Last week I had the pleasure to meet Eileen Sutton who is a financial services copywriter in New York. I was describing some of the work we’ve been doing for the National Australia Bank (known as ‘nab’ here in Australia and the largest bank in our country by asset size¹) and she was amazed that a bank was so progressive. She asked me to write up some of the things we are doing for nab.

For the last four years we’ve been training bankers from all levels across the bank in our Storytelling for Leaders program at the bank’s internal university, nabAcademy.

We’ve done narrative-based leadership development programs, for example for the bank’s executives at the Private Wealth Group. Click here to have a look at the case study.

nab has taken business storytelling seriously. They have even included storytelling as a core capability for senior executives in the bank’s capability framework.

Late last year we featured in a new leadership program for high potential store managers. They kicked off the program with Storytelling for Leaders.

We have also helped the financial advisors be better storytellers and worked with different parts of the IT organisation to help them better connect with the business lines.

nab has been a pleasure to work with. The people there really want to make a difference and care about being good leaders. Of course there is always room for improvement and we play our small part in an overall effort to build the capability of the bank.

^1. Source: The Banker, July 2013