Deutsche Bank’s internal coaches are building a coaching culture, developing courageous leadership and helping protect the bank from risks, says award-winning coach Naomi Schwabe
During my 20-year internal audit career in financial services I was introduced to coaching on a training course where I was assigned a coach. This moment in 2013 changed the course of my life, persuading me to become a qualified coach.
I found the journey of becoming a coach very fulfilling – each coaching conversation was an opportunity to have a deep connection with another human being. I learnt so much about myself from clients as well as from my supervisors. It’s made me a better person, and it’s extremely fulfilling to witness how people are transformed through coaching, becoming aware of and more able to use their strengths, including to face any challenges.
I persisted with the coaching journey, becoming a European Mentoring & Coaching Council (EMCC) practitioner and supervisor, and three years ago, with my passion for coaching, I joined the Deutsche Bank (DB) group audit’s staff development team to establish an internal coach faculty.
Deutsche Bank
Working with the EMCC, we created a coach training programme. We now have 40 internal coaches and have taken the training from classroom to virtual during the pandemic.
Our internal coaches play a vital role in group audit, supporting the soft skills faculty programme our staff development team launched for the function, partnering with PSI Talent Management UK (a subsidiary of PSI Holdings Limited), that specialises in leadership development skills to develop the content. The programme is uniquely tailored to support the challenges the group audit function faces as the third line of defence for DB.
In addition, each faculty participant gets assigned an internal coach to support them in working towards goals that are appropriate for the faculty content-wise and which contribute to the group audit function’s vision. The coaches help delegates stay honest about progress towards their goals by meeting with them regularly throughout the duration of the faculty.
Our internal coaches have been well received by the function. Over the past three years, we’ve trained 75% of our leaders through our advanced faculty programme and 40% of middle managers through our intermediate faculty programmes.
The coach faculty programme is making a real difference in group audit, creating a coaching culture that also contributes to our vision statement to “support and protect our bank from present and future risks through everyone’s courageous, inspirational leadership leveraging our unique independent position”.
Third line of defence
Our group audit charter states that our role is to add value by providing independent and objective assurance to the management board of DB and the group companies on the adequacy of the design, operating effectiveness and efficiency of the risk management system and the systems of internal control. We also act as an independent, proactive and forward-looking challenger and adviser to senior management.
Group audit is a global function of the bank, serving the rest of the bank’s employees totalling 84,500 (Q2 2021). The challenges that come with our function’s size comparative to the rest of the bank and being a third line of defence prompted us to develop a faculty programme that caters specifically for these challenges.
Key challenges are project management skills – we deliver a high volume of audits, communication skills – lack of buy-in from stakeholders to our audit reports (our key product) with critical content, emotional intelligence to enhance leadership skills in the function.
We partnered with PSI to develop the content of the Advanced Faculty programme aimed at leaders. We started by sharing the key learning outcomes we were hoping to cover in the faculty with the vendor, as well as existing internal materials about leadership expectations and ongoing projects such as the High Performance Culture (HPC) programme.
Responding to the key challenges outlined above, the Advanced Faculty programme covers Emotional Intelligence, leadership skills, communication skills (Insights Discovery), project management skills and resilience, and is structured in three modules: understanding self, leading others and leading the business.
Our Advanced Faculty programme pilot in July 2019 was a huge success. The overwhelmingly positive feedback from delegates allowed us to get budget approval to continue in 2020/21. Due to the pandemic we had to make a tough decision to delay the Advanced Faculty after the first lockdown, because of travel restrictions and working from home. After much deliberation and the realisation that the pandemic might not be going away soon, we piloted a virtual Advanced Faculty in November 2020, and haven’t looked back since. We revise the content regularly and react to feedback from delegates.
Our Global Head signed off our delivery of a shorter, tailored version of the Advanced Faculty programme with our executive committee (exco) in 2022. This follows the very fruitful team effectiveness sessions we hosted with our exco in the last quarter of 2021 that led to open discussions and reflections among exco members. We used Insights Discovery’s Self-Aware Leader profiles to help each exco members understand their natural leadership style – strengths as well as development areas. More importantly, it helped the exco reflect on strengths and development areas as a team.
We also piloted the Intermediate Faculty aimed at experienced auditors that led audits in 2019, drawing on materials from the Advanced Faculty, tailoring them for the role of this group which is very focused on project management.
Internal coaches
We experimented with external coaches in our first Advanced Faculty. Some delegates fed back afterwards that they didn’t prefer external over internal coaches, while a few delegates said they’d prefer external coaches to gain a fresh perspective, because conversations will stay confidential, and to allow them to cover any topic, including career opportunities, more broadly.
However, the cost of engaging external coaches is significant and the valuable knowledge they gain about the culture of the organisation leaves with them. Due mainly to the cost challenge, we set up our own Internal Coach Faculty, partnering with EMCC, which tailored the coach training programme to incorporate DB’s values and our function’s purpose.
Benefits
We find that there are multiple benefits to having internal coaches:
- Creating a coaching culture supporting a high performance culture (HPC)
Our HPC programme was launched in 2019, incorporating the key components our function aspires to: collaboration, empowerment, goal-orientation, growth mindset, inspirational leadership and consistent reinforcement of behaviours.
Our coaches play a vital role in ensuring delegates set goals for the faculties that are aligned with HPC aspirations.
- Developing our leaders by training them as coaches
We invite all our Advanced Faculty delegates to attend the coach faculty training. Going through the theory of coaching competencies and practising coaching with each other encourages them to use coaching daily, making them better leaders and helping to create a coaching culture in our function.
- Internal coaches develop the rest of the department
Once a coach has completed the coach training programme and indicated that they commit to working towards an externally recognised coaching qualification, we invite them to be a coach on our faculties.
The feedback I get from the coaches afterwards is very positive – they have to do the coaching on the faculty on the ‘side of their desks’, but they find it very fulfilling to coach other members of the function who they might never otherwise have interacted with. They can also see the positive outcome of their coaching first-hand in the function.
- Anonymised feedback on the culture of the function
We gain valuable insight from our coaches – always anonymised. It allows us to tailor the faculty programme in real time and also our staff development book of work if there are themes that arise such as emotional resilience and mental health during the pandemic.
Lessons learned
- Sponsorship from the top
Getting exco members’ buy-in beforehand was a key success factor for our faculties. We engaged our exco members before the advanced faculties to get their sponsorship and support for hosting the faculty in their region. We also got their input on the cohort’s specific project. The project theme for 2021 was ‘How group audit could further embed HPC’.
- Collaborating on content
Working with external suppliers like the EMCC and PSI on the content of our faculties and coach training programme delivered the following key benefits: having an externally recognised accredited coaching programme and credibility of the content that was still tailored to our function’s needs and incorporated ongoing internal programmes like HPC.
The contact with these external suppliers also helped us have an external point of view and regular updates on current industry developments. The suppliers facilitated the training initially while we observed, then we brought the facilitation inhouse in 2021.
- Adapting the faculty courses from classroom to a virtual offering
The key benefit I observed from taking our faculties online was being able to host cross-regional faculties, eg, APAC, UK, Americas and central Europe mixed in one virtual classroom, allowing for greater networking opportunities and breaking down of silos. It also allowed people to share how they were experiencing lockdowns and working from home, realising they were all struggling but weren’t alone. The virtual faculties were so successful that we’re going to continue with them for the foreseeable future, although we’re keeping our options open for classroom/hybrid sessions in the future.
Outcomes
- Giving back to group audit
As mentioned above, we agree a project theme with exco for each Advanced Faculty cohort to work on. The first few faculties have delivered successful projects helping us to streamline our audit products, support our people and create informal networks for new joiners to get to know each other and the rest of the function. We’re very excited about faculties projects in the pipeline.
- Coach faculty – culture carriers
Our coaches are ‘culture carriers’ in the function, through their support of faculties and other training programmes, development of delegates alongside the faculty programmes, and use of coaching tools and techniques in day-to-day line manager roles.
- Models used – communication preferences and Emotional Intelligence
We combined the roll-out of Insights Discovery communication preferences with teaching an Emotional Intelligence Profile (EIP3) framework in our faculties. Combining the knowledge of these two models/frameworks have been one of the key take-aways for most delegates. It’s helped delegates with relationship management internally and with our stakeholders, allowing them to flex their personalities and embrace others’ differences to allow difficult conversations to be more productive.
The greater awareness of Emotional Intelligence has also helped us to reflect more as a function – celebrating what we have done well and learning from our mistakes.
About the author
Naomi Schwabe was Highly Commended in the Coaching at Work 2021 Awards in the Internal Coaching Champion category. She qualified as a chartered accountant and has been working in internal audit in financial services for multinational companies for the past 20 years.
Before joining Deutsche Bank in 2018, she worked at Barclays for five years where she was part of an audit team that covered culture, people risk and corporate governance. She is an EMCC accredited practitioner and supervisor.