The multi jobs approach

A.R. Rao, President, Tube Products of India, in the Rs 17,000-crore diversified Murugappa group, didn't come from a manufacturing background, but from the HR function. S.S. Gopalarathnam, moved from finance in TI Cycles, then to Tube Products of India, onward to corporate strategy at the corporate office, and then to the insurance business (Cholamandalam MS General Insurance) where he is the Managing Director. These are but two examples of senior leaders in the organisation who have moved from their primary functions and gone on to assume key leadership roles in the group.

For the past many years, the Murugappa Corporate Board has spent over a week every year analysing the talent pool of senior management in the group. One common thread emerged: many of the leaders, the CEOs and business heads, had undergone key functional changes in their career paths, which had propelled them to the top.

However, says Shyam Raman, Sr. Vice-President, Group HR, “It was done more as a developmental plan for the individual than as a process by itself. We saw the merits of that in terms of the knowledge and experience gathered (of working in a different area), and wanted the group as a whole to benefit from such experiences. We saw the need to institutionalise it as a process for all employees.”

From July of 2013, the group will embark on a brave new initiative when, by mandate, executives will need to have handled one more function if they are to be moved to the next grade. As Raman explains, “The mandate is that before a person becomes eligible for a grade shift, he/ she should have gone through a functional rotation. It is not just before or at the time of the grade shift, it should have been done by the time the grade shift opportunity arises. This is ideally done at a mid-management level, so that the employee can bring with him/her learnings from the earlier role, while being open enough to assimilate knowledge from the new role.”

Sridhar Ganesh, Director, HR, Murugappa Corporate Board, explains this thinking in the context of the new career development programme evolved in the group. With the average age of the 5,000-plus workforce in the management cadre around 37, this process is expected to energise the organisation and put it on a higher growth trajectory.

The six work levels that a manager transitions through are individual contributor; first-time manager, managing a section; a seasoned manager, managing a department/geography; first-time leader, leading a business function;  seasoned leader, leading a business group; and  enterprise leader who leads an enterprise.

Says Ganesh, “The three-four MDs of the group, and many of our SBU heads of large businesses, have gone through this process. We have now formalised this through many of the models that were earlier done intuitively. This has come out of anecdotal experiences, stories and sagas of how people have worked, and how development works in the group. We realised that people who have done well have moved across functions. We brought that aspect in, by saying that at the level of moving from a seasoned manager to a first-time leader, the person must have had exposure to another function, which we have made as a mandate now. For example, a person from sales getting an exposure to manufacturing before moving back to sales, is able to understand the internal and external processes better.”

Ganesh says making this mandatory will create upward pressure for creating assignments for such interested people. “But, this will be a two-way process because in some other company, we will have another person wanting to move into this role, which is getting vacated by this person. This helps in the exchange of ideas, collaboration, apart from helping in the individual's learning. This movement is easy in the case of the Murugappa group because of the sheer size and diversity of businesses and roles,” he explains. The Murugappa group has 28 companies in its fold, eight of them listed, and employs 32,000 people.

After this mandate comes into force, employees will not be able to shift grades without having gone through these different experiences across responsibilities. Earlier, it used to happen by practice, now it would be a matter of formalising it within the group. “This will create a lot of entropy in the system, and will bring in a lot of benefit to the individual, and hence to the businesses. You cannot start anything only for the sake of business. It should fundamentally hold true for the benefit of the human being as well,” elaborates Ganesh.

HR consusltant Ganesh Chella, who has worked with the Murugappa group in evolving its career development programme, describes it as a bold step, as a compulsory mandate will create pressure within the system for executives to look for alternate functions.

To start with, the smaller businesses in the group will start rolling out this programme as a trial launch. Each company's HR will embrace this model gradually before it's adopted group-wide.

Shyam Raman says that for the supervisory cadre there will be some challenges (for example, the mobility of people in specific sectors such as manufacturing as against financial services). The intention is to extend the model to the supervisory cadre as well, but after resolving the challenges. “There are other challenges including specialisation ladders. For instance, someone who is in R&D may not be very comfortable moving to a function such as sales. Hence, for such a person, we may have to consider roles that are adjacent to his current role. The process should, hence, be more nuanced rather than a one-size-fits-all approach,” elaborates Raman.

The idea of moving employees to different functions is part of the freshly minted career development programme, which is in its launch phase now. Says Sridhar Ganesh, “The career development programme is the core around which the initiatives are designed.” The CDP rests on three well-defined anchors that give it structure: nine competency themes, the six work levels and five developmental experiences.

The competency themes articulate the fact that at each work level or career stage, an employee uses a set of knowledge, skills and capabilities, collectively called competencies. The CDP defines the specific set of competencies (see graphic) i.e. skills and capabilities that an employee needs to possess at each work level/career stage in order to achieve high performance in his or her role.

The work levels have been explained earlier in this article. Lastly, having identified what is to be developed and why these need to be developed, the CDP provides a framework of “how” to develop by enabling different types of experiences for staffers.

The CDP, says Ganesh, focuses on five “transition points” which refers to the process of moving from one work level to the next. Making a successful transition to the next level requires the employee to demonstrate higher levels of skills and competencies as appropriate to the new level. It also requires that the employee leaves behind some behaviours that were appropriate at the previous level. The CDP defines the five transitions necessary to move across the six work levels described earlier in the article. It also defines the “enablers”, or behaviour that facilitate the transition to the next level and “derailers”, i.e. behaviours that hamper smooth transition.  

vinaykamath@thehindu.co.in

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