Vedanta prepares over 500 future leaders through Internal Growth Workshops

The new leaders have been empowered through various key strategic initiatives across the Group and regular feedback sessions, which ensure they are on the right track to being the ’leaders of tomorrow’

The one thing that successful businesses cannot afford to go wrong with, is the identification of the right set of people who will carry forward the legacy, taking the business to even greater heights. Ensuring the same, the Vedanta Group has just created a leadership pipeline of 500 new leaders, who are being mentored and developed to take up larger roles in the future. With an aim to capturing the career aspirations of its employees and enabling them to realise their potential and achieve accelerated growth, this is a hallmark Group initiative. Called ‘High Performers & Potential Leaders Identification’ under the ‘Internal Growth Workshops’, the initiative is anchored by the chairman.

The programme is in line with the Group’s core philosophy of ‘leadership from within’ and has been a key platform through which hidden gems are ‘recognised and empowered’. The workshops are great knowledge-sharing platforms, which have not just helped identify the leadership pipeline of 500 emerging leaders, but have also been instrumental in ideating impactful solutions and various suggestions across the Group.

The new leaders have been empowered through various key strategic initiatives across the Group and regular feedback sessions, which ensure they are on the right track to being the ‘leaders of tomorrow’. The initiative has also enabled Vedanta to reduce lateral hiring significantly for critical roles across the Group in the past two years.

Samir Cairae, CEO-Diversified Metals India, Vedanta, says, “A classic leader generates employees’ confidence in him, the leader. A great leader helps employees develop confidence in their own abilities and thus become leaders themselves. These workshops are an innovative way of identifying and developing leaders, while also forming a network, which will co-create and co-lead the Vedanta of the future.”

The workshops help ingrain in these individuals, a strong focus in the areas of HSE; ethics-governance-compliance; technology; benchmarking; continuous innovation and power of analytics, which in turn, are percolated across their respective functions/businesses. Meeting the growth aspirations of the employees and ensuring internal mobility of high-quality talent has been a key highlight of this endeavour.

In line with that, Deshnee Naidoo, CEO- Vedanta Zinc International, says, “The workshops have been a step further into enhancing our ‘business with purpose’ philosophy. They have accelerated the mobilisation and empowerment of several hundred leaders over a very short period.”

One notable aspect of the initiative has been the fact that all the CEOs and executive-committee members have been an integral part of this initiative, sharing their ideas, feedback and recommendations during the several workshops held. “The entire senior management team has been part of this flagship initiative to engage with our future leaders, which has resulted in many innovative ideas being implemented across the Group,” says, Suresh Bose, head-Group HR, Vedanta.

Numerous exceptional ideas and suggestions have been gathered from thousands of professionals through several workshops, covering all key/critical functions across businesses. Over 500 leaders have been identified, out of which 24 per cent are women professionals. The average age of the employees in this elite group is 34–35 years.

Kishore Kumar, director-strategy & business, Vedanta, shares that the group constantly believes in harnessing talents across the business verticals, both in India and overseas. This results in cross- fertilisation of best practices and blossoming of new ideas and innovations on a continuous basis. Most of the leaders would have worked in two or three verticals including functional rotation, before setting the ladder of senior management.

“The focus on the diversity-empowerment target of 40 per cent is one of its kind. Here, young women from diverse backgrounds, including mining and smelting, are trained on fast track with special projects provided to groom their managerial capacity. Programmes are designed to make them comfortable in numerical and objective evaluation of decisions,” he opines.

To ensure holistic development of these emerging leaders, each of the identified new leaders is connected to a senior anchor, who supports their personal and professional journey. Also, they are covered in an exclusive L&D initiative of ‘e-learning’ wherein they have access to over 5000 learning courses, enabling them to further develop and hone their skills as they move up the career ladder. In addition, this elite group of talent is also entitled to the prestigious ESOS (Employee Stock Option Scheme) to further motivate them to deliver superior performance.

Talking of the initiative, Pankaj Kalra, CFO, Cairn India, that was just acquired by Vedanta, says, “This initiative personifies and epitomises the true DNA of Vedanta, that is, harness the best of human capital through motivation and empowerment. This hallmark programme has unleashed many latent minds to think differently and take their career towards newer defining heights.” Certainly, the workshops have been immensely enriching platforms for discussion and formulation of a value-add roadmap.

Praveen Purohit, Group HR, Vedanta, who has been anchoring the initiative believes that it is all about paying attention to people. “Our focus was to design the best framework, which is outcome oriented, with due concentration on the right process. The entire initiative was chaired by our esteemed chairman, Navin Agarwal, and as an anchor, I could see tremendous zeal and enthusiasm among all the stakeholders to unlock and create value by unleashing people potential,” he says as he shares his experience.

Going further, Vedanta plans to introduce an initiative to measure the overall contributions and achievements of these new leaders and how they add transformative value to the business in their enhanced leadership roles. This will further be linked with their KPIs for developing comprehensive online -measurement metrics. The leaders are also being given high-impact projects across businesses, which will be reviewed by the respective senior business-leadership teams.