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Godrej Consumer Products Limited
Q. How did GCPL develop a culture of high performance? Is it a tough tightrope to walk, between 'pleasing' employees and developing a high performance culture?
Nisaba Godrej: I do not think it is a tightrope. High performing people want to be pushed; they want the bar raised all the time; they want the rope to be tighter and tighter so it becomes more challenging. I personally do not think being tough on people necessarily means that you make them unhappy. Yes, someone who does not have the ability and does not want to perform, will not. The way to push performance is always to be fair. If you are an organization where someone gets promoted because they are close friends with someone in the organization, I think that is where you are not pleasing people and are making them unhappy. But if people understand why they are getting pushed, and if you are quite open about why selected people are getting a higher position, I do not think it is an issue. At Godrej, while we have been tough and asked people to leave, we have also taken in people who have not had the experience you would think to be in that role. We see a lot of potential in them and we take a bet, because we believe they can stretch. If it does not work out, we see to it then, but if we feel they can really stretch, why not give them a shot? In turn, this has been increasingly motivating for people as they feel that the organization really believes in them.
Vivek Gambhir: To add to this, the strength of the organization lies in the focus on value creation and results delivery. GCPL was one of the earliest companies in India to implement the balance score card. If we look at the goal sheet process and how we cascade targets down, clarity around what people targets are and what performance standards are has always been very clear. Where we have become tougher is in terms of pushing our people to have a dialogue to redefine the role of a leader in the organization. We are working towards an 'inspired leadership' model. One of the four vision elements is fostering an inspiring place to work, where we are saying thatwhile it is expected that you have to deliver results, this is no longer enough. Your responsibility to the organization has to go beyond results delivery. What is most important is the kind of legacy created and how the results are being delivered. It is imperative to play a role in nurturing and growing the next generation of leaders to be able to grow at Godrej. The organization has to be a place where leaders are energizing, motivating and figuring out the intangible aspects to motivate and develop the next generation of leaders. To me, this is where we are getting tougher such as the 'how to' of results delivery and the role
people need to play to develop the next generation of leaders. This is really the heart of 'Tough Love', our talent strategy. The results delivery was always the hallmark of the 'Godrej way' of working.
Q. What are the people initiatives at Godrej that are very popular with your employees and that you believe have been very effective in achieving their purpose?
Nisaba Godrej: There are a lot of them! It depends on which areas we look at. If we look across leadership development, we have programs called Leading Self and Leading Others and Leading Business, which are tied into our competencies. GCPL has built the capabilities to do Leading Self and Leading Others in-house. Initially, we realized one of our Senior Leadership Members, who is currently heading international HR for Godrej, had a deep interest in building capability around Leading Self and Leading Others, and he started experimenting by running these courses with a few people from Godrej. He was so good at this that we designed a role specifically around this. This is one of the many examples of GCPL giving people opportunities. A lot of focus has been put on career development at GCPL that has shown us a significant and sharp increase in the engagement score.
Vivek Gambhir: The people asset score card is a great way to capture data analytically and feed it into the goal sheet. Through this, people have a clear sense of what they need to do to improve their leadership quotient. There is a certain weightage on the goal sheet that comes from the 'how' of leadership.
The weightage goes up to 30% at the senior level. This includes a 360 degree scorecard, the number of people they are mentoring, scores in terms of developing others and, very importantly, the in-tune engagement. I think this is one process that we have implemented extremely well, not just in terms of the survey, but the kind of discussions it leads to in the teams and the kind of dialogues we are having in terms of how to improve. Ultimately, engagement is at the team level. The grand score can be anything, but the true impact of engagement has to happen on a daily basis in terms of how teams work; the process used to have discussions on engagement, monitoring, etc. has been the biggest reason as to why the needle has moved.
On the recruiting side, there has been a fair number of innovations we have made. One is of course the Loud Program. This has been a key differentiator that we can see on campus. We have launched an innovative fellows program where some of our brightest people actually get to do an internal fellowship. This used to be a one-year program, but it is a two-year program now, simply because we want people to get deeper into the issues they are working on. A lot of the work they do is about making Godrej a better place. It is a great platform for the people as recommendations get implemented; campus hires get training and there is an exposure to senior management. To my mind, these are the ways in which we have been distinctive and how we bring our value proposition to life.
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