Financial Conduct Authority: ‘At our best’ leadership programme

Oxford Saïd collaborated with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to enhance its senior leaders’ capabilities to navigate the increasingly complex financial services and regulatory environment.

Innovations, such as big data and blockchain, are transforming financial services. However, as well as bringing competition, choice and convenience, they also create new dangers. Growing complexity, cybercrime and fraud threaten the integrity of the global financial system, while rising household debt and uncertainty in employment continue to test consumer confidence.

Mitigating these risks is a significant task for regulators worldwide. As the organisation responsible for regulating financial markets and more than 59,000 financial services firms in the UK, after Brexit, the FCA faces the added challenge of disentangling the country’s financial regulations from Europe’s.

In 2017, the regulator embarked on an organisational transformation to deliver the future of financial regulation. It refreshed its mission and values, moved into a new purpose-built headquarters in Stratford, London, and invested in new cloud-based IT systems to encourage more collaborative working. However, it knew its success rested on implementing a bold new approach to leadership development.

More than 110 of the FCA’s senior leaders already had industry-leading technical expertise. The challenge was to enhance their capabilities to navigate the increasingly volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) financial and regulatory environment.

The regulator needed a partner capable of developing a flexible leadership programme which was responsive to its evolving priorities and would engage time-pressured people to commit to personal growth.

Combining faculty knowledge from one of the world’s most prestigious universities with a diverse, innovative team of executive education professionals, Oxford University’s Saïd Business School offered the FCA the change-catalysing intervention it needed.

Oxford Saïd's Custom Executive Education team, the FCA's Executive Development Department and an Executive Development Advisory Panel of representative FCA senior leaders worked as a seamless team to co-create an agile and unique leadership programme.

Named ‘At our best’ to reflect the FCA's refreshed mission and values, the multi-channel learning experience developed iteratively to meet participants' live needs and embedded professional development in the workplace.

‘At our best’ launched with an event for the FCA’s senior leadership team at its Stratford headquarters in September 2018, before splitting participants into six smaller cohorts to complete a six-month development track.

Each cohort gathered senior leaders from the regulator’s different levels and departments, including the CEO, Directors and Heads of Department, to encourage collaboration and networking across the organisation.

A deliberately overlapping cohort timetable between November 2018 and January 2020 guaranteed inclusivity and allowed those entering the organisation or who missed a learning session to still benefit from the programme.

Residential events at Oxford Saïd’s Executive Education centre at Egrove Park at the beginning and end of the programme focused on critical themes for the organisation, such as the future of regulation, risk and resilience, reputation, the work of leadership and sustaining change.

Oxford faculty-led workshops at the FCA’s Stratford headquarters embedded learning in the workplace and empowered senior leaders to take the ideas, tools and techniques they learned back to their teams.

Coaching sessions organised in small groups of up to six people, based on seniority, reinforced workshop learning, embedded reflective practice and encouraged senior leaders to speak candidly about their challenges.

An intuitive online learning environment and accessible mobile app gave senior leaders ‘just-in-time’ access to materials and encouraged them to engage with digital learning in new ways.

Oxford Saïd’s Custom Executive Education team, the FCA’s Executive Development Department and an Executive Development Advisory Panel worked hand-in-hand to develop the programme iteratively throughout its delivery.

The Oxford Saïd- FCA ‘At our best’ implementation team drew on participant, faculty and coach feedback, and FCA updates on vital regulatory and political developments, to evolve the programme iteratively and ensure it was agile and responsive to the organisation’s emerging priorities.

‘At our best’ encouraged the FCA’s senior leaders to engage with professional development in an environment where time pressures make it challenging to commit to learning. It built new cross-divisional networks, which enabled greater collaboration and cohesion among senior leaders. While facilitated coaching supported them to share live issues and find real solutions.

Participants applied the coaching methods they learned with their teams and discussed programme themes such as managing the pace of change and using doubt as a positive force at meetings traditionally reserved for technical discussions.

Reflective practice had a significant impact on senior leaders’ decision making. Directors and Heads of Department applied the technique to enhance management meetings.

The strength of collaboration between the FCA and Oxford Saïd made ‘At our best’ a success. It empowered the organisation’s senior leaders to be at their best to navigate the increasingly volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous financial and regulatory environment.