Bettina Büchel, Professor of Strategy and Organization, and her team were recognized at the annual Chief Learning Officer magazine awards for their work co-creating a talent development program with Moroccan state-owned mining and fertilizer firm OCP and Africa Business School.
This is the third recognition for the OCP custom program, following on from two Gold awards, one at the EFMD 2022 Excellence in Practice awards in May and another at the 2022 Brandon Hall Group awards in August.
“Talent development and learning is at the center of any aspiring and successful organization,” said Professor Büchel. “That is our approach at IMD. We challenge what is and inspire what could be. I personally am deeply committed to that mission, and it is even more exciting to be recognized by an external community – the chief learning officers.”
The case follows OCP, which in 2018 was a decade into a far-reaching transformation from an industrial phosphate mining giant into a customer centric agriculture company. To achieve its growth ambitions and diversify into new businesses it needed to develop new talent and skillsets.
The result was an 18-month talent development program called Beyond which alternated between off-the-job academic learning and on-the-job action learning. The program was so successful that OCP launched a second cohort and created a separate program, Learnin’Pact, to expand the concept of interweaving academic and action learning to all of its 23,000 employees.
Yasmina Lamtiri, Director of Custom Programs at Africa Business School said: “The Beyond program – given its strong connection to the field – has disrupted both how custom programs are designed and the purpose of these programs, which addition to upskilling employees, has become a powerful driver of change within the company.”
Building a culture of collaboration
IMD has also received recognition this year with a Silver EFMD award for a customized learning program for Norwegian financial services group DNB.
The bank entered the 2020s in strong position having notched up its best-ever annual result. To maintain this performance in an increasingly complex financial services market, DNB realized that it needed to foster stronger internal collaboration to develop world-class, end-to-end consumer experiences and anticipate its customers’ needs. This meant working as ‘One DNB’.
Working together with DNB, IMD came up with a 10-month action learning journey based around cross-functional shadowing for the company’s top 230 leaders. Broken down into four stages, the program involved a self-awareness stage, a half day of shadowing a peer from another department, and individual and group coaching sessions to debrief and share perspectives.
“Together with IMD, we have created a whole new culture of learning across the organization,” said Katrine Kalelic, DNB Senior Vice President – Head of Leadership, Talent & Team Development. “The combination of action learning methodology with virtual sessions and internal/external coaching has produced new ways of learning – efficient, creative, exciting.”
The program developed a renewed sense of empathy across business units and allowed them to better understand how their actions affected other parts of the organization. Two-thirds of participants said the program contributed to a more effective end-to-end customer journey, while 91% said they collaborate better as a result of the shadowing.
“Partnering with DNB was a very rewarding experience for the IMD team. DNB made a bold choice by opting for an unconventional learning design that included cross-functional shadowing, which took place virtually for 230 leaders. This was a more challenging but ultimately much more impactful learning journey,” said Ina Toegel, IMD Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change.
EFMD is the largest international network association in the field of management development. IMD has previously won EFMD Excellence in Practice Awards, which celebrate impactful learning and development partnerships, for case studies on Valmet, Stora Enso and Siam Commercial Bank.
