Legal & General - Raising the game

Legal & General plc (L&G) has engaged CITI many times over the years in a number of its businesses to provide project, corporate portfolio and programme management education and consultancy. Legal & General Group (a FTSE 100 company) is one of the best known and respected financial services companies in the UK.

They are a leading provider of risk, savings and investment management products in the UK, with nearly seven million customers worldwide. In response to a rapidly changing business environment in their Individual Protection business, they needed to improve their capability to deliver change. We were asked to outline an approach to assess their current change capability, benchmark this against similar organisations, and design a targeted development programme that didn’t impact current priorities of the business.

Approach

“The classic training model, taking individuals out of the business to sit in a classroom for a week at a time, was not going to work for us” says Jane Logie, Strategy & Development Director, “but at the same time, we knew we needed to raise our game in managing change”. This is a current business issue for many of our clients – the need to develop capability, without the capacity to take large numbers of the change community ‘off-line’ to attend training courses.

“CITI were a good choice for us” continues Jane, “having worked with them before, we knew they were able to deliver high quality support coupled with leading edge advice and people. The main attraction of their approach has been the quality of the benchmark data used in assessing our current capability - allowing for extremely targeted development, and the way in which the development has been delivered in-line with business pressures.”

The key to success was indeed the way in which the development programme was designed and delivered specifically to suit L&G’s environment. Once the profiling element was completed – evidencing strengths and areas for development - project managers were immersed in short, best practice workshops with CITI experts. Delivered over a period of months, these workshops targeted the areas identified for development. After each workshop, individuals were given the opportunity to apply the best practice in their live project environment through supported work-based assignments. A hugely successful approach, it effectively accelerated the learning by embedding it with delivery. At the same time, it did not increase the risk to any project because these new ways of working were supported with CITI coaching.

Outcome

Reflecting on the engagement to date, Jane says “this approach was far more useful than a week in a classroom. It gave our project managers the opportunity to experience best practice in action, and didn’t distract them from our on-going business and change agenda”. “And I have to say, your people are brilliant”, finished Jane.

Nick Dobson, our Lead Tutor for the programme says ”this has been a very rewarding and interesting engagement with L&G, together we were able to explore new ways of meeting today’s challenges and were hugely successful in our pursuit”. The unique approach is being successfully implemented in other parts of the business and we continue to work with Jane’s area to meet a challenging business environment.