Be bolder. Feel
stronger. Lead better.

The Challenge

The West Brom is the leading regional building society in the Black Country and Birmingham. More than 160 years old it is also the 7th largest society in the UK with around 446,000 members.

This decade the society resolved to bring a step change in its people development, growing its own future leaders and strengthening leadership skills and behaviours across the organisation to achieve a high performance culture.

The Process

The Evolve programme, established with the support of the Leadership Trust, focussed on guiding teams and their leaders to think differently, identify and maximise the strengths in themselves and in others, learn how to listen and motivate and deliver results under pressure with the courage to try something new.

Outcomes

Both measured results and anecdotal feedback have shown the Evolve project to be popular and successful across the organisation with line managers rating skills and behaviours more highly than before the course, more promotions and secondments taking place, individual employees telling the society they felt they had a strong future within it and more people stepping outside the day to day business to help charities with the skills they’d acquired.

Feedback

100% of those employees who took the Evolve course said they would recommend it to colleagues and 73% said the programme had achieved their expectations – with half saying they felt it had actually exceeded them.

In the Reality Checker surveys taken after the programme, individuals told the organisation they felt…

• “braver in the way I lead”
• “more comfortable in my own authentic leadership style”
• “my team has seen a noticeable difference in me as a leader”
• “become very aware of the need to focus on people – their motivations, fears and ambitions – in order to be more successful and proactive.”

Investors in People said the Evolve programme was an “excellent methodology to define the future requirements of leaders” and provided The West Brom with a resilient and stable business structure. It also steered the society to earning IiP’s Gold Status.