Work Based Report (50%) File Name: REGNUM_ IBP7002_WBR

Reflective Journal (25%) File Name: REGNUM_ IBP7002_RJ

Personal Leadership Plan (25%) File Name: REGNUM_ IBP7002_PLP

Coursework: Individual Reflective Journal (25%)

Each student must write an individual reflective journal answering the question set below.
It should be a maximum of 2,000 words in length.
Assessed Learning Outcome
Analyse the impact of an organisations culture on individual and team behaviour and
evaluate the ways in which national culture can influence individual and
organisational behaviour, management styles and practices.
Assignment Task
Using practical experience from your sponsor organisation and appropriate management
theories, reflect on your personal development of practical skills and learning experiences
during your first few months in your internship.
1) Identify at least two key learning experiences from the past year. Examples include
team working a project, a new policy or strategy that has changed the way that you
work. Write a rationale for your choices, explaining why these experiences have been
significant to you.
2) Analyse these two learning experiences using relevant theory, framework or concepts
covered in Organisation Behaviour classes
3) Critically analyse the factors that have helped or hindered your learning such as: the
leadership style, the culture of the organisation, the role of group/team work and the
influence of national cultural on either individual or team performance
Grade Criteria
Your work will be assessed in accordance with the grade criteria (see Programme
Handbook), namely:
Knowledge and Understanding
Structure and Argument
Information Collection and Analysis
Critical Engagement
Academic Presentation

Coursework: Personal Leadership Plan (25%)

Each student must write an individual personal leadership plan answering the question set
below.
It should be a maximum of 2,000 words in length.
Assessed Learning Outcome
Examine the role of leadership in the organisation including an exploration of the
various types of leadership and the unique contribution that each type of leader
makes to the effectiveness of the organisation
Assignment Task
Using practical experience from your sponsor organisation and appropriate management and
leadership theories, reflect on your personal leadership style.
1) Identify at least two key learning experiences from the past year where you have
taken a leadership role
2) Analyse these two learning experiences using relevant theory, framework or concepts
covered in Organisation Behaviour classes
3) Critically analyse your personal leadership style, such as the values that are
important to you, the principles on which you base your leadership, and how your
style of leadership empowers those around you to perform better
4) Provide an action plan comprising the skills that you need to develop your leadership
skills, the action required to achieve your goals and the time scale for achieving each
of your goals and what metrics you might employ to determine whether or not you
made progress
Grade Criteria
Your work will be assessed in accordance with the grade criteria (see Programme
Handbook), namely:
Knowledge and Understanding
Structure and Argument
Information Collection and Analysis
Critical Engagement
Academic Presentation
Your assignment should be word-processed
Arial font
Font size 12
1.5 line spacing
Report Format: Cover Pages, Page Nos., Section Titles and Contents page
Harvard referencing (in-text) and Bibliography
It should be a maximum of 2,000 words in length
This includes all quotes.
This includes all Harvard references.
This does not include appendices.
This does not include your bibliography.

Your assignment

While working with your sponsor organisation or another organisation approved by

your professor, employ a variety of methodologies (e.g. personal observations,
interviews, surveys, library, internet research, company materials, etc.) to
investigate, assess and analyse the effectiveness of the organisation in its
management of people. You should highlight relevant issues/challenges, underlying
root causes, theoretical underpinnings and offer pragmatic work-based
recommendations. Your report should include a discussion of at least two of the
following topics:
Identify a change management programme recently introduced in your
organisation or another organisation approved by your professor. Evaluate the
complexity of introducing and managing such a change and provide alternative
interventions that management can implement to overcome resistance to change
and improve organisational performance. Please incorporate appropriate underlying
theories into your discussion.
Using carefully selected Organisational Theories as tools for understanding
Organisation Behaviour, identify the likely underlying root causes of organisational
problems observed, experienced or researched, and provide potential pragmatic
solutions to these problems that are linked to the organisational theories selected.
Analyse and evaluate the rewards system, job performance and organisation
commitment in your selected organisation and assess the role of management in
enhancing workplace motivation and leadership. Please incorporate appropriate
underlying theories into your discussion.

Identify a change management programme recently introduced in your organisation

or another organisation approved by your professor. Evaluate the complexity of
introducing and managing such a change and provide alternative interventions that
management can implement to overcome resistance to change and improve
organisational performance. Please incorporate appropriate underlying theories into
your discussion.

Repeated news which tarnished the reputation of Banks make our leader Antony
jenking to introduce a major cultural change program in 2012. The program names
Project Transform. And three years down the line the media is still debating whether
the program has achieved all its objectives or not.
Before diving into the details and taking any side in debate I would take opportunity
to critique the idea of debate itself. Do cultures change overnight? Can we change
the thought process and work methodologies of thousands of employees who are
accustomed to one working style by mere declaration of new vision and value
statements? For Barclays, there has been more than mere declaration, there is a
constant reporting about achieving the value statements and monitoring of our
progress towards becoming the Go To Bank.
The five core principles on which the culture change program is based on are :
Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship and there have been a
number of traning programs to explain all these values to the employees and the
reporting tools been amended to ensure that Barclays is living upto its values.
Three years down the line, we have managed not to get into any new controversy
but is that due to our culture change or due to the very strict regulations imposed
such that the Banks are not even allowed to enter into any risky business. But have
we won the hearts of people of society wherein we are operating or they still hate
us and feel we are the ones who play with their money to make profits for
ourselves.
Why are we unable to change the face of Bank, where are we lacking ? are our
values not clearly defined or are our employees not accustomed to live upto those
values ? maybe a bit of both. The Transform project was launched with a much of
fanfare and during the days of despair the perfect ground setting for a major
revolution. But was it delivered with such a force to make a strong impact on
workforce of thousands of employees. Maybe not and the results started to come in
only when the reporting mechanisms incorporated specific monitoring on the
progress of citizenship tasks.
I would first point out a shortcoming of the online learning system, wherein Barclays
uploaded very well designed course to instill the ideas of citizenship in the minds of
all employees . But if just online courses could change the mindset of employees
then the whole of educations sector would cease to exist. The online courses can
act a a good refresher but to bring a change in mindset we need a vibrant instructor

who lives the values himself and can advise all how the values bring a change for
betterment of all.
I would quote example of project citizen SBI launched in 2008 by then chairman OP
Bhatt. During the time of financial crises when all banks were reeling under pressure
from liquidity crinch and falling profits, he took advantage of situation and in a quick
flash energized the workforce of more than 200000 employees to achieve
excellence in customer service. The citizenship SBI course was delievered through
in person classes and that brought a huge change in mindset of the employees
whose dedication level increased many folds.
Next, I would like to comment on the benefit package. There is a move to switch
from Bonuses to the fixed package structure to comply with the regulatory
requirements and also the demands of society but we need to analyse that such a
big direct impact on the expectations of employees can

One issue being faced by the banking industry is the regulatory requirements which have
shrunk the profit margins and there is a need to innovate and reduce costs. I dont believe
why even in today world people believe that laying off employees is important to cut costs
and improve margins. Who gets laid off?
1. First to leave are the best achievers. They can manage another opportunity. They
quit.
2. 2nd are the rebels. Who concern about the organization and are never willing to
compromise. They cannot be a yes man and often pinch their supervisors.
3. The underachievers who create inefficiency in system are just a small minority .
Infact a majority of underachievers have better chances of survival because :
1. Their survival skills are good. They are surviving in the organisations for a long
time so they know how to obviate the risk of being laid off
2. The ones who have a good chance to survive are the non performing yes men.
They go overboard to satisfy the desires of the supervisors and survive the storm
somehow.
3. The old guys having spent so many years in the organization can manage to find
some godfather.
In Barclays case there has been a cascading effect on the inefficiency in system. The
top leadership is trying to engage the employees to get ideas from grass root level to
improve efficiency and there is a lot of scope of technological improvements and
process redesigns to create efficient systems but the participation from the good guys
down there is minimal. Because there is a fear that if the system gets efficient, lesser
number of employees would be required and the chances that the person who proposed
the efficient system will get laid off increase.
I relate this to another major HR shortcoming that there is no effort to create long term
resources who are expert in various fields. The people in one department spend so
many years doing the same task. They get expert in their field but they are not confident
about the other areas and surely the top jobs need expertise from different areas. Job
rotations should be encouraged and people should be given exposure to different areas
so that the good employees are not required to be laid off even when the job function
which they performed is not required at all by the organization.

The biggest problem that I have observed in Barclays is that there is surely inefficiency
in system but finding the burden employees is a difficult task when the number of
employees is more than 100000.
A few approaches that I can think of are:
1. New business ventures : employees can volunteer and go to new business line
2. Global expansion : Business enviorment might be bad in UK but there are so many
high growth economies out there

3. Taking voluntary leave applications : There would be many who need a break (A few
good people might go but atleast we have managed to keep them attached to
organization)
4. Voluntary resignations: The uninterested ones should be the first to leave as we
cannot expect commitment from them in bad times.
5.
Therefore there is utter discontent with the reward system as people believe that
the attempts to improve efficiencies increase the risk of them being laid off. This
surely has a badeffect on job performance because people do not work to their full
potential and organization commitment reduces as people start the contingency
planning and start exploring new opportunities.
The management is responsible to control all the bad effects and to improve the
systems to get back to the earlier profit margins. The intention of the management
is correct and they have drafted their plans to improve the face of Barclays in the
eyes of the public at large but the execution of the plans is ill planned. Not only
there has been a wide declaration in the media that Barclays has decided to lay off
employees but there are deadlines also planned for this task. These deadlines result
in uninformed decisions taken near the deadlines.

To bring a change successfully a good leader would garner eight characteristics :

Why people resist change , sometimes its just a retaliation. I had to provide a
feedback on an employees task which was not upto mark and I did my job honestly.
He retaliated by speaking up againt my proposed changes without any reasonable
supporting thoughts. In the end, no one paid any heed to his points but he
succeeded in delaying the design for sure and the delays if keep repeating
combined create a huge roadblock to implement a successful change.

Using carefully selected Organisational Theories as tools for understanding

Organisation Behaviour, identify the likely underlying root causes of organisational
problems observed, experienced or researched, and provide potential pragmatic
solutions to these problems that are linked to the organisational theories selected.
One organization theory that I remembered during my program was that being
respurceful gives power to an entity. IN Barclays the front office generates the
revenues and therefore the resource. That is the most powerful entity in
organization.
The cost management system of organization is such that all the departments are
allocated budget and they have to manage their assigned tasks within that budget.
I was surprised to see that incase Loan operations team want a specific project from
IT team, IT team will raise an invoice to Loan operations team and there will be
internal movement of funds because both teams have to manage within their
budget. This system can never make the thousands of employees working in
different teams to believe that the Barclays is one organization as a whole and the
ultimate motive of each employee is to ensure long term growth of the organization.
What I observed as a part of a small change as improvement of processes, for each
and every small change that we as loan operations proposed for the workflow tool,
the IT guys always brought up the issue of budget and advised us to consider our
requirements vis-a vis budget available with us to bring this change.
We could not even think about trying our best and brining all our thoughts about
improvements in processes on the table because we had to be aware of budget and
that there will be movement of funds from our team to theirs just because we are
more concerned with quality of work and improvement in processes.
There is a need to revise this system of allocations of budget to ensure that each
and every employee contributes to the growth of organization rather than bringing
the output of only his own team.
The present market condition is that the strict regulations forbid much of innovation
and diversification in the product offerings. Barclays has responded to the
regulatory sstrictness with its plans to strengthen the relations with its valuable
clients and having long term relations with the clients ensuring repeat business.
In this scenario, we have to ensure not only good quality customer service but there
is a need of customer delight in each and every experience to the customer.
The requests of customers are actually processed by the back office. The efficiency
and capabilities of back office determine the quality of customer service that an
organization can manage. I have observed numerous requests from customers that
their request is serviced as soon as immediately but what they receive is a time
chart which they have to follow to ensure that the request is serviced on stated time
and we never get a confrontation about the service quality and the delay in
servicing.

Second even with the policy of giving the time chart in advance already in place, we
still see many escalations from clients for not servicing their requests on time. Be it
inability of the back office to service requests on time or the systems being unable
to allow, surely there is a gap which if plugged can give us an edge over our
competitors and many in the back office would have their ideas on how can the
systems be improved but just because of the explanses involved to bring these
changes everyone has their mouth shut.
The front office , the darling of the system will never accept that it was inability of
the back office and would say they are capable but they did not do because till the
budget of back office is same there is a lot available to the front office and large
part of that goes directly into pockets of the employees.
The front office employees have huge responsibilities to bring in the revenues but
their inability comes from their own perception which has to be thre for selfish
nature of humans. Further the system hides their imcompetitiveness especially for
the servicing side. There might be a lack of ability in atleast a few teams and there
might be some need of help but that all is hidden. A team might be bringing large
amount of revenues but the opportunity would be even more in that area and their
market share might still be smaller.
There are all these issues which may or may not be present but because the front
offices are the revenue generators therefore they can afford to be lethargic and
their shortcomings would get hidden by the system as long as somebody is in
positive revenue system he is a darling of organization. In case of shortfall in
revenues the back office would face budget cuts for sure and that will further
hamper their ability to provide good quality service.
I am nto advocating for larger busgets but a complete overhaul of this budgeting
system so that all ateams are utilized to their full potential and the central figure to
determine which area needs more allocation so that the organization always keeps
moving in right direction and keeps brining in changes to the processes to ensure its
competitiveness among super strong peers.

Alternative costing system :

One of approach that can be used is Transfer Price Mechanism. In this method, the
revenue for all the deal will be shared by all the stakeholders who are responsible to
service the client. The business generation teams (front office), the deal servicing
teams (back office) and the risk managing teams (middle office) each has to
contribute manhours and their area of expertise to ensure that the business rune
smoothly. Each has to take ownership of all the clients in the Barclays books. The
revenue from the clients can be shared among all the teams and the ratio to be
determined by the amount of work required on the part of respective teams. The
major chunk of revenues for any particular deal will remain with the business teams
and because the deal servicing teams deal in large volumes , their own stream of
revenues will be sufficient to make them self-sustaining unit rather than depending
on the budget allocated.
The ancillary tasks such as IT /HR which do not participate in the deals but are
crucial to the success of organization can be headed by specialists in their fields and
the budget allocated to them by a central oversight team. This will empower them
to provide better services and at the same time take the undue power from the
hands of some of their teams be cause they can no longer invoice any team for the
work done by them. In this manner, all the teams across the Bank will be free to
raise as many IT requests as required and the prioritization of tasks will be done by
the experts in the field. The time lag for service delivery from IT will increase
because number of requests will increase substantially but will have marginal
impact because such time lag is still very high. The present reason for the time lag
is the inefficiency of IT teams and proposed the time lag will be for the extreme
utilization of their services to create efficiency in the organization as a whole.
There is a wide-spread belief that the IT teams exaggerate the work required for any
particular project ,avoid new projects by providing inflated costs to the requesting
teams, and go so beyond that they create small easily repairable imperfections in
the systems designed by them in order to get repeat requests which can again be
invoiced and the man-hours of IT teams being justified by this dishonest attitude.
They can easily slip through because of absence of any expertise at the top office
which can ensure efficient running of such specalised tasks.

First Page
Preface/ Abstract
Acknowledgement
Table of contents
Introduction
Organization Efficiency
Change Management
Proposition
References

This report has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
award of Post Graduate certificate in International business practice