Shifting to a remarkable culture of customer centricity, agility and meritocracy.

The Business Challenge

Brazil’s largest bank, Itau bank, acquired BBA, an investment and corporate bank, to form Itau BBA. The new entity needed to show the benefits of the merger quickly: it faced the arrival of many global competitors in their market and the risk of losing their top talent.

The Executive team wanted to ensure that they would be able to sustain what was working in both cultures, while simultaneously adapting to rapid growth and new ownership and leadership.

"You have helped us to make our journey increasingly concrete and perceived by our employees as a necessary and beneficial change for everyone and not only for the company. Every day that passes people realise that what we are discussing and implementing is extremely useful and effective also in our personal lives.”

SENIOR LEADER

Bottom Line

End-to-end culture transformation enabled them to realise their goal of maintaining their reputation for customer-centricity and their retaining strong core values. This provided a vital foundation for their continued growth and development.

Outcomes

• By identifying drivers of the current culture, elements of risk and the mindset and behaviors needed to support the vision of the new organization, the culture assessment enabled the Executive team to (1) pinpoint how they needed to adjust their approach and (2) identify the initiatives that would have the most impact.
• The Executive team became conscious of culture and of the shadow of their leadership; the development work helped them to lead and role model the mindsets and behaviors needed to underpin their business strategy moving forward.
• The Culture Planning set up a program team to lead the new culture and build momentum to move successfully into the future. The target culture was strengthened.

Workstreams

• In-depth culture assessment using Walking the Talk’s Discover methodology and our six cultural archetypes. Identification of the business imperatives for culture with the Executive Team.
• Leading by Example - The Executive team underwent a team development process, including individual assessments, advisory and team leadership development and advisory.
• Culture Plan development for first 2 years.

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