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Indian Organizations today have come a long way from just being led by the promoter. The new age savvy and progressive promoters are just not looking at building an enterprise that is growing and sustainable, but also the organization that is world class and has a pipeline of home grown leaders who can further build, strengthen and foster the organization’s growth.
Organization Context
One such experience for Right Management India has been on our journey with Endurance Technologies Pvt. Ltd. An organization led by the promoter – Mr. Anurang Jain. Endurance was established in 1985 as Anurang Engineering Co. Pvt. Ltd. to manufacture Aluminium Die Casting products at Aurangabad, Maharashtra (India). Today, the Endurance is among India’s leading auto component Companies with strong presence in Aluminium Casting (including Alloy Wheels), Suspension, Transmission and Braking products Endurance Group has 19 Plants across India. The Group also has subsidiaries in Italy & Germany for supplying aluminium die-cast parts to European car manufacturers. Consolidated turnover for the group in FY 12-13 was marginally in excess of Rs 3850 Crs.
Known in the industry for its strict quality regime, interaction with customers and an eye on emerging needs, Endurance has carved a niche to cater to some of the world's leading Automotive Manufacturers.
On the strength of their experience and the depth of their Technological Expertise, the organization has now geared up to launch themselves on the high growth global circuit.
The Focus on High Potential Need – The Next level of growth
As Endurance continues on its journey for high growth in the next five years, it is imperative that the organization looks at various facets of growth and focuses on aspects that will harness such growth and ensure its sustenance.
In its attempt to ensure that the growth is holistic, fast paced, customer centric and above all sustainable, the Management of the Company decided to look at the ‘People Readiness’ of the organization to ensure that the organization and its leadership is geared to meet the business needs. For this critical initiative, Endurance partnered with Right Management to build a structured and systematic approach towards pipeline building and adopt a matured process for workforce planning, which would focus to transition from being a mere replacement hiring for key positions to a systematic process for succession planning for critical roles, building talent pipeline for key roles for the near future and ensuring the process of succession management gets institutionalized in the organization.
The HiPo Process at Endurance:
A very detailed step by step process was followed to ensure that each stage of HiPo identification, notification, developing and focusing on expected returns was taken into consideration. Let’s understand each of the stages in greater detail.
Identification of HIPO:
A very robust process was adopted for identification of high potentials in Endurance. We obtained data from multiple sources to provide a holistic insight on each individual. The key data points were:
– Personal Data on background, tenure, qualification etc.(as shared by Internal HR)
– Performance Evaluation data for last three years (as shared by Internal HR)
– Leadership Confidence on the individual (based on one on one discussion with Reporting Manager)
– Personality data (based on psychometric tool i.e. Birkman)
– Potential data (based on one day Development Center for each individual)
– Perception (based on 360 feedback)
– Technical ability
– Career Aspiration (based on career aspiration survey)
Mapping of HIPO to possible future roles:
On the basis of the above data, we have mapped the talent pool for all the critical roles in the organization as either Successors or Potential Talent
Successors are employees identified within the system who are fairly ready or can be made ready to take on the role with no additional inputs to focused developmental inputs. They would be ready to take up the next role in less than three years’ time.
Potential Talent is seen as an employee having potential to grow in the long term. Can be mapped to critical roles but would need to be supported by focused developmental interventions. They would be ready to take up next role beyond three years’ timeframe.
Individualized HIPO Talent Development Plan:
For each HIPO Talent, we created an individualized Development plan basis the identified roles and his/her development gap areas. This development plan was done in joint discussion with the Reporting Manager of the HIPO talent.
Possible Roles the Person can be Groomed For
Role Consideration
Estimated Timeframe for Development
Skill to be Developed for the same
Development Action Plan
Current Role
0-36 months
Product knowledge
Financial acumen
Regulatory norms of different countries
Awareness of cross cultural norms
Training on products
Need to shadow a senior leader on pricing and maintaining Profit/Loss Account
Part of CFT to put up operations in different countries
Training on cross cultural diversity
Review after three years
Head Exports Sales (for a larger market)
No immediate action
No immediate action
Head After Markets
No immediate action
No immediate action
Development Interventions: Broad interventions which are common across the HIPO talent.
Post creation of individualized development interventions, Right Management collated the data and identified broad interventions which are common across the HIPO talent.
There were multiple interventions identified which could be run either internally or through external support. Their development interventions are under the 4E development approach adapted from the Corporate Leadership Council research on best practices for leader development. The ideal mix of development should be comprised of 25% education, 25% exposure and 50% experience along with a measure of effectiveness.
Mapping of each HIPO to development intervention was based on the premise that the intervention would meet his/her specific developmental needs.
Executive Coaching
Action Learning Project
Mentoring
To have focused individualized development to
Developmental for Future- Build perspective for future role
Developmental for Current role – Build additional capabilities/skills to perform better in current role
Remedial - Work on individualized behavioral challenges which could be potential de-railers
To provide exposure to the team in
Handling projects outside their comfort zone
Developing a larger business perspective
Developing competence amongst individuals and teams in problem-solving and decision-making
People do very specialized work in Endurance and a lot of domain knowledge does not get transferred. The intervention is
To build capability so that the mentees can acquire the technical skills
To eliminate the indispensability of critical role holder to ensure Business As Usual doesn’t get impacted
To build bandwidth in the organization to ensure current role holders can take on larger roles in the future
To lay the foundation for the culture of mentoring to make it a sustainable system in the organization
The above interventions are being rolled out and the organization has commenced the journey to develop the leaders for tomorrow.
The Way Forward
For the organization, this is just the start of its journey of building high quality leaders, who are able to add greater value in their current roles, manage larger and more complex roles in the organization and most importantly build cross functional capabilities so as to build multiple leaders in the organization who can work across roles in the organization.
Most importantly, the organization by implementing the succession management process on an annual basis will be able to ensure that increasingly going forward the organization transitions from buying talent completely to achieving the right balance between buying and building talent.
The Winning Proposition at Endurance
Almost all organizations plan to make the transition from being an organization completely dependent on buying talent from the external market to progressively building talent within the organization to meet its current and future needs. While most organizations start this journey, not all are able to achieve the results. In case of Endurance, one of the most important success factors for implementing this initiative has been the sponsorship of the MD and the senior leadership. Ability of the MD and the leadership to treat this as one of the most important priority items – by giving it due importance and allocating time and leadership attention, has ensured that the initiatives were successfully implemented and the focus continues.
But as it’s said – ‘To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often’; this is just the start of the real journey.