At twice the rate of the pharmaceutical industry, Lupin has grown rapidly. As a result, leadership development emerged as one of the core focuses for the company. Lupin sought to accelerate its leadership development rate at the same pace as its growth rate. The company needed to build leadership pipeline at both the senior management and the grass root level so as to nurture leaders from within the company.  In order to match the rising needs as a fast growing company, it had to ensure that the requisite skill sets match the company’s aspirations. This called for capability building to manage growth, identify existing skills gaps and making the work force future ready.

Customizing development

At first, Lupin considered procuring talent from outside. While this was thought to bring a fresh influx of talent, it involved risk of non-alignment of talent with the company goals. The company thus realized that there can be no simple or a single template for developing leaders. Acknowledging that organizations see most success when they tailor leadership development systems to the realities of business, the company developed a strategy for developing leaders with the changing demands of the enterprise.

Leadership development at Lupin today follows a three-pronged approach which utilizes the collective capacity of all members of an organization to accomplish critical aspects such as alignment, scale up and employee life cycle management. Putting it together, the company framed an intervention called Leader Plus. Through this initiative Lupin helped front line supervisors build leadership skills. This would equip employees to handle the transition from managing self to managing others.

The right strategy

To put the Leader Plus initiative in place, Lupin partnered with a pool of outsourced trainers who imparted training and thereafter the in-house team stepped in to continue with the reviews and impact measurements. This resulted not just in development of home grown talent as leaders but also increased effectiveness and led to innovation at workplace. Leader Plus built action learning by ensuring that the employees take up continuous on the job improvement projects directly impacting the bottom line. Some of the outcomes of the program as identified by Lupin are increase in savings, cost reduction, and improved productivity and system. All of this as a whole resulted in improved business outcome.

Making learning adhesive

Going forward, Lupin plans to institutionalize learning interventions by harnessing the advantages of various technology platforms through integration. A gamut of initiatives have been implemented using a plethora of training delivery methods depending on the audience profile, the kind of intervention, the expectations of the target audience and the intended impact. Moreover, in order to capture and share learnings from the program, the company shares the best 20 projects across all locations through its common portal every year. As knowledge repository, Lupin converts the best 3 projects into white papers so that it can circulate it across locations to share knowledge that can be horizontally deployed.

There is also a Bi-Monthly Newsletter titled ‘Lakshya – Enabling Leadership’ that is circulated across locations.

All these implementation projects have been preserved & uploaded on a Knowledge Management Portal. The L&D Team has designed an in-house Knowledge Management Portal; titled GYAANODAYA, which functions like a search engine. This has further made more employees aspire for getting their Implementation Projects uploaded on this portal. And above all, it has also significantly enhanced the focus on effective implementation of projects. GYAANODAYA; delves on the principle that: “The strongest form of learning is learning from each other; learning from past success.

Lupin has started taking a more strategic view of the training and development practices. The company is now concentrating to ensure a sustained execution of these strategies over a period of time that will lead to results that impact not only the bottom line but also act as a panacea to many of the issues that have been plaguing the pharmaceutical industry as a whole.