Newsletter, October 2018

Senior leaders and a tough social issue

“I deliberately spoilt a loan application form in the hope that the bank would notice that I was being coerced into filling it in.”  So said a survivor of domestic and economic abuse to the Lloyds Banking Group Community Banking Exec Committee, who volunteered their business expertise to help the leaders of three domestic abuse charities with pressing strategic issues. In a second session we then applied our social insight thinking to help HR and Vulnerable Customer specialists from the Bank to take what we learnt from the charities and devise new ways of doing things for people affected. Read more in the case study.

A care home, a dyslexia charity and a savings & investment business

Question: What does a care home and a dyslexia charity have to do with developing excellence in leaders at M&G Prudential? Answer: Their strategic challenges gave two teams of future leaders the opportunity to practice, develop and embed their leadership skills by working in unusual settings, with people outside of their day to day environments. Not only that, they became what we would call ‘Connected Leaders’ by engaging in societal issues that businesses can’t afford to ignore: older people and the provision of social care; and the needs of customers with different types of vulnerabilities, in this case those with dyslexia. Read more in our case study online.

Socially-minded development for Millennials

We’re just back from Swindon, where Nationwide Building Society’s graduates and industrial placements students, one year into their development programme, have been building their skills by working with local charities. Their missions were as diverse as helping a social enterprise to sell more sandwiches and establishing an evaluation framework for a charity that supports socially excluded young people. As well as designing the projects, we helped the participants to hone their presentation skills so they could impress senior stakeholders from within the business with the stories of the projects and development outcomes.

Employees of the future and digital skills

One week, three locations, over 500 students – these were the ingredients of Tata Consultancy Services’ Digital Explorers programme for Year 12 students. Working closely with emerging talent specialists MyKindaFuture we created compelling and interactive content on the digital world, recruited students from dozens of schools to take part and oversaw the delivery of the one week programme – all to inspire young people to pursue their interests in digital into university and beyond.

A purposeful recruit

We are delighted to welcome Michael Hilton to the Three Hands team. After seven years in Government, where he worked on the UK’s strategy for securing a global climate change deal, Michael did a year’s placement at A Blueprint for Better Business, at the heart of the burgeoning purpose movement – an increasingly important feature of Three Hands’ projects and programmes.

And talking of our team, we’re looking for our next recruit – perhaps someone who wants to break into our world of operating between businesses and communities. Please feel free to share our Junior Project Manager job post.

That is all for now. Please get in touch if any of this intrigues, inspires or motivates you!