Building Manager Resilience at Irish Life

The client

Irish Life Corporate Business is one of Ireland’s leading providers of pension and risk solutions. Its management population carries the kind of responsibility that makes personal resilience a business question rather than a personal one, and during a period of significant organisational change the company looked for a partner who could treat it that way.

The opportunity

Managers were adapting to new ways of working at the same time as they were holding their teams steady through change. Two demands at once, both landing on the same people.

Irish Life took a clear position on this: for managers to lead well through the transition, their own wellbeing had to be treated as seriously as the wellbeing of the teams they were responsible for. The brief was to move past standard wellness activity and build something that connected wellbeing directly to how managers perform.

The programme

Working with Paul Collie at Irish Life, Fitvision designed Wellbeing for Performance for Managers. It was built as a full journey rather than a single event, because the change being asked for was behavioural, and behaviour holds when it is practised over time.

Pre-programme consultation. Sessions with Irish Life to understand the organisational context, agree what success looked like, and shape the programme around the pressures managers were actually under rather than a standard curriculum.

Individual coaching. One-to-one sessions with each manager, focused on personal resilience and on leading a team through a period of change. Confidential by design, with the goals set by the manager.

Assessment. Data-backed assessments gave each manager a clear baseline and a way of seeing their own progress, and gave Irish Life a defensible view of the programme as a whole.

Facilitated group feedback. A structured session in which managers shared what they had learned. Individual insight became shared language, and the group left with a common reference point rather than a set of separate experiences.

Report to senior management. A closing report setting out the themes that emerged across the cohort, with high-level recommendations for what to do next. Individual conversations stayed between the manager and their coach.

What changed

Managers re-evaluated their own wellbeing practices and put new routines in place, and those routines held once the programme ended. That is the part that matters: the shift showed up in how people were working weeks later, not only in feedback collected on the day.

The effect carried further than the cohort. Managers who were looking after their own energy and leading with more clarity changed the experience of the teams reporting to them, which lifted the wellbeing culture of the wider department without a separate programme being run for it.

The work also opened a conversation Irish Life had not been having in those terms: what role wellbeing should play inside the performance management framework. Moving that question from the wellness agenda onto the performance agenda is a meaningful change in where it sits and who owns it.

What came next

The findings and recommendations from the closing report were used to design Irish Life’s employee engagement and wellbeing calendar for the following twelve months. The programme became the evidence base for the year of work that followed it, which is the outcome we look for: not a completed engagement, but a clearer view of where to go next.

“From initial conversation through to execution and review, FitVision/Mark was a fantastic partner for our Manager Wellness programme... Working with FitVision/Mark is easy and richly rewarding for my colleagues.”

Paul Collie, Irish Life Corporate Business