Transnational professional development

Thanks to the buoyancy of the Indian market and the favourable climate for overseas expansion, the company was keen to grow inorganically through the M&A (mergers and acquisitions) route.

The success of M&A depended largely on the local teams assuming immediate charge and quickly getting operational.

The company wished to draw upon the experiences of Korean companies. It had groomed their middle level executives to adopt a general managerial outlook and operate with a cross-functional perspective.

The board wanted to assess the state of readiness of their executives to move out and start work. It wanted to get a feel for the diversity of their professional exposure. A sample profile of experiential diversity of a candidate with 13 years of experience with the company was created. The profile was created by drawing upon the following subcategories of data already available.

Function: Front end — customer facing operations such as sales, service, market research etc; back end — all other functions that are inward looking

Reporting relationship: Direct — directly supervising people or reporting to a designated senior manager; and virtual — operating in an independent capacity from a location with no one supervising them directly.

Alternatively, supervise a team of juniors from a remote location.

Territory coverage from base location: Metro — six metros and A-category towns; semi urban — towns with an overnight train connection to a metro; and rural — district headquarters with a population of more than 5 lakh.

Seniority level: Senior— profit-centre head and above; middle — supervisory; and junior — non-supervisory

Fluency in communication and language skills: Foreign — ability to conduct business with English-speaking Indian nationals and non-English speaking foreign nationals; local — ability to conduct business with non-English speaking Indian nationals; mother tongue — ability to work with people in own native language.

Role: Advisory/research — jobs involving depth, breadth and complexity of thinking with a high analytical component; executive/compliance — jobs involving creative execution under situations involving no prior knowledge.

Team composition and Span of control: Specialists — lead a team of subject matter experts; generalists— lead a team of experienced professionals with no specialisation in any particular domain of knowledge.

Shown across is a profile of experiential diversity of one candidate, Raman Lamba.

Question for directors

Would they find the snapshot profile of Raman Lamba meeting their need for a candidate with a general managerial outlook and cross-functional perspective?

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