Complete turnaround of a boutique bank
Partnering with the newly appointed, young, energetic CEO, we facilitated a complete turnaround of a stagnant business into a growth engine. A sleepy, tired organization was transformed into a culture of high-performance and continuous improvement. Consistently growing year over year, the organization stays the course towards becoming the best boutique bank.
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Ripples has been a partner to this remarkable transformation journey in the past four years. The journey is now on its third leg. The first leg was about igniting the sleepy culture and the stagnant business to create a culture of high-performance. The second leg was taking the organization from good to great. And the third leg is all about continuous improvement and sustaining the momentum for long-term profitable growth.
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Using our classic approach to mid-size business turnaround, the first leg of the journey was completed in record time. Activities included organization diagnostics to fully understand the current state, creating a shared vision and drawing a detailed roadmap with all the changes needed in strategy, structure, culture and systems of the organizations. This led to 15 initiatives that were prioritized and spread over the year, taking into account the capacity of the organization. In addition to shaping the top team, we invested considerable effort in building leadership and change capacity in the organization. For instance, we launched a change leadership forum consisting of the top 15% high performers. Periodic off-sites, designed and facilitated by Ripples, were key to mobilizing the transformation and marking progress. The vision, mission, values, and desired leadership behaviors were all defined in these change leadership forum off-sites.
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Once the turnaround was complete, attention turned to moving the organization from good to great. In this leg of the journey, the focus became culture. Ripples facilitated how the team defined the desired culture and behaviors that demonstrated the values in action. Hiring, onboarding, performance management, rewards, and recognition were all refined to sustain the culture. HR put additional emphasis on training at all levels to increase managerial effectiveness and build leadership capacity.
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Ripples led multiple workshops and retreats to develop the top team as well as teams of various divisions with the goal to increase leadership and team effectiveness. Ripples continued the annual employee engagement survey to mark progress and identify areas that needed management attention to improve employee experience.
To date, the client company has consistently exceeded its financial targets and significantly grown its year over year revenue and income. Similarly, overall employee experience has also consistently improved year over year in every dimension, and current employee satisfaction score is 84%.
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Now on the third leg of the journey, there is increased attention to build processes and practices for continuous improvement and sustaining a high-performance culture.