MuniFin (Municipality Finance Plc) is Finland’s third largest credit institution, and its work touches the everyday life of all Finns. MuniFin funds a wide range of significant and life-enhancing projects of Finnish municipalities: lending is used for environmentally and socially responsible investment targets such as public transportation, sustainable construction, hospitals and healthcare centres, schools, and day care centres.
Challenge
MuniFin had recently renewed its strategy, vision, mission, and values and implemented an organizational change to support the renewal. At the same time, the operating environment was undergoing a major transition, with several different changes underway, such as a massive reform of the Finnish social and health care services.
Along the journey, the organization realised that not all changes had been concretized so that everyone knew what was expected from them in practice, and the line managers in particular experienced uncertainty. At this point, the need to systematically develop skills for change leadership and change execution throughout the organization was identified.
Objective
The customer’s objective was to ensure successful adoption of the renewed strategy and the new ways of working. The change leadership skills of executive management team and line managers, as well as the change competences of people working in the projects were identified as critical to success. As several changes were taking place at the same time, there was also a need to increase the ability of all personnel to adopt, navigate and effectively lead themselves at the times of constant renewal.
CCEA service
The executive leaders, line managers and team leaders, and people working in development projects each have an important role to play in a successful change. To meet this need, CCEA designed target-group specific sparring and development paths to increase change skills and competences of each group, and to provide participants a practical toolkit for leading, implementing and adopting change. As a result, CCEA facilitated a change leadership sparring path the leadership team, a change leadership development path for line managers and team leaders, and a change execution development path for people working in projects during the autumn of 2021. In addition, a learning path was designed and facilitated for all personnel in the spring of 2022 with the aim to develop skills that are needed in the modern work.
All development paths included an orientation to successful change as well as 3–4 interactive workshops that were conducted virtually. Development paths increased understanding of the people-side of the change, concretized the roles and responsibilities of different groups in a successful change, and provided concrete tools to support the change.
Customer benefit
MuniFin acknowledged that the understanding of leading and implementing a successful change became clearer in all groups and the interaction and communication between the different groups improved with common language to change. The new practical tools were found very useful, and many were taken into use immediately.
According to customer feedback, the structure of the development paths was well designed all the way from the materials and participant communication to facilitation, and participants felt that it was easy to conduct the development path as a part of their daily work. The greatest benefits of the development paths were considered to be concrete tools, improvement in leadership practices, and new insights into successful change.