‘Building futures and protecting what matters’. Suncorp’s purpose is a positive statement about banking and insurance. But it’s more than that – it’s a broader ethos that underpins its commitment to better leadership and a 17-year ongoing strategic partnership with Maximus.
Suncorp has always been progressive in its thinking, but in recent times has focused the business with a simplified strategy rebuild. The company’s ambition is similarly and refreshingly straightforward – to ‘create a brighter future’.
Suncorp’s first engagement with Maximus was a humble one – a single workshop with frontline leaders in 2008. This progressed to leadership programs with middle management and work around ethical decision-making in leadership. These programs were delivered piecemeal, but as the value of aligning leadership work within the business strategy became clear, Suncorp began to take a more holistic view. Since then, we have worked with Suncorp to integrate five distinct levels of leadership across the business into a single cohesive ecosystem.
The lightbulb moment came when Suncorp formed the view that senior leaders required transformation capability, the power to accelerate parts of the business rapidly to compete effectively with new market entrants and inspired incumbents. To make this happen, we brought the Strategy & Transformation and People, Culture & Advocacy team together to collaboratively build transformational leadership capability. We developed a program of work running over 18 months for Strategic Leaders (generally known as Executive General Managers) in a program called ‘Catalyst’. This has significantly shifted the mindset ability of the organisation to solve problems faster, become more customer centric and build better levels of performance.
Today Maximus helps Suncorp manage the leadership ecosystem, as the five levels of leaders achieve greater interdependence and cross-communication. By bringing the CEO and Executive Team into this system, we are now able to offer Suncorp the advantages of a top-to-bottom, side-to-side view of leadership. It is now wired as a function into the organisation, in the same way other critical business systems such as financial management and customer experience are. During our relationship, we’ve developed the capabilities of literally thousands of leaders within Suncorp and become an integral partner to the business.
