Old Mutual Wealth was in the middle of a fundamental strategic shift. The business was moving from being primarily a product provider towards becoming a vertically integrated wealth manager — a change that brought new businesses, new capabilities and a much more complex set of relationships into one organisation.
The leadership challenge was not simply to explain the new strategy. People had to make sense of what it meant for their own part of the business, work across previously separate boundaries and help colleagues move towards a future that was still taking shape. Our diagnosis found that there were almost as many versions of that future as there were people describing it.
That became the starting point for Enabling Positive Futures. Rather than treating leadership development as something alongside the transformation, the programme was designed as part of the transformation itself. Its three priorities were to bring “One OMW” to life through collaboration around a common purpose, deepen client focus by helping people see how their decisions affected the whole client experience, and strengthen participants’ capacity to act as changemakers in a complex system.
The design deliberately combined support and stretch. Participants worked in small Home Groups and coaching pairs, explored 360° feedback, examined the emotional as well as rational dimensions of change and practised new ways of influencing, collaborating and leading. The aim was to create enough psychological safety for people to acknowledge what they did not yet know, while challenging them to step outside familiar perspectives and experiment with different behaviour in the work itself.
Measurement was built into the design rather than added at the end. Follow-up data showed that 90% of participants were collaborating more, 83% said they better understood client needs and 83% reported that they had raised the performance level of their teams. The wider business was also moving strongly during the period, but we were careful not to treat organisational performance as something a leadership programme could claim on its own.
The work was recognised with an EFMD Excellence in Practice Silver Award for the partnership between Old Mutual Wealth and Accelerance. The recognition reflected the close connection between the development journey and the transformation the business was actually trying to achieve.
Participants were changing while the organisation around them was changing too. That made the transformation more than a backdrop: it provided the relationships, tensions and choices through which leaders could expand their perspective and practise different ways of leading.