Infosys, YES bank, Airtel and HUL, among others, scout for future leaders from among their existing employees
At the Infosys Leadership Institute in Mysore, Matt Barney, vice-president and director, is busy assessing close to 1,400 Infosysians for the role of future leaders at India’s second-largest IT services company.
Infosys is not the only company that is scouting for future leaders from its over-130,000 employee base. YES Bank, a leading private bank, has set up YES School of Banking (YSB), where employee leadership skills and development initiatives are being carried out. Airtel, Hindustan Unilever (HUL) and many more are realising the need to refine skills of employees, so that in future there is no dearth of leaders.
HUL says one of its ways in nurturing talent is having a robust performance feedback session. For example, extensive training is given to all leaders on how to handle these performance feedback sessions. Many leaders have fallen off the ‘lister’ (the term for extremely talented people who are on the fast track to success) category just because they couldn’t handle these feedback sessions with the required empathy.
At the heart of the robust performance appraisal system is, of course, the methodology and the transparency, as HUL belives half the job is done if employees believe it’s a transparent and fair system. That explains why all managers are plotted on a nine-box leadership matrix named LDT (Leadership Differentiation Tool) that sees how well the key resources of the company have been developed by managers. The position is then communicated transparently and career paths are shared.
Then there are mechanisms like the GPS (global people satisfaction) survey that cover everyone in the company and seek their feedback on points like employee engagement, information sharing, leadership, boss-subordinate relationship, teaming and collaboration and so on. The move isn’t just a management fad, since over 99 per cent employees responded to the GPS survey last year.
This is also emphasised in the recently released CII-KPMG white paper ‘Leadership in Action’. The report points out the need for rapid acceleration of young executives up the corporate ladder, and called for high-level executives to improve their ability to judge the current performance and future potential of employees to make such a programme successful. Several Indian companies already seem to have understood this situation and have taken necessary action for it.
India's second-largest IT services firm Infosys realised the need for such a set-up in early 2001 and established the Leadership Institute (ILI). With the promoters and founders clear about relinquishing their role after a set period, having such an institute helps the company scout for leaders from within the company. The ILI has created a pyramid style structure for the leadership to be groomed. The pyramid has three layers.
The top most layer is a step close to the board. Employees in this layer are generally above the vice-president level.
The second layer, has people with work experience of around 10 years, and are capable to head a business unit in the next three to four years. The third layer has a much larger pool and has people with a work experience of five to seven years. “At the end of the day our investments pay off when we see these leaders performing well and getting promoted to a level where we have a huge pool of them, or when our founder members leave or someone does a Nandan Nilekani,” said Barney.
Similarly, Bharti Airtel has also started the Young Leaders Programme (started in 2003) to create a talent pool, identify potential leaders to be senior managers in future and provide a framework for career and succession planning for management cadre in the company.
During the first year, the Young Leaders (YL) go through various initiatives like six months cross functional exposure. Each YL needs to do a project in functions other than their core function and spend around a month in several business divisions to understand the business complexities.
Each YL is assigned a mentor from amongst the Top Leadership who develops and nurtures the YL, developing him/her towards a future senior leader. There is also a unique concept where an YL gets to mentor a senior leader. YLs from the last three batches are picked up to mentor the leader.
To help them settle down well, a buddy is assigned to the YL who helps them understand the culture, ethics, work conduct.
According to Deodutta Kurane, senior president, Human Capital Management, YES bank, “YES bank has been built on the cornerstone of professional entrepreneurship and believes in a manager-owner-partner philosophy.”
Y-PEP is one of YES Bank’s most innovative and institutionalised talent acquisition program lead by the YES School of Banking and aims at hiring the best available management professionals with prior experience, directly from the Top premier B-Schools in India and select foreign universities.
Ganesh Shermon, partner and country head, People and Change Advisory, KPMG says, “In-house training is useful only if there are trained systems, content, knowledge and instructional designers within the company. Training the trainer is critical before embarking on in-house programmes.”
The CII-KPMG white paper also proposes ‘Star Track’ as an approach to identify the top performers of the company, train them and prepare them as citizens of the 21st Century Corporation.
The approach influences the direction of the organisation through the selection and development of high caliber employees. These high caliber employees are placed in key positions where they are tested, challenged and are given the opportunity to prove themselves. Every such employee is provided with a career progression map drawn up exclusively for her. The map charts out the course for an individual and indicates the number of years an employee would take to traverse from one position to the next.
