Westpac Leadership Star

Westpac wanted to develop effective and enthusiastic leaders. Its challenge was that a leaders' perception of their performance didn't always match the experience of their staff. Westpac wanted to create a data-rich and comprehensive process for regular and constructive feedback from staff to their leaders helping them self-improve.

Providing feedback on your boss isn't always easy. Even when asked to do so by a trusted manager or upper management, there is always the risk of the manager in question not being receptive to pro tips from a team member. Leadership Star protects staff by asking relevant, anonymously answered questions. This encourages them to be frank about how their team leader is really doing, and what they could do better. The leader is also protected with responses only going back to the leader themselves – it isn’t shared with their manager so it can be safely reviewed and considered

Westpac NZ CEO put faith in the development and roll out of this concept by investing from the CEO’s office budget, and it has paid off. An increase in team positivity and happiness, and leaders being recognised for their improving efforts has now caught the attention of Westpac group.

The service was was rolled out in three stages involving continuous feedback from users and stakeholders. It was initially prototyped and tested with a small group of leaders and teams, followed by a successful pilot across all bank staff. Feedback from team members, leaders and HR was gathered via interviews and surveys. And the current solution was redeveloped with enhanced experiences specifically tailored to the needs of each stakeholder. For example, leaders asked for improved views of improvements over time, and comparison with peers. Leadership Star was designed mobile first with a primary goal to remove barriers for team members responding to surveys. It needed to be fast, quick, 'tappable' and engaging - on any device. People needed to find it so easy that they would be happy to repeat the survey every couple of months. A key requirement from the sponsor was to provide the same level of polish and elegance in experience design that the bank offers to customers. In order to encourage use, the solution needed to feel like it had been designed with care. The designers worked closely with front-end developers to ensure a high level of polish across all interactions.