This program is the manifestation of our commitment to investing in our talent. In building this leader-led internal development program for our top talent, we want to ensure that Newton’s culture, heritage and institutional knowledge endure for generations of leadership to come.
Last month, we launched the Newton Leadership Development Program, a senior leadership team initiative to identify, develop, inspire and empower the next generation of leaders at Newton. We welcomed our inaugural cohort – a diverse group drawn together from our Boston, San Francisco and London offices – with a week of interactive workshops, skills challenges and networking opportunities at our London headquarters. With programming delivered by our own executive committee, our cohort received a great insight into what our leadership team views as the building blocks to success.
Our Vision and Mission
As stewards of the investments we make on behalf of our clients, we’ve certainly heard time and again from investee companies that their people are their most valuable asset. At Newton, we feel the same about our own people. They have invested so much in Newton, and we wanted to show them that the firm is equally invested in their development and success.
While it is commonplace within the industry to provide all employees with access to courses on various day-to-day business skills, we saw value in creating a bespoke leadership training program for those individuals that we identify as having the potential to be our future leaders. By equipping them with the necessary leadership skills, we are demonstrating our commitment to invest in them, their development and their future with us.
We further believed that, in order to achieve the greatest impact from this investment, we needed something specific to Newton – a thoughtfully curated program that captures our institutional knowledge, our commitment to supporting diversity of thought, and our highly inclusive culture. We designed a rigorous, two-year program with training delivered by our own executive committee members. This structure will enable our cohort to develop the skills and knowledge our current leadership wishes to foster in the next generation of Newton leaders.
Crucially, diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) lie at the heart of this program. It is our belief that businesses benefit from diversity of thought, as this enables more robust decision making. By encouraging and actively supporting the advancement of talented diverse employees, leadership can ensure that diversity of thought is captured in the decision-making process. At Newton, we view developing talent and supporting diversity at all levels of the firm as two inextricable endeavors. Because of this, we’ve woven a DE&I focus into the very fabric of our program. We are not simply preparing our top talent to take on expanded leadership roles; we are preparing them to become globally minded thinkers and leaders.
Taking Our Program from Ideation to Successful Implementation
No program can succeed without sound support from the top, and we must attribute much of the success of getting ours off the ground to our executive committee’s commitment and involvement. Our steering committee, comprised of a number of our executive committee members including our CEO, Euan Munro, dedicated many hours towards the development of this program. They provided guidance to us as program originators, drawing on their own experiences in becoming leaders; they also helped us to ensure we crafted a meaningful curriculum that will push our developing leaders to reach their full potential as they are challenged to drive forward some of the firm’s most impactful initiatives.
No firm is an island and, as part of the broader BNY Mellon ecosystem, we benefited greatly from the support of our DE&I and learning and development partners from our parent company. Through this partnership, we have been able to share learnings with other groups across BNY Mellon and, in turn, learn from the success stories of broader bank-wide initiatives. The guidance we received from our BNY Mellon partners has been invaluable in helping us successfully launch this program.
Preparing Newton for the Future
The work doesn’t stop here. As we strive to advance our top talent to positions of leadership, we look ahead to the challenges we face both as a business and as an employer. As a predominantly ‘people’ business, we believe that investing in our people’s development using a structured and meaningful approach will demonstrate that we are a company of the future, helping to steer Newton towards industry recognition and future commercial success. And we think that empowering our people with the skills and opportunity to be at the forefront of tackling some of our biggest strategic challenges will equip these future stewards of Newton with the tools they will need to lead with impact on the global stage.
