Leadership
Leading non-competitive companies form consortium to train HiPos
A leadership development consortium between 5 non-competitive companies from different domains illustrates how organizations can mutually exchange learning and help their future leaders to broaden their capabilities.
Volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous is the fabric on which today’s business ecosystem operates. To manage challenges related to such elements, organizations have to innovate and create strategies that offer value and positive business outcomes. Traditional business approaches and strategies no longer provide growth and development and to ensure long-term survival and relevance, the need to take development initiatives and plans is critical.
All this is also corroborated by the fact that challenges involving leadership and talent development have accelerated. Today, organizations want to innovate and expose their talent to approaches and strategies that are out-of-the-box and that provide them with a perspective other than of their own. The need for doing this has risen as carrying out same responsibilities over time molds employees into developing a specific and static style and mindset towards approaching and solving problems – which works for them but also limits them to an extent.
A company-specific environment results in an insular way of thinking and makes it difficult for potential leaders to stay agile, as it shields them from assessing their own skills and competencies objectively in comparison to their counterparts across industries. Thus it becomes indispensable for organizations to provide an outside-in perspective for its talent in the succession pool and keep them abreast with continuous learning and industry standards to unlock their potential and minds to new growth possibilities and approaches that can enhance both effectiveness and efficiency of their work.
This was the logic that spurred the innovation of the concept of XChange, an inter-corporate collaborative HiPo development initiative, co-designed and co-owned by 3M India, Robert Bosch India, SAP India, Coffee Day and Titan.
The Beginning
The genesis of XChange initiative took place in 3M India when Maclean Raphael, Executive Director – HR, along with HR Manager, Shreeraj H. and Learning & Organizational Development Head, Aparna Sardar, went and presented the Annual training plan to the MD, Amit Laroya who in turn asked as to what they could do to give an outside-in perspective to the HiPos. This was based on the fact that when the value of people to the organization is defined by roles, their true potential gets restricted to that particular role. Thus the question revolved around what could be done to broaden the value of contribution and at the same time give the HiPos an outside exposure.
The team came up with the idea to leverage their networks and contacts with the HR leaders in other companies to try and do something radically different by creating a learning consortium by partnering with different organizations. The next step was to thrash out the idea and determine what were the competencies that their HiPos needed to develop over and above the regular job and how these could be structured within the program. They decided to build the consortium with non-competing organizations, brands that had created a name for themselves and known for some of the best people practices.
The learning consortium was thus envisioned as a forum for leaders from different organizations to exchange knowledge, thoughts and ideas and build sustained, long-term relationships between the participants. This was not visualized to be a one-time occasion where a group of people would come together and not remember one another. Whilst XChange was envisioned as a training that would take place once a month with the same batch coming in and covering the scheduled competencies, the organizers also decided to remain flexible in accommodating the needs of participating companies.
Thus, while inviting organizations to join, there was also an implication that a brand-new proposition such as theirs, which required the HiPos in various companies to train outside of their own organization with other companies, could lead to confidentiality and non-disclosure concerns which could go right up to the senior leadership level. The complete buy-in of 3M India’s MD meant that he could step in to reassure and convince the MDs of other organizations. Finally, after many conversations, deliberations and troubleshooting, Bosch, CCD, Titan and SAP came on board with 3M, to co-design XChange and mutually agreed to send 4-5 participants each from their mid-level executives with 10-15 years of experience.
Content, methodology and design
When accredited organizations from different fields share their practices with a common agenda, it becomes an eye-opener for the learners and enables them to broaden their horizons by learning about the possibilities that they did not think could be relevant to them. Peer learning with other professionals is also far more advantageous than reading about a concept or learning theoretically, because it entails a two-way sharing of real experiences. XChange was designed to take place over 2 days in a month for 4 consecutive months, which allowed the participants to go back each time and apply some of the learnings to their work. They could then discuss that experience with co-participants in the following session.
It is not frequently the case that participants, who are at first highly skeptical, come out of a program referring to it as the “best learning session they have ever had in their entire professional career”. This is something that XChange claims to its credit. Miresh Desai, National Sales Manager – Personal Safety Division at 3M, who was an XChange participant, shares that receiving another email about a training program did not please him at first, as it implied allocating time away from his normal work. However, upon attending XChange, he found the content to be highly relevant to him as a professional and the mix of methodologies helped make the learning process very hands-on and application-based. Another participant, Mahesh Reddy, Regional Head – South at CCD, described his experience in XChange to be like an executive-MBA in a short burst of time, in terms of learning.
The consortium revealed excellent coordination by the various HR and L&OD professionals of the 5 companies in creating a highly relevant, overarching program for all participants regardless of their backgrounds. After the final 5 companies were sealed to come together for XChange, the HR and L&OD Heads came together for a workshop in which 3M shared the skeletal version of the idea which was then discussed and finalized by all. They discussed the competencies, which each wanted to develop in their talent, and the strengths that they all brought to the table as organizations. These individual strengths were leveraged to build the design of the program and to identify the five theme competencies – Innovation, Leadership, Strategy, Intrapreneurship and Customer-centricity. Each company took ownership of one – 3M took charge of Innovation, Café Coffee Day took Customer-centricity, Titan led Intrapreneurship, SAP went with Strategy, and Bosch took the reins of Leadership.
The owners, however, did not plan these sessions in isolation. Each company’s HR and L&OD heads shared the basic structure of their own session with their four counterparts for expectations, inputs and ideas, for e.g. in Innovation, 3M looked at the innovative things that the other organizations were doing, and identified people within these organizations who could act as faculty for that session. These inputs were key in the final construct of the sessions.
The designers of the sessions were also well aware of the fact that mid-level executives were least interested in being passive recipients to theoretical knowledge. So they decided to push the envelope by inviting entrepreneurs, specialized consultants, industry experts, domain experts and academicians as faculty – people who were actually doing what they would talk about. The methodologies chosen to reinforce the concepts were even more diverse – there were group discussions, lectures, movie analysis, live case studies, learning from actual project presentations, workshops and real-time projects to engage the participants on practical challenges that were highly relevant to their work. In addition, every company hosted an evening with their top executive leader, which served as a tremendous networking opportunity for the participants.
The success of a training program finally depends on how participants feel about it and what benefit they gain from it. Another strong aspect of XChange in this regard was its robust feedback system, which gave the participants a role in further improving the program. “The participant feedback after the very first session – which was more theoretical – helped in making the rest of the program much more hands-on”, shares Beate Steinfeld, XChange attendee and Head of Product Innovation at Tanishq in Titan.
Thorough feedback was taken by every companies’ HR after each of the 2-day sessions, and comprehensively at the end of the program, in which the participants were asked specific questions about the methodologies, facilitators and content of individual sessions and asked to rate them in terms of relevance and effectiveness. While most of the content was lauded, there were a few sessions that were not perceived as very relevant and a few faculty members, who in spite of great credentials, did not resonate with the audience. The XChange team took the feedback into account with immediate effect where applicable and also saved it for improvements to be made in XChange 2.
Way forward
In the time up to its second run, XChange has grown in ways more than one. XChange 2 is no longer the first experiment and HR leaders now know better what they can expect out of it and the kind of people they want to nominate for participation. While SAP has stepped back for the time being, three other organizations — Amazon, Biocon and Mindtree — have come onboard in XChange 2, making it a consortium of 7 companies. It has also enlarged in terms of the number of participants – 49 in total, as opposed to 25 during the first run, with each company nominating 7 participants. The content and methodologies have been revisited and refined from the observations of the organizing HR and L&OD leaders as well as the extensive participant feedback in XChange 1.
While about 80-90 percent of content remains the same, new organizations have also brought in their own fascinating case studies and unique expectations that have the potential to further enrich the various competency sessions. New facets to the competencies covered in XChange 1 have also been realized and added. For e.g., the session on Innovation in XChange 2 is not only going to include learnings from the innovative models of Amazon and Biocon’s product innovative capabilities, but also an aspect on what are some of the things that organizations are doing to foster an innovative culture. Similarly, the competency of Leadership in XChange 2 is going to become ‘Leadership and Change’ because leadership in the VUCA world is primarily about leading people and organizations through transformations. With all that, XChange 2 kickstarted in February 2016 with two modules so far completed in a bigger and bolder avatar than before.
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