Developing deep insights of leadership behaviour

About Inter Hannover

Inter Hannover is a specialist primary insurer. It’s also a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hannover Re, one of the largest reinsurance groups in the world.

With a head office in the City of London and international branches in Sweden, Australia and Canada, they have a truly global senior leadership team.

The challenge

Inter Hannover asked us to help them in changing leadership behaviours for the better.

The first step on that journey was gaining a fuller understanding of the current state of leadership in the organisation, mapped against the behaviours they wanted to see.

How we helped

We carried out in-depth 360° assessments for members of their senior management team.

I’m sure they won’t mind us telling you they weren’t fully prepared, so we also helped them in the creation of a competency framework with which to assess their current leadership team, and potential leaders of the future.

They called them their Performance Characteristics – which is a pretty good name.

The initial set of 360° assessments were carried out as a series of face-to-face interviews – perfect for the executive team where confidentiality and depth of response was critical. As they were rolled out further into the organisation we converted them into an online assessment – ideal to keep costs down but quality high.

Results

Nick Parr, their Chief Executive was really happy with the outcomes. In his own words:

“I found the Vmax Consulting 360° Assessment process very enlightening. It captured the perceptions of my colleagues in a very constructive way that highlighted certain strengths and weaknesses with a rationale that very well aligned with the characteristics of our business model.

Having extended the process across the leadership team, I can relate to this as a meaningful catalyst that brought about a step change in our effectiveness.”