Developing Talent Portability for Managerial Success
By Gopalakrishnan*
In my experience of management talent development (distinct from specialist talent like with doctors or scientists), portability is a very important feature. What does portability of talent mean? Portability refers to the ability of a successful manager to be moved around the organization and for that person to depart from his or her zone of comfort to work with different products in different areas with different teams of people.
To build great talent in an organization, as Tata Steel, Titan, Infosys, Mahindra have demonstrated, there must be an organized process to: first, build talent density; second, develop talent portability; third, clarify talent responsibility; fourth and last, hold talent accountable.
To build talent density, management’s focus must be on quality and quantity of talent recruited. Talent recruitment must be dense but planned well. The sequential step is to develop such recruited talent through portability. This is the subject in this article.
The vectors or dimensions of portability are functional, geographic, domain, and team. Portability should be practiced with judgment, intuition, review, and common sense, otherwise an organization will inadvertently disable its recruits through a high-speed centrifuge. Timing, frequency and distance of porting are important determinants. Variety is an important test bed for talent, just like a top tennis player should get experience of playing on grass, clay, and synthetic courts. A top cricketer should learn to perform different types of pitches. So, it is with managers.
Functional portability does not mean testing a biochemist in finance and accounts. It means offering a stint in, for example, sales to an accountant, or offering a stint in supply chain to an HR resource. It is a matter of judgment about how unconventional or long the jump should be while developing a candidate. I recall that in the 1970s, Ashok Ganguly, a researcher in biochemistry, was given a chance in manufacturing. He must have excelled as he rapidly moved on to become chairman of Hindustan Lever. In my early career, when I joined as a computer systems analyst and programmer, I was tried as a sales manager for a few years. It so happened that I liked the change, and that gave me the opportunity to switch my career path.
Geographic portability refers to changing the place of work. If you are a good sales manager in Karnataka, will you make a good sales manager in Punjab? After all, the language of doing business differs, the retail and distributor universe is different, attitudes to credit and trade differ. Some managers perform the same role in the same place for fifteen years and may even boast that they “have fifteen years of experience”. They have possibly had the same annual experience repeated fifteen times.
Suresh Narayanan was the General Sales Manager in Nestle India. He was then moved to work in foreign subsidiaries of Nestle. When the Maggi noodles crisis hit Nestle India, Suresh was moved back as Chairman of Nestle India. From all accounts, he did a great job of getting Nestle India back on track.
Domain portability is the third vector. It is not essential to switch companies to get domain experience. Multiple domain experiences may be available within a company, but dramatically different domain experiences may be available across companies. I discovered this when I moved from fast moving consumer goods (Unilever) to industrial manufactures (Tata). A single corporation may have multiple domains as Unilever has Home Care, Personal Wash, Foods, and Refreshments. It is a great development experience to work in more than one domain. The business model and ways are different among Home Care and Foods, just to take one example. During my own career in Unilever, I moved back and forth from Home Care to Foods more than once. I believe domain moves accelerated my learning propensities.
Before being appointed as President of World Bank, Ajay Banga worked in Nestle India, Pepsi Co, and Mastercard. Debu Bhattacharya, a Chemical engineer by training and experience, successfully headed HINDALCO, a metallurgical behemoth, for the Aditya Birla Group.
Team portability: Every manager is strengthened by his team and he or she strengthens the team. There is an organic relationship between an individual and how that person gets along with a team, principally because of the dynamics of human interaction. A top-class general manager should be flexible enough to work at the top of his or her capability with all sorts of teams.
I have seen leaders who have worked in the same location with the same product line and with the same people for several years. Such leaders are almost specialists because their ability to gel with an alternative team in an alternative location has not been tested. The best among such leaders may well adapt, but many may not. That is why companies move emerging managers to work with different teams. When I moved from the comfort of working in Hindustan Lever to the discomfort of a different and international team while heading Unilever Arabia brought, I learnt a lot. If one reviews the career of top business leaders, one invariably notices evidence of that person having worked the way up while working with many teams, for example, Indra Nooyi at Pepsi Co, N. Chandrasekharan at Tata, Sanjiv Mehta at Unilever, to name a few.
Talent density and talent portability are two sides of the same coin, just as planting and harvesting are two sides of the same coin in agriculture.
*(The writer is an author and business commentator. His fifty-year professional career was spent in HUL and Tata).
