Isabel Group Feedback Culture

case study - Leadership Development

Feedback Culture

Isabel Group

With the company shifting from a traditional yearly evaluation cycle to a more continuous feedback culture, Isabel Group wanted to make sure its people managers were well-equipped to embrace and implement the new approach.

Together with the Isabel team, we developed a coaching programme that combined a 360-degree assessment to raise self-awareness, individual coaching to identify areas for improvement, and group discussion to share learnings.

Isabel Group

Isabel Group is Belgium's largest fintech company. It helps banks, businesses and accounting firms streamline their administrative processes by ensuring the smooth and secure exchange of documents, payments and identities between all parties in their financial chain. Thanks to this seamless flow of information and transactions, organisations gain new insights and are empowered to make better decisions.

The context

Isabel Group had been undergoing a shift from traditional yearly evaluations to a more continuous feedback culture. As well as keeping a focus on performance management, the company was also placing more emphasis on personal development, motivation, and talent retention.

To support the shift, a new process was implemented, and people managers were given tools to assist them in their role. The company also wanted to increase people managers’ self-awareness in relation to feedback culture and to accelerate the necessary behavioural changes.

What we did

Together with the Isabel team, we developed a coaching programme aimed at helping people managers embrace the new feedback culture and fully integrate the new behaviours into their team’s daily routines.

For coaching to be effective, it’s crucial for individuals to have a realistic understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses. To help participants achieve this, we began the coaching process with a 360-degree assessment to be filled in by their direct reports, colleagues, and manager. We developed the assessment questionnaire together with Isabel to make sure it was aligned with the company culture and represented the company’s target behaviours in terms of building a feedback culture.

The project was implemented on a departmental basis, starting with all people managers in each department undergoing a 360-degree assessment. Once the assessment was complete, each person then had an individual coaching session to review the outcomes and identify areas for improvement.

To encourage collaboration and shared learning, we held a session with all people managers to discuss the overall outcomes of the two-step process. During this meeting, we identified common strengths and weaknesses, and developed actionable steps for improvement. We also provided tips and tricks that people could use to help each other improve in the identified areas.

The results

The 360-degree assessment gave Isabel an opportunity to communicate its behaviour expectations related to feedback in a concrete and constructive way. All participants reported that they gained new insights into themselves and others, and over 80% were able to identify concrete actions to improve how they gave or received feedback.

The aggregated information from the different departments proved to be a useful resource in itself. It gave a consolidated view of people managers’ strengths and points for improvement, which has allowed the HR department to identify trends and gaps across the organisation. These insights will contribute to the development of future training and coaching programmes at Isabel.

Overall, the project was a great success, with participants reporting increased self-awareness and an improved ability to give and receive feedback. The Isabel-tailored 360-degree questionnaire and individual coaching sessions helped ensure that people’s individual needs were addressed, while the team-level insights provided valuable information for the organisation as a whole.

What Isabel Group Feedback Culture say about us

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