• My sector
• Points of Pain
• Self Diagnostics
• FREE Insights
• Products & Services
• About Virtual Group
• Our People

Products and Services

• Strategic
• Change
• People Development
• Optimising Performance
• Measurement, Financial
• Marketing, Communications

Change Lessons on Change

Written by Bruce Holland

Lesson from the BNZ

My views on empowerment have been strongly influenced by the four years I was Group Strategic Planning Manager at Bank of New Zealand. I joined the bank in 1988 when it was on its knees. The New Zealand Public had just been asked to contribute $600 million to save the Bank from bankruptcy. The Managing Director took his top team away for a four-day strategic planning workshop to try and find solutions to the problem.

His opening statement was: “It’s not my Bank. It’s our Bank, and if we gonna make it work will have to do it together!” At the end of the four days the only really important decision we made was the understanding that “It’s not our Bank. It’s our Bank and if we gonna make it work will have to do it together!”.

The next four years in conjunction with Booz Allen I helped manage the empowerment process which involved 6500 staff in 300+ workshops. The process was designed to make sure everyone touched it.

The improvements had to be seen to be believed. In the four years the bank went from being almost bankrupt to being first to second in nearly every key measurement of success.

Lessons since BNZ

1. Don’t attempt it without the senior management support
2. Put most of the effort into managers, they will be the problem. Front line are like ducks to water.
3. Involve people in deciding what will be done, then you won’t need as much effort in communicating it or implementing it.
4. Involve people as equals otherwise they will become political and stuff it up for you.
5. Start simple and build ownership before sophistication.
6. Align key supporting processes including: 1. Performance management, 2. Feedback. 3. Rewards, 4. Recruitment and retention.
7. Put most effort into unconscious aspects - heart, emotions, feelings, trust, security. The head will follow but it will not lead the way.
8. People do not resist change, they only resist being changed.
9. Those things that get recorded and rewarded tend to be the things that get achieved
10. Focus on behaviour more than results
11. The power is not in the nodes, it is in the connections. Therefore we should spend far more time focused on relationships & less time building structures.
12. Ease off the rule books and focus on providing meaning, freeing people, establish three big values.
13. Complex systems have evolved from the bottom up, not the top down. Change processes need to be designed in the same way.
14. Grow by chunking. Big bang, top down change processes won’t work.
15. There are many futures. Look for what works rather than optimisation. The best option is to keep as many options open as possible. Forget elegance; if it works, it's beautiful
16. Maximise the fringes. Healthy fringes speed adaptation, increase resilience, and are almost always the source of innovations.
17. Honour your errors. Lesson: It’s not only okay to make mistakes’, it’s essential!