Leadership At The Heart Of MIDF Culture

stephanie.ho@leaderonomics.com

Malaysian Industrial Development Finance Bhd (MIDF) turned 54 last March, stamping its position as a pioneering financial institution focused on accelerating the development of Malaysian SMEs (small and medium enterprises). Moving forward as a well-established financial service institution, MIDF’s core business is clearly defined and strategised in the areas of investment banking, development finance and asset management.

Business and people are evolving components. With a revamped business strategy in 2006, MIDF today aims to build its people to be a unified force in achieving the company’s vision. In alignment with the business strategy, new talent has been introduced to collaborate with its loyal-serving employees and to cohesively work towards a performance-driven culture of excellence.

Needful interventions were planned and executed carefully to intensify commitment drive, practices towards work empowerment and valuable engagement. These were subsequently targeted towards employee retention. As of 2013, turnover rate has gone down significantly from double digits in previous years to single digits. The key premise of the MIDF employee engagement programme is to promote a lasting staff engagement by going back to the basics of human motivation.

The company is committed to promoting affinity, affiliation and autonomy for continuous engagement with the staff especially the Generation Y. Azizi Mustafa, the chief operating officer, talked about the shift in focus of human resources this year towards employee engagement. He emphasises the importance of bringing out the potential and optimising the skills of employees. Drawing on the challenges faced by the company, the management of MIDF have outlined their strategic plans on people development. The three key areas which will support the delivery of the company’s strategic ambitions are:

1. Developing individual, team and organisational capabilities to deliver business objectives.

2. Creating outstanding leaders and talent through structured development plans such as the recently introduced Talent Acceleration Programme (TAP) to ensure uninterrupted succession planning.

3. Promoting a lasting staff engagement to tap into the discretionary effort of employees.

Azizi further added that the company subscribes to the belief that leadership is at the heart of its organisational engagement culture as it can facilitate and promote strong engagement. Along this line of thinking, MIDF have a formal coaching and mentoring programme in place to support the need for employees to be “well-led”.

An eminent and inaugural batch of 20 future leaders composed of mainly the mid to senior management levels were handpicked and appraised to be part of TAP with Leaderonomics.

The eight-month TAP programme is defined with MIDF’s core competencies to be a leader, enabler and executer; with other learning interventions through projects, internal and external leader-sharing, and mentoring sessions by MIDF key leaders.

Given the maturity and seniority level, this first batch is set to excel in their capability and strengths, upheld in continuous learning to go beyond and become the future leaders of MIDF.  MIDF is set to reap the rewards of its people investments in the years to come.  Other organisations can truly learn from MIDF and how their emphasis and investments in people are now resulting in fruits of growth.

Stephanie enjoys connecting with people. She is curious and sees the positivity in life. At this moment, she is focused on how we at Leaderonomics can partner corporations and elevate their employer branding. Email her at stephanie.ho@leaderonomics.com to exchange ideas. Feel free to comment in the comment box provided. Click here for more business articles.