Regent Insurance

Regent Insurance is part of the Imperial Group, a diversified multinational mobility group with activities that span motor vehicles and related operations across all modes of transport for people and freight. Regent Insurance specialises in short-term insurance and life assurance products and operates in South Africa, Botswana and Lesotho.

Business challenge:

With the decision to merge Regent Life and Regent Short-term, the need was identified for initially supporting staff through the merger process, then defining and entrenching the required culture as well as developing an aligned and competent leadership body.

Nature of the engagement:

During the physical merger process, Grow Consulting facilitated Change Resilience sessions with all staff members and Change Leadership sessions with all Regent leaders, enabling them to lead themselves and others through the change process more effectively. We further assisted with post-merger integration by facilitating a large-scale organisational alignment intervention with all 650 staff members, followed up with customised divisional alignment sessions with each division to develop divisional strategies in support of the overall company strategy and behaviouralise the defined culture. Working within the context of Regent’s strategic intent, leadership competency profiles were developed and a gap analysis was conducted for the different leadership tiers. Grow Consulting then developed and facilitated customised development journeys across Exco, Senior and Middle Management as well as Supervisory Management levels.

Client quote:

The merger of Regent Life and Regent Insurance in June 2008 was a significant change management challenge, involving reorganisation of close to 1 000 people across multiple locations throughout South Africa and dealing with significant redundancies. Grow Consulting played a tremendously important role in the success of the project, providing support to staff and managers, timely ongoing feedback to the executive leadership, and crucial post-merger leadership and organisational interventions that helped to cement the progress of the new entity.

(Jurie Strydom – Joint Managing Director)