Learning by Example
Best Practices in People

This article began as a consultancy project. Compiling the best practices of a financial entity, we can discover that common sense and sensitivity toward others are common values among all good managers.

Executive Summary
Individuals working at all levels of an organization tend to accumulate highly valuable experiences that are frequently not shared to the extent they should be. These have become known as best practices. A recent project with the Spanish banking entity Caixa Sabadell offered me the opportunity to highlight some best practices for branch managers. I was asked to lead a People Management Development Program for the company’s branch managers, and the idea of incorporating an activity that would encourage best practices came to me during one my meetings with the management.

The idea took hold, and I felt it would make an interesting subject for an article. The best practices examined in this program are very valuable as they relate to the management of people and underline the good sense and ingenuity of those who are placed in charge of small teams of co-workers.

The People Management Development Program consisted of 10 sessions arranged into five modules. Each of these in turn comprised two sessions, the first a case study and the second a seminar. The subjects for these modules were Motivation, Communication, Training and Assessment, Leadership and Teamworking. Sessions were held at Caixa Sabadell's offices in Barcelona every Wednesday afternoon.

The 300 branch managers were divided into six groups of 50, and each of these was in turn divided into five teams of 10 people. Participants were asked in each program module to list the best practices they had implemented. The director of the PMD Program developed a protocol which set out how best practices were to be documented, providing a series of steps to be followed. The contents of the protocol were then summarized (See Table 1).

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