Dexia Banque Internationale à Luxembourg

The issue

Dexia Banque Internationale à Luxembourg (Dexia-BIL), the asset management arm of the Dexia Group, and a major bank in Luxembourg, wanted to develop a training programme to equip their management team with the behavioural competencies needed to deliver their business objectives.

Dexia-BIL's objectives were to:

• understand and prioritise the training needs of their management team
• identify behavioural competencies needed to meet business objectives
• set up a coherent training programme for the senior management team
• increase management satisfaction.

Our approach

PricewaterhouseCoopers Human Resource Services was appointed to assist Dexia-BIL in the review and development of an appropriate training programme. Having worked with Dexia-BIL previously, we already had a strong relationship and a good understanding of their culture and the banking sector. Dexia-BIL was impressed by our expertise in competency requirement analysis, coupled with the PwC ACADEMY - our unique human capital development and training service.

In order to set the training within a business context, the joint project team, comprising members of the Dexia-BIL training department and consultants from PwC, started by reviewing the medium and long-term strategy of the bank with senior level management. The project team held a series of workshops to identify the existing and desired competencies at management and employee level, linking this back to Dexia-BIL's strategy.

The Dexia-BIL training department then analysed this information, and incorporating elements of Dexia Group's 'Dexia Executive Assessment Leadership' competencies, identified gaps between existing and desired competencies.

The project team worked closely with an academic partner to design a training plan, to help Dexia-BIL's management to adopt the desired competencies. This was presented to the steering committee for approval. The training plan was divided into three programmes tailored to address the specific needs of Assistant Vice Presidents, Vice Presidents and Senior Vice Presidents.

We assisted the Dexia-BIL training department in close cooperation with the academic partner, to design the Vice President training sessions. The sessions, based on theory but with a practical bias, focused on soft management skills in areas such as people management and coaching, translating business strategy into performance measures, influencing and decision making techniques.

After the first training session for Vice Presidents, we held a formal debrief with the Dexia-BIL training department and the academic partner to analyse areas for improvement and fine-tune future training sessions.

The outcome

Dexia-BIL now has a clear idea of the behavioural competencies needed from their management in order to deliver their business objectives and how they can help this population work towards adopting these competencies.

Over time, the training plan will help to bring about a change in Dexia-BIL's culture, which will support the behavioural competencies and see them cascade down through the rest of the workforce. Feedback from the 20 participants on the Vice President training plan has been very positive, with an average score of 3.4 out of 4 for overall satisfaction.

We have now built a strong partnership with Dexia-BIL and the academic partner for the development of the management of the Bank. The training plan is currently being rolled out to the remaining management population at Dexia-BIL.

For further information about this case study, please contact:
Bernard Dubois at
bernard.dubois@lu.pwc.com or on +352 49 48 48 4301
or Serge Ceurvels at
serge.ceurvels@lu.pwc.com or on +352 49 48 48 4307