Understanding the training environment at Lloyds Banking Group
I joined Lloyds Banking Group — UK’s largest retail and consumer bank — in November 2017 as Service Design Lead for the Service Design and System Thinking team. The business has roughly 85.000 colleagues. With an ongoing transformation process — where the bank tries to keep up with the ever-changing, very competitive market — there is a big push for training colleagues in agile methodologies, system thinking, and service design. I was hired as the first and only Service Design Coach in Lloyds: My task was to review, test, and iterate current in-house training, and if necessary, amend and change the content and delivery.
But it is not as simple as that.
I spent the first two months researching the new working environment, by:
- Taking training as a colleague: participating in courses which have been on offer to understand the structure, content delivery, experienced impact
- Understanding people’s roles and responsibilities, and their training and up-skilling needs
- Understanding team structures: reviewing as many as possible organizational charts, scribbling a potential new structure and delivery process for the service design team
- Learning from the industry: doing research and interviews with design managers/leaders, discussing working team set-ups and best-in-practice operating models
There are currently a total of 16 courses offered to Lloyds colleagues
Ranging from Design Immersion, System Thinking, Advanced Agility, Communication and Active Thinking courses, Test & Learn and Service Design — offered inconsistently in terms of levels (Essentials, Advanced, Master, Leadership) and content alignment — most of the course delivery is fairly theoretical, where participants are sitting around a table in a boardroom.
Multiple ownership and working in silos
There are multiple owners and/or trainers for the offered courses. The training material is developed in the respective silos, i.e. system thinking for system thinking, service design for service design etc. Courses are not aligned, single disciplines defining course content for their training needs, which results in a weak sometimes wrong representation of other disciplines.
“When I went on to the agile training course, the way they talked about service design was very confusing and sometimes wrong”. — Participant
Lloyds has huge ambitions, but are these the right ones?
CapabilityBuild — a team organizing, planning, overseeing the collective training effort — is widely made of contractors, few people have a training background. The ambition is to train 3500 colleagues a year. For each discipline.
Training some thousand colleagues in multiple disciplines demands ownership, structure, and a plan. It should not be quantity over quality. In the context of learning, having worked out the right flow, learning support and follow-ups is essential to scale. What is the intended purpose? To tick boxes, or to prep, set-up, motivate and empower colleagues for an organization-wide transformation?
The #changechronicles, a growing collection of written work from Roman Schoeneboom, covers but is not limited to #projectwork, #storiesofimpact, #sessioninsights, #training-by-doing, #opinionpiece, #teamsupport, and #changemanagement.
