Building Leaders
For almost a decade, India’s manufacturing industry struggled with attracting and retaining talent, as against the booming IT industry. Things have changed since. “Manufacturing is no more on a weak wicket,” says Pawan Goenka, MD, Mahindra and Mahindra ( M&M). “Whether in marketing and sales or in product development and manufacturing, jobs have become richer. Pay packages, too, are higher in manufacturing than IT.” Moreover, attrition levels are now in the low teens.
Anand Mahindra, Chairman, M&M, spearheads the hunt for top talent within the group companies, under the Future Leaders Program, to be groomed for bigger roles. “In the first batch, we selected 32 people below the Group President level who will be trained for 18 months,” says Rajeshwar Tripathi, Chief People Officer, Automotive and Farm Equipment Sectors, M&M.
M&M’s multiple businesses – from passenger vehicles and tractors to Tech Mahindra and Mahindra Finance – provide numerous opportunities to its aspirational workforce. It has an open system in which employees can apply for new job opportunities advertised internally. “It is not the availability of funds, but getting the right tal-
ent that is the biggest challenge today. M&M has always believed in growing talent internally rather than hiring on a large scale from outside,” Goenka informs.
The group started Mahindra Leadership University in Nashik about a year and a half ago, to build future leaders from within the organisation. There is also the Mahindra Institute of Quality which helps create high-calibre professional managers, and the Emerging Leaders Program for the manager-level employees.
Flexi hours, and five-day weeks are some of its other crowd-puller initiatives, apart from the work from home incentive, for two days in a month, for women employees with children below 18 years of age. The strength of women on its shop floors has almost doubled in the past three years. It has also instituted a women’s leadership programme.
Continuous training is how M&M weathers any disruption in the business model, be it due to digitisation or a new range of products. “We have to keep strengthening our core skills in the auto business to stay ahead of the competition,” says Tripathi. ~