Advancing leadership maturity at a European multilateral development bank
Since 2017, a leading European multilateral development bank has partnered with Sheppard Moscow to strengthen its leadership pipeline, particularly at the senior manager level. As the bank’s mission evolved to address increasingly complex global challenges, they recognised the need to deepen leadership maturity, resilience, and cross-departmental collaboration.
Focus
Our work evolved with the bank’s need, growing from foundational leadership development to advanced programmes that support leaders in navigating complexity, leading change, and influencing across systems. The strategic focus was on aligning leadership with the bank’s evolving mission, building leadership maturity and resilience, and strengthening collaboration and collective leadership, supporting leaders to navigate complexity and lead systemic change.
Action
Our approach to programme design leveraged real-world relevance grounded in participants’ actual leadership challenges and encouraged deep listening, diverse perspectives, and double-loop learning. We built community by fostering trust, straight talk, and peer accountability. This was supported by senior sponsorship and executive engagement of participants who cascaded their learning to their teams.
Key learning elements included:
- Leading for impact: leaders build core leadership and people management capabilities and develop strategic thinking, emotional resilience, and vision leadership.
- Leading for change: designed to shift leaders from expert to leader and toward post-conventional leadership – upgrading their capacity for complexity. Leaders deepen self-awareness, broaden perspective-taking, and enhance systems thinking. They are equipped to navigate ambiguity, lead with purpose, and influence across ecosystems.
Impact
- Strategic alignment: over 130 leaders have been developed to lead on core priorities such as sustainability, cohesion and innovation and are aligned with mission-critical goals.
- Behavioural shifts: participants report increased self-awareness, improved relational intelligence, and greater confidence in navigating ambiguity and leading change.
- Cultural impact: the programme has fostered psychological safety, cross-organisational connection, and a culture of feedback and experimentation, strengthening team dynamics and organisational resilience.
- Proven track record: Earlier programmes for newly appointed senior managers received consistently high ratings and led to tangible improvements in people management, strategic leadership, and emotional resilience.
Find out more about the impactful work we do with MDBs and IFIs, including further insights and case studies.
