The Hindu Business Line : Being the change

From being an old world company, the Rs 1,100-crore Godfrey Phillips India (GPI) has used Six Sigma and John Whitmore's GROW model to tighten its boots and enhance competencies.

What has made it stand apart is the industry's recognition of its transformation in the human resource management sphere. In fact, several companies, including large organisations such as Bharti Enterprises and NTPC, are benchmarking themselves against GPI in the field of mentoring and coaching.

"At GPI, we have integrated all people processes relating to selection, promotion, training and development, performance management and succession planning into a total system built around our competencies. These competencies are value based and serve as the base structure for all human processes," says Shalini Sarin, General Manager - Human Resources (Training and OD), GPI, and the force behind the changes taking place in the organisation.

In fact, GPI is also benchmarking itself against some organisations well known for their `people skills' — such as Cadence, Flextronics, Wipro and GSK.

Employee satisfaction

First and foremost, Sarin targeted employee satisfaction to make the difference. The Six Sigma project is currently underway to analyse and improve satisfaction levels of employees.

To egg it on, job rotation for employees was introduced so that apart from developing in-house talent, it could also be retained under every circumstance. Other initiatives towards providing high performers with opportunities to enhance and enlarge their roles were also put in place to combat attrition and provide a challenging environment to managers.

Next came a variable income plan linked to the employee's performance and his or her contribution to the company's overall performance. This was followed by the launch of a three-tier leadership development programme aimed at developing three facets of a complete leader — managing oneself, managing others, leading and implementing change.

Developing talent at all levels

The leadership programme was rolled out across the board to develop talent at all levels — junior, middle and senior management.

"The aim is to develop in-house talent and match people to new upcoming opportunities. And people are happy to get the opportunity to grow, especially when you create a culture where the person's work gets appreciated," explains Sarin.

She adds that the company has also started assessment and development centres. According to Sarin, research on selection processes has shown that assessment centres have a reliability coefficient as high as 70 per cent.

"This is because in this process we club several simulations in which we try and capture various competencies which are required for high performance." Each competency is then assessed by a different assessor, which brings objectivity into the assessment process.

As a mandate, all promotions from staff to management cadre are through an assessment centre, she says commenting that employees appreciate the transparency this method brings into the system.

GPI's development centre is also designed around similar principles, but here the prime objective is of collating multi-source, multi-rater data for an individual on each competency. This data is then used to facilitate an employee's self-development process, so that he or she can use it to map out an individual action plan.

Mentoring and coaching programme

Where the company has got the most accolades for is its mentoring and coaching programme. Sarin put in place what she had learnt at the Motorola University-Chicago, from where she is a certified trainer. The theoretical base of the programme was John Whitmore's GROW model.

The mentoring model is essentially structured as a three-month intervention for new entrants, so that they can assimilate the company's work culture and values without a hitch.

"It aims to guide and direct the new entrants by providing them an experienced `buddy' in the system to clear doubts and fears that are normal in the formative months," says Sarin.

She elaborates that the tough part of the programme is matching the mentor to the entrant, so that there is synergy between the two and it becomes a non-threatening friendly relationship. "Where there is no risk of sounding foolish."

In fact, sometimes mentor matching has had to be revisited, especially when the mentor was an introvert and the entrant turned out to be an extrovert. In another case, the entrant could not gel with his mentor because his boss would constantly run down the mentor and it aided in colouring the entrant's attitude.

GPI uses coaching as a tool to propagate the company's vision of `every manager as a coach'. In fact, to ensure that both programmes run to their optimal potential, all coaches and mentors are given training and support so that they can fit the role. "They are also given feedback on their mentoring and coaching skills, with the two programmes being constantly tweaked to incorporate new learnings," says Sarin.

And for GPI, which is in the third year of restructuring its HR policies, the learning is still happening.

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