Grooming The Leader
The endeavour has been to move to empower and allow employees to make choices, be it with regard to their training or career development. This has been done primarily by ‘Empowering’ the employees to create their learning plan leveraging individual budgets that are given to them specifically for this purpose. These budgets can be used through a personal debit card on an online system called the Learn Smart. The focus of learning has been shifted from ‘push’ to ‘pull’ as the employee takes primary ownership for his learning and self development and Company provides the tools and resources.
A number of innovative processes and tools have been provided to facilitate the employees in their development journey.
- Career Growth Model
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To make sure that our people get the competitive edge, we aim to match great talent with important opportunities.
And because we can’t possibly select everyone for every fabulous opportunity, we choose carefully. Who we choose for a particular role depends on five factors:
- Proven Results
- Leadership Capability
- Functional Excellence
- Knowing the Business Cold and
- Critical Experiences
These factors together coupled with the right opportunities make way for a great and fast tracked career at PepsiCo.
- Leadership Model
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PepsiCo is differentiated from others in its strong commitment to making leaders of its employees.
For this purpose, a robust Leadership Model is in place that identifies talent, develops readiness and prepares the individual for the required movement. This consists of 70% on the job learning, 20% coaching, feedback and mentoring and 10% formal training; each of which is given due importance.
Five pillars support this model:
- Career Planning Tools
- Academies (functional workshops for development)
- Learn Smart (highly customizable learning tool to develop each individual as per his or her needs)
- Internal Job Posting (allowing flexibility to employees to gain Critical Experiences across businesses and functions in the PepsiCo world) and
- Strong Manager Assessment (via a tool called Connect that provides feedback to a leader on his/ her working style, strengths and weaknesses)
These, in tandem, have helped build a system that culls the leadership skills out of each individual and hones them to perfection
- Coaching and Mentoring
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Coaching and Mentoring cushion the move of leaders from one role to another and then help them to grow faster in the new role as well.
The objective at PepsiCo was to develop a performance coaching structure which can be used by managers to coach their team members internally and to help employees discover more about their talents and potential strengths.
This also helps others understand the dynamics of individual strengths and connect how organizational best practices can be used to deliver better organizational performance.
Mentoring, on the other hand, brings in the much needed personal interface at organizations that helps employees to share and learn from the experiences from senior colleagues. It is our belief, that this helps reduce stress and improves the effectiveness of work that an employee puts in.
Working as support systems to the overall career growth program, coaching and mentoring have helped PepsiCo make balanced fast paced leaders.
- Future Leader Program
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Our Future Leader Program is amongst the most organized and well structured program for management trainees from across the best schools in the country. The objective is to provide them with the best-in-class training to prepare the future talent pipeline.
For this purpose, the following is done: stints across various functions to ensure critical understanding of the business, on job training supplemented by class room training, coaching and mentoring and a continual feedback cycle that includes two way feedback for development of the individual as well as the process.
The program is interspersed with various fun team events apart from the usual Fun @ Work at PepsiCo, which allow the future leaders to bond as a team and learn to work together in harmony.