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Masters of Change Management Training
October 28, 2008
Change Everyday: Two case studies show how Training 2008 Top 125 companies Wachovia Bank and PNC Financial successfully—and continuously—manage and train for change. By Liz Wheeler
By Liz Wheeler
With more than 100 mergers in less than two decades, Wachovia Bank has become something of a poster child for change management. Headquartered in North Carolina, this large diversified financial services company has streamlined the integration of newly acquired companies.
"Change management is not an event for us; it's something we do every day," says Amy Lessack, Wachovia senior vice president, enterprise learning. "It is embedded in the work we do, so every time we do a learning design or talk to clients or to the business, we talk about change—how it's impacting employees and leaders, how to lead that change, and how can we partner with the business to help employees work through the changes."
Lessack isn't kidding about change being an everyday event. The company, with 3,300 retail offices and $812.4 billion in assets, has a team for merger projects, and it seems as soon as one merger is complete, another begins. At the end of every merger, she says, "we create what we call a training cookbook, which literally documents all the processes, roles, and responsibilities needed to do a merger from a training perspective."
Wachovia acquired Golden West Financial Corporation, the holding company for World Savings Bank, in October 2006. Integration for acquired companies can take up to 18 months. But only one year later, Wachovia acquired A.G. Edwards. Because of the training cookbook, "we could apply what we already had learned from World Savings to A.G.," Lessack explains.
For Lessack's team, the process is continuous during the mergers. "As soon as a merger is announced, we pull our enterprise merger training team together," she says. The team, using the ADDIE model [analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation], begins analyzing the other bank, looking at what it does in its branches and how it defines job families, and then determines the training needed.
For World Savings, Wachovia started with the information employees needed to switch from a savings and loan to a commercial bank, then looked at how differently each employee role functioned at World Savings compared to Wachovia—and how that role would function in the new Wachovia. "In World Savings, tellers and people on the platform did both jobs. In Wachovia, the platform [people] don't do teller work. That changes how we're going to do our training and how we'll adapt people from World Savings," Lessack notes.
Much of the training design focuses around the legacy company's culture. "We'll take output from cultural review and design training in a way that embraces the legacy company's culture and helps to move the culture to the new Wachovia environment," Lessack says. On the first day [of training], the first two hours is about culture and change and the values of Wachovia." And on that day, trainers wear the extra mantle of counselor. "We train trainers to make sure they're sensitive," Lessack says. Trainers are asked questions on anything from vacation days to health benefits. "Learning is the power to get through change. We follow a process where we want to say, 'Here's what the change looks like in the future to you.'"
And that learning works both ways. Wachovia has adapted best practices such as technologies and product lines from acquired companies to help it improve.
For the World Savings merger, each of its 14,000 employees received training to ensure they were familiar with Wachovia products and processes in order to maintain a high level of service so customers would see no change between Friday to Monday when the name on the door became Wachovia.
"Change management happens at all levels at our company," Lessack stresses. "I wouldn't necessarily say training leads change management. Rather, it's in partnership with what the company is doing overall. We don't do anything in a vacuum."
Seven hours directly north of Wachovia headquarters, at the corner of Pittsburgh's Fifth Avenue and Wood Street, is the corporate anchor of PNC Financial. With $143 billion in assets, this financial services company is the 16th largest bank holding company in the U.S.—a culmination of more than 20 mergers and acquisitions of financial service companies since 1982.
On July 19, 2007, PNC announced the acquisition of Sterling Financial Corporation. On August 11, 2008, Sterling's 59 offices reopened as PNC retail locations, culminating more than a year of planning and training. The Sterling merger involved a cross- functional team of PNC managers working closely with their Sterling counterparts. The managers led 27 functional teams, each with its own strategic integration plan feeding into the overall integration plan. Each of Sterling's more than 1,000 employees received training from PNC, whether they were expected to continue with PNC after conversion or not. Training began in March 2008, more than a month before the legal close of the acquisition, and, through the August conversion, required more than 31,000 employee hours. PNC planned to continue integration-related training beyond the conversion.
PNC's training program uses a mix of classroom, online, and hands-on experiences to complete coursework in more than 25 broad areas of knowledge. Additionally, dozens of current PNC line employees were deployed to Sterling work sites to serve as mentors for new employees as they learned PNC systems, policies, and procedures.
Fifty-nine Sterling affiliate bank branches closed at 3 p.m. Friday, August 8, and reopened Monday, August 11, as PNC Bank branches with all of their PNC signs, merchandising, products, and systems in place. Over the intervening weekend, PNC shifted the accounts of approximately 120,000 consumers and businesses to PNC's banking platform—a feat it had completed successfully once as part of a mock conversion more than a month before.
"Sterling employees already had earned a reputation for outstanding customer service," notes Fred Solomon, PNC vice president, corporate communications. "Our goal was to leverage that reputation and further enhance it by training them to be alert to unmet customer needs and ready to offer the value-added solutions embedded in PNC's products and services."
Visit www.trainingmag.com/kotter to read about Harvard guru
John Kotter’s Leading Bold Change initiative.
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