This organisation operates in a variety of diverse, challenging and geographically dispersed environments which offer huge potential for growth. Bendelta partnered with the entity to build its new growth strategy, requiring onsite consultations with senior management teams, external market and economic analysis and new conceptualisations of the product range. Utilising the Bendelta Growth Framework, we developed a cogent new direction based on a small number of powerful growth drivers and supported by a new sub-regional structure. Less than 12 months into the plan, the entity is already well ahead of its growth targets, at a time when most of its peers are well behind.

This private equity firm has grown very successfully over several decades. Its increasingly large and diverse portfolio and the growing importance of successful relationships between the firm, its fund manager and its shareholders necessitated a thorough review of its governance practices.
Based on market research with leading authorities in the field and configuration to the unique context of the client, Bendelta identified shortfalls in governance systems and processes and provided a clear and compelling action plan for improvement. This has led to the successful establishment of new practices such as Board Charters and Investment Committees in both the parent and its investee organisations, with benefits clearly seen by Board members and other stakeholders.

This leading international bank has a strong focus on customer excellence and a CEO who sees his senior leadership team as the key to driving the customer ethos further still. With the post GEC upturn arriving, the company has invested in developing the leadership skills of their top 120 managers so that they can engage staff to ensure that sustained customer delight positions them for market share gains.
Bendelta developed a bespoke longitudinal development program to address this agenda, including fully customised simulations, action learning projects, executive team sponsorship and self-awareness raising. The feedback on the program has been outstanding and has led to material change, as evidenced by nine strategic initiatives sparked by the program and now driving performance improvement throughout the organisation.

This organisation is one of the world’s most recognised brand names in professional services. Following the appointment of a new global CEO, the Asia-Pacific region was seen as having the strongest growth prospects internationally. However, this represented a major change from the previous regime, necessitating a new plan that not only drove very rapid growth (doubling in three years) but also emboldened the organisation. Bendelta ran top team retreats in Mumbai, Shanghai, Tokyo and many other locations – utilising the Bendelta Growth Framework to help Country Managing Directors and their teams identify the strongest prospects and develop plans to exploit them.
The result was a re-ignited organisation with a revitalised growth trajectory, earning the region the position of role model to the global entity.

This law firm is highly regarded for its performance, market reputation and culture. However, its Partner performance management system did not accurately reflect the balance of priorities and risked destabilising the collegiality of the partnership or misrepresenting individual contributions. Bendelta assisted the Board and partnership to work through the development and implementation of a more balanced approach. While the technical validity of the solution was critical, so too was the process – managing changes in an inclusive fashion that addressed sources of apprehension and resistance in a way that would create unanimous engagement with the eventual system and process. The result has been a successfully implemented new system that has recalibrated performance measurement and facilitated more equitable management of shareholding levels.

Firm A is a top tier international law firm headquartered in Australia, with more than 1500 personnel in the Asia Pacific Region. Bendelta initially designed and subsequently implemented a major three-year leadership development program for Senior Associates.
Since 2006, Bendelta has been managing this leading law firm’s Excellence in Leadership Program (ELP). We researched and constructed the assessments, delivered them and have since provided reporting and feedback, including processing the 360-degree assessments, producing reports and holding feedback sessions in four Australian states and four Asian countries annually. Our relationship with this firm commenced with Phase 1:

Phase 1: Research and design of a Development Program for Senior Associates

Bendelta conducted external and internal research in order to design a first-in-class Development Program for our client. Aspects of the research are as follows:
• Program customisation workshops with and questionnaires to employees across Asia Pacific to gain understanding of program goals, needs/content,format, style, logistics, and any local considerations.
• Gained information from stakeholders, for example the National Staff Partner, Legal Department Staff Partners, Knowledge, Education and Development representatives, HR representatives and other representatives of the Partnership, Management or the Senior Associate cohort.
• Analysis of available internal documentation such as Partner development program, capabilities, recent employee surveys, key strategy or policy decisions and the performance management system.
• Global benchmarking research on best practice Development Programs by Fortune 500 firms
We conducted a benchmarking study with sixteen leading international comparable organisations such as leading professional services firms, using Behavioural Event Interviewing and Thematic Analysis techniques.

Phase 2: Development of Capability Model

In this phase, Bendelta, with the internal project team used the results of phase 1 to design a capability model.

Phase 3: Design of the Excellence in Leadership Program

Using data from the combination of Phase 1 and 2, Bendelta constructed:
• An online 360-degree questionnaire
• A Leadership Development Centre which contains four simulations, and built to simulate activities of a partner in this firm. These were not only bespoke but as mentioned above were built with expert input from key client staff to ensure validity, realism and credibility. The current simulations have the following components:

o Business development
o Project planning
o Client management
o Team presentations
o Coaching a junior member of staff
• In-house coaching process
• Practical leadership workshop training modules
• Career development planning framework

Phase 4: Implementation of Phase 3

The firm has now been fully skilled to deliver the Excellence in Leadership Program in-house. They have been  equipped to conduct:
• Annual training and supervision of assessors
• Provision of individual capability reports, along with face-to-face coaching and feedback across four Australian states and various Asian offices
• Analysis of results to determine individual, group and organisational capability development requirements and recommendations

Client Feedback

The feedback from this program has been very positive and this program is now set to establish a new benchmark for leadership development in Australian professional services. Bendelta has an ongoing relationship with the firm and has continued to assist in roles outside of this project, including the facilitation of “working with different personalities” workshops with partners, partner performance review training, keynotes to the Board, and career self management modules.

The Audit Office of New South Wales plays a critical role in the performance and accountability of the State. The newly appointed Auditor-General has a bold vision to ensure that the people of NSW are proud of the work that the Office does. Accordingly, Bendelta worked with the Senior Management Team to build a plan which would turn this aspiration into reality, through the creation of cogent, focused strategies – aligned with the Office’s unusual position of being both a government agency and a professional services firm. This plan has served as a key platform for the office, in turn driving plans for human resources, technology and strategic audit planning.

The New South Wales Office of State Revenue (OSR) administers State taxation, collects revenue, outstanding fines and penalties, develops policy and implements legislation relating to State taxation for and on behalf of the people of NSW.
During the 2007 Corporate Planning, the OSR Directorate became very aware of the succession planning challenges facing the organisation: within five years there may be complete staff turnover at the Director level and significant turnover at the level below. As such, succession planning was confirmed as a Corporate Action Program for 2007-08. As a first step towards effective succession planning, OSR wanted a practical and comprehensive framework that can act as a blueprint for bringing the solution to life. It needed a complete ‘How to’ guide so that the organisation can launch and run its own succession planning program, where selecting people for the succession pool was based on merit rather than intuition. Bendelta was brought in to assist with this.

Bendelta developed the Succession Planning Guide via two steps:

1. Best practice research

Bendelta drew on its library of best practices in succession planning to provide a sense of how leading organisations (both public and private) are tackling succession planning and related issues. This was fed into the report below so that the research is used practically (rather than theoretically).

2. Workshops/Interviews

We conducted diagnostic workshops with key senior stakeholders on major considerations, including (but not limited to):
• Criteria and process for identifying members of the Succession Planning Program (SPP)
• Succession planning constraints and opportunities created by the public sector context
• Opportunities for linkages to existing HR practices (as well as identifying challenges that may arise) – including performance management, assessment centres, recruitment practices, executive development program, coaching, etc
• Exploration of ancillary processes to assist succession planning including job design and recruitment

Deliverables:

We delivered a Succession Planning Guide from the findings above to put the key principles on the table so that they can be refined and signed off before moving to more detailed implementation guidelines. The position paper gave our view on how the SPP should be designed and run, in terms of all key issues of content, process and style.
The feedback from our client was so strong that we were subsequently brought in to implement the SPP. Specifically, we were commissioned to prepare, design and provide 360-degree and Assessment Centre type activities as part of the selection process for candidates applying to join the SPP. We assisted with:

1. Applications and 360 degree assessments:

• External Assessor role on Phase 1 Assessment Panel
• Provided guidance to Directorate for Succession Program decision-making
• Developed, designed and administered online 360° questionnaires
• Provide qualified organisational psychologist to assist OSR through application and selection processes
• Preparation of 360° feedback report for unsuccessful applicants

2. Assessment Centre component of the SPP

• Development, design and administration of assessment centres, including training and supervision of assessors, briefing and supporting the candidates and working with assessors to endorse and finalise scores.
• Creation of Assessment Centre materials including: participant manual documents, briefing materials, documentation, assessor training materials, and logistics planning
• Preparation of Feedback report for each of the participants (360 feedback and simulations)
• Delivery of one-on-one feedback sessions
• Creation of Assessment Centre Evaluation report

The National Library of Australia (the Library) is Australia’s largest reference library. Its main role is to ensure that documentary resources of national significance relating to Australia and the Australian people, as well as significant non-Australian library materials, are collected, preserved and made accessible.
The Library has undertaken systematic workforce planning over a number of years and recognises that workforce planning is not a detached process, and that an effective approach must be integrated with operational practice, incorporated with an analysis of current and possible future operating contexts, and linked to Library strategy and workforce risks.
In 2008, the Library was interested in evaluating the impact of its major strategic workforce planning initiatives so that key successes and opportunities for improvement can be identified. Bendelta was brought in to assist with this process.

To achieve this, Bendelta facilitated and led:

• A three-hour management meeting, documentation review and evaluation of relevant workforce data
• Four impact-assessment focus groups with representative samples of management/staff
• Strategic analysis and risk assessment
• Benchmarking research – internal and external (interviews with comparative organisations, labour force trends, and best-practice people practices) and gap analysis
• Two internal analysis and planning workshops (relevant trends in the provision of services; forecasted workforce characteristics; external scanning) with representative samples of management/staff and,
• Ongoing communication to management and staff (as appropriate), along with parallel project management

The outcomes coming from the process with Bendelta are as follows:

1. The Library is now clear about the effectiveness and impact of its workforce planning strategies.

2. The Library, having been provided with a thorough assessment on the cost and benefits of its workforce planning spend, is now able to create greater strategic alignment between its workforce planning and strategic plan. In particular, the benefits or outputs gained by our client are:

• understanding of major strategic risks faced by the Library to implement in the Library’s Strategic Directions
• data needed to determine the match between the current workforce and the desired workforce
• a range of monitoring support tools linked to financial cycles to help in determining whether or not workforce planning strategies are achieving results;
• reviewing the cost-benefits of extending the Library’s capability framework, along with recommendations going forward, and
• recommendations for effective succession planning.

This multi-national consumer goods company has a strong presence in Australia, but one in which the various product lines are driven as stand-alone businesses – even at the Board level. Thus, Bendelta was brought in to develop a governance and strategy framework that would unify the businesses and would enable the various CEOs to collaborate on the business synergies and combined market proposition.

This work has had a transformational impact, in some cases reversing Board members views from a belief that there was limited scope or benefit for a one-company approach to seizing the new-found scope for integrative governance and strategy. This has cascaded through the business, strengthening the organisation culturally and financially.

This leading consumer goods manufacturer and franchisor is a household name in Australia. However, a series of issues had resulted in a lack of focus and efficiency in approaches to marketing, distribution and business structure, in turn leading to a severe decline in profitability. Bendelta was brought in to review the business to identify the key drivers of under-performance, identify areas for cost-reduction and work with the client to revise the business model.

The findings showed that significant re-design was needed, including a new organisational structure, a new cost structure and a new financial model for assessing business area contribution. The review identified where economies of scale could lead to profitable growth, and conversely where the cost of growth was too high to be sustainable.

Bendelta assisted the client in developing an overarching channel strategy that differentiated the service offering by key markets but enabled each channel to increased sharing of central resources, particularly in customer support. Moreover, the need to re-enforce the brand was key in determining how to structure the distribution channels and develop a marketing strategy to support those channels.

This company is the Australian Dealer for a leading global manufacturer of mining and industrial equipment. In 2006, our client launched a set of ambitious goals in terms of market share, revenue and profit growth, with a clear line of sight to 2010, then 2020. It was observed that achieving these targets would require a major mental and cultural shift towards growth and entrepreneurialism.
Within this context, the company was faced with the challenge of engaging people with the strategy at all levels of the organisation, where the company as a whole and leadership capability may not be well-aligned with strategic goals. Moreover, it was also concerned about the disconnect between management and its professional salespeople on the ground.
In 2007, Bendelta was brought in to assist with translating this strategy into reality whilst maintaining a strongly positive environment and alignment in the workplace.

Our approach had two objectives:

1. To heighten senior team engagement, and

2. To build leadership capabilities as strategists, leaders and general managers throughout the senior executive team in order to engage people with the strategy.

In some cases of major change, management can become bounded by downside possibilities. Before significant progress can be made, the senior team needed to be fully engaged, individually and collectively. This meant replacing any fear, anger and cynicism with urgency, optimism, belief and a sense of team

A baseline of diagnostic data was obtained in four key areas before the implementation of interventions:

• leadership behaviour (through a 360-degree assessment),
• cultural impact (through culture survey),
• self-identified needs (through needs analysis), and,
• business results.

The analysis provided an accurate, robust and insightful basis for understanding both current capabilities within the company’s needs, as well as a basis for measuring the effectiveness of subsequent development initiatives.

The findings showed a divergence in key leadership capabilities associated with successful strategy deployment. From the Managing Director through to the senior team, transformational skills such as coaching, influencing, inspiring, and persuasive communication were enhanced via leadership development workshops, one-on-one executive coaching (linked to strategy and needs analysis) and coaching on leadership and communication.
The development of leaders is meaningless without putting the results on the board. It is critical to make positive progress early on and continue sustaining and building on those results to stay on track with the vision. Bendelta conducted regular monitoring and reviews with the Managing Director (of results delivered by senior executives), and worked with the Managing Director to refine the project, especially in terms of specific interventions to address the profile of results achieved (e.g. a common performance deficiency across many executives).

Bendelta successfully changed the mindsets of the leaders of this firm from one that is primarily operational or transactional to transformational. We successfully formed a more cohesive, capable and engaged team of leaders within the firm, well-prepared to embrace the growth challenges ahead.

This organisation holds one of the strongest and most widespread brands in the Australian property industry. However, it had encountered a plateau in growth and threats to its leading status, through the emergence of aggressive competitors and both structural and technological changes to the industry. Bendelta was engaged to work with the Board and CEO to create a new strategic plan that would focus the company on its key success drivers and engage staff nationally in the new direction.

The process was about stakeholder consultation as much as it was about internal analysis or scanning of the external environment. It was also about ensuring that the resulting plan was a living document and one which would be seen by management and staff as a holistic representation of their views and passions for the future of the company.

This organisation is a leading property and planning consulting firm through Australia, Asia and the Middle East. It operates in numerous locations, industry segments and technical disciplines (e.g. town planning, retail economics, urban design, valuations, social research, landscape architecture). While there is a general sense of role hierarchy from graduate to Equity Director, the differences between the disciplines and the changes in role structures had meant that there was a lack of a consistent, unifying taxonomy to define and link roles from a capability perspective.

Bendelta worked with the National Directors to understand the drivers of success at different levels and in different disciplines, seeking to find the unifying factors and ways of accommodating the different styles and capability perspectives of the various disciplines. The result was a framework that gave a clear sense of shared capabilities, differences by level, a high level of consistency and yet also an ability to tailor where needed. The model has been successfully embedded and now serves as the foundation for an online performance management system and for driving all career development and learning solutions.

This consulting firm has grown at an astonishing rate in the last five years, assisted by geographical diversification (including entry to the Middle East), mergers and the addition of new service lines. It has improved shareholder earnings as impressively as it has grown revenues. However, this would not have been possible without investing in the development of the 50 Directors, to assist them with the leadership, strategic and financial acumen required to transform the business from an excellent professional practice to a world-class corporation.

Bendelta designed a bespoke longitudinal program, grounded equally in the strategic drivers of the firm and the developmental requirements of the Directors. This program has now been run for six years, now taking every new Director and Associate Director through small-group skill-building in areas ranging from staff management and strategic thinking to business development and profitability analysis. The effect of this program has been not only to support growth but also to drive the business further and ensure senior leadership succession.

In 2008, Director of Bendelta Anthony Mitchell acted as facilitator and one of 19 members of the remoteFOCUS group (which contains highly regarded Australian leaders such as The Hon Fred Chaney AO, Lieutenant General John Sanderson AC and Dr Peter Shergold AC) focused on improving remote governance.

As part of the consultation process, Anthony Mitchell ran a facilitation ‘on country’ in Gove, Arnhem Land as part of the Garma festival to gain local views on the challenges and solutions to governance challenges in remote Australia. He also chaired remote governance streams at the Desert Knowledge Symposium in Alice Springs, including facilitation of Indigenous-only workshops, resulting in the development of key principles for reflecting Indigenous priorities and methods in the reform of governance in remote Australia

The resulting remoteFOCUS prospectus (of which Anthony Mitchell was a co-author for the reform of governance of remote Australia has received widespread attention, endorsement and support.

This organisation is one of Australia’s largest providers of Community and Employment Services, serving annually over 300,000 clients across all states.
Toward the end of 2007, the organisation commissioned Bendelta to design a robust and transparent classification framework for its employees, so that performance management and recruitment could be enhanced. This classification framework for the 250 Services Managers would be underpinned by a competency model and included in the new Industrial Instrument.

Bendelta developed the framework:

• in a way that captured the diverse competencies of Services Managers,
• that consists of a job sizing methodology to recognise and quantify the various complexities of the roles and provide internal equity in remuneration,
• that consists of an individual assessment tool used appraise performance and competence and recommend professional development initiatives,
• and a new remuneration scale benchmarked on external surveys.

The framework was developed using collaborative methods, such as online collaboration tools and focus groups, to ensure maximum engagement of the different stakeholder groups at each stage of the design and development of each component.
The Competency Model was developed from a thorough analysis of existing Services Managers roles, as well as the organisation’s new Strategic Plan, to capture not only the competencies required in the current roles but also those required in the future as the organisation’s new strategy unfolds.
For the new Sizing Methodology, an elaborate model was built after broad consultation with all Services Managers and other internal experts through a detailed survey. The model contains over 20 variables representing the various complexities that Services Managers face during the course of their work. A specific database was developed to effectively capture the various factors and interface with existing information systems.
The Individual Assessment Tool was designed using state-of-the-art talent management principles, and provides line managers and HR professionals from the organisation with a range of options to assist their Services Managers in developing their competencies and enhancing their performance.
Finally the Remuneration Scale was built using external benchmarks provided by external specialists, and integrating outputs from the Job Sizing Methodology and the Individual Assessment Tool to determine individual remuneration packages.
The feedback we received was so strong that we now have been commissioned to help with its implementation, with all roles being re-sized using the new methodology, and all Services Managers to undergo an initial assessment of their competency levels based on the new Competency Model.

Bendelta has designed and delivered a variety of leadership residentials for groups of 25 senior managers from within the native title representative body system of Australia. Working with mixed groups of Indigenous and non-Indigenous managers, we have assisted them to make a successful transition from professional expert to senior leader by building their capacity in areas such as strategic thinking, business planning, governance, staff management and financial management.