Major bank enhances leadership skills with Crew business simulation

The customer

The customer, who wished to remain anonymous for the case study, is a major UK bank with an excellent reputation for  innovation  and customer service. Central to the banks success are a large community of leaders and managers in both branches and core business support functions.  

Customer needs

As a result of a detailed performance review of the core manager group it was established that the team leaders and managers needed to develop stronger skills in how they lead their teams and tasks.

In particular it was identified that they need to get better at in “nipping issues in the bud” by having the right relationships and conversations with their colleagues, teams as a whole and their customers.  

The solution

The chosen solution was Crew , where you're a team leader responsible for successfully delivering a four-week project with your group. You’ll need to schedule work, delegate tasks, manage deadlines, and respond to unexpected issues - all while developing your team and keeping morale high.

Crew is grounded in John Adair’s Action Centred Leadership (ACL) model, helping leaders understand and apply the principles of task, team, and individual. It’s an ideal environment to practise team management in a safe, reflective, and engaging way.

The simulation focuses on two core skill areas:

• Project management
• Team leadership

It allows participants to experience leading a small team whose work on key projects is being impacted by issues around their colleague’s capabilities, motivations and other distractions.

The simulation lasts for half a day and covers 4 rounds each of one week’s duration in simulation time. It was played by four teams each of four people competing against each other and the clock.

The team tasks and staff profiles were customised to reflect the typical tasks and working environment of the bank.

The simulation has been run with over 500 managers and leaders in the bank - working in teams.

Here are some of the most frequent feedback comments on what learning participants gained from playing the simulation:

Overall conclusions and value

The sponsor at the bank had this to say at the end of the of the rollout of the simulation exercise:

The CREW simulation enabled our managers and project managers to actually experience the difference between being a good manager and merely being a scheduler. In fact to do well in the simulation they really had to focus on having the “hard conversations” with staff which are so easy to put-off. The competitive element really helped and they quickly forgot it was a simulation and treated it like the real thing to the extent that some teams were absolutely gutted when they missed a tell-tale warning sign which resulted in a key staff member going off on long-term sick leave and destroying their team’s productivity. We will definitely use this kind of simulation again.