Case Study

ING is the largest retail bank in the Netherlands with over 250 retail branches.

The Challenge

ING’s retail banking operations regularly looked at key performance indicators (KPIs) such as annual revenue, profit per customer and profit per employee, for each of its retail branches. While certain external factors influenced the success of the top performing branches, in many instances a star manager or team was the reason for the office’s success. Management wanted to know if the recipe for success could be repeated across the organization? Was it possible to objectively measure the intangible characteristics of the top teams? ING leadership hoped to be able to replicate the performance of the top branches by identifying the characteristics of the top teams.

The Solution

Staff in over 250 branches took the Management Drives® survey. The survey results were then compared to the KPIs of each branch. A pattern emerged that the more successful branches had managers and teams with certain types of Drives patterns. Leadership had originally thought that managers who demonstrated classic strong goal oriented decision making skills would be the models of success. While these managers and teams had the most activity in terms of offers to customers and requests for products, they didn’t have the most closed sales and earned revenue. The Management Drives® profiles revealed that managers and teams who combined achievement characteristics with a strong empathy for each other and for the customer, did significantly better. With this pattern for success in hand, ING had two avenues to bolster sales:

• Trainers worked with under performing branches to adopt the identified behaviours needed for success. New approaches for customer focused sales were deployed.
• When looking to fill vacancies or to rotate staff, ING now had a clearer sense of the individual and group profiles of each of the offices in order to better match the staffs to the success criteria.

The Result

Over the course of 12 months, ING saw significant improvement in the performance of under performing branches as they adapted the successful behaviour models identified by Management Drives® . This unique web based test and group workshop provided profound insights into individual and group mind sets that influenced how decisions were made and what drove behaviour.

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