Piramal Group refurbished : Nandini Piramal Takes Group wing to Newer territories
In August 2010, just after taking over the duties of the Human Resources department at Piramal Group, she realised that the department was spending more time on sorting employee paperwork than on talent development. She knew that for Piramal Group to grow and move forward, talent growth was indispensible. This was just a few months after her father Ajay Piramal decided to sell most of the pharmaceutical business to Abbott.
So she brought about the great change. She refurbished the entire team by replacing old with young. She formed the learning and development function, compensation and benefits function and a central talent sourcing team to begin with. She also got in more technology to reduce the manual paperwork.
“After the Abbott deal we had to reinvent ourselves. I think our focus on people and talent development has also changed. We are integrating the science of HR a little bit more in what we are trying to do. We are helping each business recruit and develop the best talent,” Piramal said.
The $4 billion group, which was once a pure play pharmaceutical company, is now also spread across finance, real estate
and information management. The business house is planning to demerge publicly listed Piramal Enterprises’ healthcare and finance entities into independent companies. Now, it is even looking to getting into cement manufacturing through buyouts.
Piramal Group hired global consultancy McKinsey and Aon Hewitt in 2014 to help create new leadership programmes aimed at preparing middle and senior management professionals for future leadership roles. The group also restarted its management trainee programme around the same time.
The conglomerate selected 115 professionals for its middle management programme called Ascend and 35 professionals for the senior management programme called Summit. The programmes that started early this year hope to make senior managers better coaches and mentors, while giving cross functional exposure to middle managers. Piramal is looking at a similar programme for its junior management too.
“It is a large scale overhaul of our human resources strategy. We have changed the way we look at new talent, existing people, new recruitments, compensations and rewards & recognition. It is a lot more aligned with business and much closer to market practices,” said Piramal.
She did not specify the expected number of new leadership roles in the future.
The group is also working with business arms to come up with a customised learning and training plan for employees which will help the business achieve its goals for the year. It is also training employees to become better interviewers.
“Conglomerates are getting more serious about leadership development because cost of leadership failure is very high. They want to understand who are the leaders who can run new businesses, established businesses or engineer a turnaround,” said Rajiv Krishnan, partner, people advisory services at global consultancy EY.
Piramal Group is the latest Indian conglomerate to revamp its human resource and leadership planning strategy to meet the needs of a highly competitive job market amid a volatile business environment.
Tata Group launched an initiative last year to create a pipeline of future leaders who will be mentored by multiple chief executives for up to two decades. Tata is also revisiting skill sets required for its future top leaders. The group already runs Tata Administrative Services, corporate India’s oldest leadership training programme.
Mahindra Group recently selected 32 high performers from within the auto-to-defence conglomerate to groom them as new-age leaders. It wants its leaders to have qualities such as risk taking, innovation and ability to manage fear and leverage failure.
Indian companies have also ranked ‘learning and development’ as a long-term challenge, according to Deloitte’s 2015 Global Human Capital Trends report.
