership lay in creating the space senior leaders rarely get: to step out of the immediate demands of the role, see themselves and the wider system more clearly, and consider how purpose, perspective and judgement needed to change as their enterprise responsibilities grew.