My greatest achievement in supporting productive working relationships came when I worked
as a BA at ANZ Bank.
This was obviously a technical role, but over time a significant part of my duties evolved into
being a supervisor and a mentor for our many graduate programmers. Almost all of these
graduate programmers were men, a large percentage of them did not speak English as a first
language, and overall I think it was fair to say that they weren’t the best communicators –
though they were technically very skilled. There wasn’t a lot of effective communication going
on between this group and the rest of the section, and I took it upon myself to offer my
assistance in order to build and maintain relationships with our graduates and between them
and other people in the section. I encouraged more face-to-face communication and more
communication in general.
To ensure that contributions were recognised and encouraged, I approached senior
management with an idea to hand out a monthly prize to the graduate programmer judged
best-performing by his or her workmates, with no one person able to win the prize twice in
succession. As this idea was cheap and easy to implement it was green-lit, and was very
successful at fostering a sense that effort would be rewarded.
Another initiative that I instituted was to identify learning opportunities for our graduate
programmers where I could see that there were gaps in their skill-sets. This including training
on topics like effective communication in the workplace and assertiveness as well as technical
topics.
As a result of my actions in building and supporting productive working relationships with our
graduate programmers, ANZ was better able to harness the benefits of their skills and
knowledge of our graduates, and the graduates were empowered to successfully complete our
graduate program and move on to more senior positions. I received an Outstanding
Contribution award in recognition of this at one of our yearly awards ceremonies, and this is
something that I’m very proud o