Designing behavioral change at scale
A behavioral system that helped 350+ leaders turn cultural expectations into everyday practice.
Scope
Behavioral Research · Experience Strategy · Service Design · Gamification · Implementation
My Role
Service Designer
Team
+3
Timeline
2021
Project Scale
Scale
350 to 400 leaders throughout Brazil
Organization
Approximately 3,500 employees
Cadence
Quarterly feedback cycles
Context
A bank in the middle of a cultural shift
Banco PAN was moving from a traditional banking culture toward a more digital way of working. The transition was already visible inside the organization, but it was happening unevenly. Leadership had a central role in making the desired culture tangible. PAN expected its leaders to collaborate, develop their teams and act as agents of change.
With approximately 350 to 400 leaders across its São Paulo headquarters and branches throughout Brazil, within an organization of around 3,500 employees, the challenge was systemic. The People team wanted to rethink its leadership development program as a way to reinforce the desired behaviors across the organization.
Design Challenge
How might we turn organizational expectations into behaviors that leaders could understand, practice, receive feedback on and improve over time?
I led the design work across four connected areas:
Research and synthesis: planning and conducting research with leaders and employees, synthesizing behavioral profiles and facilitating workshops with HR Business Partners.
Experience strategy: translating behavioral insights into the service experience, designing the service journey and defining the gamification and communication strategies.
Reward system and implementation: modeling the reward system and BitPAN conversion logic, then preparing the rollout and operational handoff.
Shared responsibilities: the HR consultant defined the leadership guidelines, measurement criteria and metrics. Banco PAN’s People team and HR Business Partners contributed organizational and operational knowledge, and would own and sustain the program after the consultancy engagement ended.
Research
Understanding the system
Leadership behavior affects more than leaders
We could not design a leadership development system by talking only to the people being evaluated. Leadership existed within a broader organizational system involving four groups.
The program connected four groups with distinct roles:
Leaders: receive feedback and act on their development.
Employees: experience leadership behaviors every day and participate in their evaluation.
HR Business Partners: support the process across different areas and provide operational data.
People Development: connect the program to PAN’s broader culture and leadership strategy, then sustain it after the consultancy left.
Each group had a different relationship with the program. An experience could be useful for leaders and still fail if employees did not trust it, if Business Partners could not operate it or if People Development could not sustain it.
Researching both sides of leadership
We conducted in-depth interviews with 10 PAN leaders to understand how they perceived leadership, feedback, recognition, professional development and the cultural transformation happening around them.
We also surveyed employees to understand their overall perception of leadership at PAN. Their perspective was essential because the way a leader understands their behavior is not necessarily how their team experiences it. Employees helped us identify which leadership behaviors mattered in everyday work, what they expected leaders to change and what would make an evaluation process credible.
How leaders perceived their own development
How employees experienced leadership in practice
Could the organization operate it?
A behavioral strategy would not matter if PAN could not sustain it. We facilitated workshops with HR Business Partners to understand how the evaluation could work across different areas of the bank.
Together, we explored responsibilities, operational constraints, feasible evaluation cadences, how metrics would be collected and the support Business Partners would provide to leaders.
The research examined desirability and operability at the same time. The program had to make sense to leaders and employees while remaining realistic for HR to run across the organization.
Synthesis
What we learned
Culture needed to become something people could see
PAN already had expectations about what good leadership should look like. The challenge was to connect those expectations to situations employees could recognize.
Encouraged behaviors
Working collaboratively · Taking ownership · Developing and guiding teams · Connecting decisions to company strategy · Acting as an agent of change · Moving with speed · Delivering business results
Discouraged behaviors
Favoritism · Micromanagement · Lack of transparency · Weak performance management · Transferring leadership responsibilities to HR
Cultural expectation
Observable behavior
Autonomy
Leaders give teams room to make decisions.
Collaboration
Leaders invite different perspectives and discuss them constructively.
People development
Leaders offer feedback, development opportunities and career support.
This translation made culture actionable. Employees could observe it, leaders could receive feedback on it and HR could support its development over time.
Evidence → Behavioral expectation → Observable action → Feedback → Development
The transformation was happening at different speeds
Leaders had different relationships with PAN’s transformation. Some worked close to innovation and actively questioned existing processes. Others experienced change mainly through operational issues. More experienced leaders could feel further removed from the transformation happening elsewhere in the organization. We mapped these differences across time at PAN and response to change, revealing four recurring profiles.
The Activist
More recent relationship with PAN
Works close to innovation and actively questions existing processes.
The Supportive
More recent relationship with PAN
Deals with the operational consequences of change and seeks greater support and recognition.
The Hardworker
Longer history at PAN
Pursues tangible results but feels constrained by rigid processes.
The Expert
Longer history at PAN
Has less direct contact with the transformation happening elsewhere in the organization.
These were behavioral profiles, not demographic personas. They represented different relationships with change and different sources of motivation within the same leadership population. A single motivational device could engage one profile while alienating another. The program therefore needed to balance progress, recognition, autonomy, social connection and visible impact.
Solution
Designing the behavioral change system
Two complementary views of leadership
The program combined two perspectives that answered different questions.
Líder+
Captured how employees experienced leadership. Employees evaluated observable behaviors related to climate, purpose, recognition, people development and culture.
LíderAção
Captured what measurable leadership actions showed. It used HR data related to feedback, training, diversity and inclusion, and quality of life. HR Business Partners provided these metrics during each evaluation cycle.
Team perception + Measurable actions = A more complete development signal
Together, Líder+ and LíderAção positioned the program as a development system, not as a single performance score.
From periodic evaluation to continuous development
The evaluation was only one moment in the experience. We designed recurring quarterly cycles so leaders could receive feedback, interpret it, act on it and observe change in the following cycle.
Set expectations → Observe → Evaluate → Understand → Develop → Reinforce → Repeat
1. Evaluation
At the beginning of each cycle, leaders and employees needed to understand what was being evaluated and why. Employees evaluated the behaviors they experienced through Líder+, while Business Partners provided LíderAção metrics.
2. Feedback
Leaders received preliminary results in a personal dashboard, reviewed the evidence and discussed development opportunities with HR.
Designing trust into the feedback process
Feedback only works when people trust how it was produced
Behavioral evaluation is sensitive. If leaders did not trust the process, they would struggle to use the results as a basis for development. We designed three stages to make review and accountability visible.
Preliminary results
Leaders received their evaluation and could review the evidence.
Contestation
Leaders could question results they believed were incorrect. HR Business Partners assessed each case.
Final results
Results were published after the review period and became the baseline for the next development cycle.
3. Development
Leaders used the final results to identify development priorities with HR. The next evaluation showed whether the targeted behaviors had been sustained, improved or changed.
4. Reinforcement
Recognition, progress and reward mechanisms helped sustain participation between evaluation cycles.
The annual service journey blueprint connected these moments across leaders, employees, Business Partners, People Development and the team operating the platform.
Gamification as reinforcement: Supporting motivation without reducing development to a game
After defining the core behavioral system, we explored how to sustain engagement across repeated cycles.
Using the behavioral profiles and the Octalysis framework, we mapped motivational drivers and assessed which mechanics could reinforce the desired behaviors.
Mechanic
Behavioral purpose
Badges
Make accomplishments and behavioral strengths visible.
Progress history
Show how results evolve across cycles.
Recognition
Reinforce consistent performance.
Collective achievements
Connect individual development to PAN’s cultural transformation.
Rewards
Provide a tangible incentive for participation and continuity.
The Activist was motivated by autonomy, novelty, participation and knowledge sharing. The Supportive valued recognition, stability and visible progress. The Hardworker responded to achievement, autonomy and impact. The Expert valued recognition, progress and connection to business results. Across the profiles, recurring needs included progress, recognition, achievement, social interaction and visible impact.
Making individual and collective progress visible
At the individual level, leaders could follow their badges, results and development history across quarters. This shifted attention from a static score toward an ongoing question: How am I developing?
At the collective level, aggregated progress showed how leadership behaviors were evolving across the organization. This connected personal action to PAN’s wider transformation.
BitPAN: Adapting a platform capability into an incentive strategy
The selected implementation platform, WeCare, already supported a points-based currency. We adapted that capability into BitPAN so leaders could convert achievements represented by badges into points and later exchange them for items or benefits in the platform marketplace. I created a model that distributed the available point pool according to the relevance, challenge and effort associated with each badge.
1. Badge weight
Relevance × Challenge × Effort
2. Point allocation
Total point pool × Badge weight ÷ Total weight
3. Points per leader
Badge point allocation ÷ Expected recipients
The model used 400 participating leaders and a monthly allowance of 2,000 points per leader, resulting in a pool of 800,000 points per period. I adjusted the calculated values into clear reward tiers and used the platform’s conversion rate of 20 points to R$1 to estimate financial impact.
The calculation considered the relevance of the behavior; the challenge and effort involved; the available point and reward budget; the estimated number of participating leaders; the expected percentage of recipients for each badge; the frequency of evaluation and recognition; and the number of program cycles.
Communication journey: Helping people understand what was happening and what to do next
A recurring program depends on more than its evaluation interface. People need the right information at the right moment. I planned a communication framework aligned with the service journey. It defined each trigger, its behavioral purpose, audience, timing, channel and format.
Prepare
Program launch, expectation-setting and participant onboarding.
Engage
Opening and closing evaluation windows, with reminders for employees and HR Business Partners.
Respond
Preliminary results, the contestation period and publication of final results.
Reinforce
Recognition, reward moments, development follow-ups and preparation for the next cycle.
Channels and formats included platform notifications, emails and conversations with managers or HR. My scope covered the communication strategy and cadence, not the final visual production of every asset.
Validating clarity, fairness and trust
Because the program dealt with performance and professional development, usability was not enough. We also needed to understand how people perceived the process.
What we validated
Fairness, clarity, participation effort, the influence of recurring feedback and remaining uncertainty.
How we validated it
A concept focus group, an evaluation-cycle simulation and structured questions about clarity, fairness, timing and trust.
Who participated
PAN leaders joined the focus group. A smaller group of employees participated in the evaluation simulation.
Participants perceived the proposed cadence as appropriate and the model as fair and comprehensive. They also believed recurring feedback could influence leadership behavior. The sessions revealed opportunities to strengthen visual communication, broaden participation and clarify questions about feedback and self-development. We treated validation as a source of direction, not as confirmation of a finished concept.
Designing for the organization that would inherit the system
The consultancy would not operate the program indefinitely. PAN needed to understand, launch and sustain it after our engagement ended.
The rollout moved through four stages: Prepare, Pilot, Adjust and Operate.
Prepare: define ownership, configure the platform and prepare evaluation inputs. Pilot: onboard participants, activate communication and simulate the cycle. Adjust: review findings, refine rules and calibrate rewards. Operate: establish calendars, governance and documentation.
The handoff transferred the service logic, journeys, rules, responsibilities, communication triggers and decision points that PAN’s team needed to operate and evolve the program.
Outcome
A foundation for continuous leadership development
The project delivered a validated concept and implementation foundation for a recurring leadership development system.
Organizational expectations → Employee feedback → Measurable actions → Recognition → Individual development → Cultural change
What the work gave PAN
The work gave PAN an implementation foundation across five areas:
Behavioral foundation: a way to translate leadership expectations into observable behaviors.
Evaluation: complementary Líder+ and LíderAção models, with safeguards for transparency and contestation.
Development cycle: a quarterly cadence supported by individual and collective progress mechanisms.
Reinforcement: a gamification and BitPAN reward strategy grounded in research and budget constraints.
Operation: a communication framework across the service journey, plus an implementation and operational handoff plan.
The behavioral profiles became a reusable lens for understanding different relationships with change and motivation beyond the program. This case does not claim post-launch quantitative impact that was not available to the project team. Validation indicated that participants perceived the model as clear, feasible, fair and potentially capable of influencing leadership behavior.
What I learned
Designing behavior means designing the system around it
Behavioral change depends on the system around the interface
Organizational behavior cannot be changed through mechanics alone. Points, badges and rewards can reinforce action, but they cannot replace clear expectations, credible evidence, psychological safety, development support and an operation people trust.
Research showed that leaders who look similar in an organizational chart can respond differently to change. Designing for those differences led us toward an experience that balanced recognition, progress, autonomy and collective purpose.
The project reinforced that organizational context is part of the user experience. The program depended on PAN’s culture, HR processes, leadership expectations, communication, platform constraints and operational ownership, as well as the interfaces participants would use. Designing the experience meant designing across all of those layers.
Credits and responsibilities
my contribution
Research planning and execution · Leader and employee research · Behavioral synthesis and profiles · HR Business Partner workshops · Experience strategy · Service journey · Gamification strategy · BitPAN reward modeling · Communication framework · Rollout planning · Operational handoff
HR consultant
Leadership guidelines · Measurement criteria and metrics
Banco PAN People team and HR Business Partners
Organizational context · Operational input · HR data · Program ownership and continuity
