A sales division merged business and personal bankers into new teams. On paper, they were teams. In the weekly meeting, they were individuals reading out their own numbers.
The obvious answer was a programme: teamwork training for every team, product courses so each side understood the other's offering, and probably a sales skills refresher on top.
In one team's weekly meeting, the area manager went round the table and each banker reported their own numbers. A business banker was "working on a few big ones". Nobody could see what they were, and nobody asked. When he met a business client who needed a home loan, he didn't mention it to the personal banker at the same table.
The rivalry between business and personal banking was older than the teams. No course was going to fix that. And a team that can't see its own work can't help itself.
Four teams, ten weeks, measured against the other teams in their regions. Small enough for the sponsor to say yes.
Each team mapped how it actually worked together: who did what, what each person needed from the others, and what the old rivalry had cost them.
Every opportunity for every team member on a single board, borrowed from the Kanban boards of agile software teams, moving through the same stages from first contact to finalised.
The weekly report-back became a short, facilitated meeting built around one question: what's stuck, and who can help?
The sponsor signed off a rollout to every team in the province. A second finding came later: teams where a natural leader emerged to run the sessions had the most even performance across all their members. How evenly performance is spread across a team turns out to be a useful signal for where leadership development will pay back most.
Months later, a reorganisation split the division and the old rivalry came straight back. The change held exactly as long as the structure that held it.
Now I build succession into a change before it is needed: second sponsors in other parts of the business, measures written into the wider performance system, and evidence put early in front of the people who will make the next reorganisation decision.
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