IT firm will sell its exclusive leadership content, services to other companies.
The Infosys leadership code is about to be cracked. The Infosys Leadership Institute (ILI), responsible for training leaders for the software bellwether, will now sell its exclusive leadership content and services to other companies.
The institute has already been approached by interested firms in Europe and CXOs from India as well.
“As we staff up our institute further,” notes Matt Barney, ILI’s vice-president and director, “we will also begin to sell our creative solutions, intellectual property and consulting services to other companies. At present we have been catering to the internal requirements of only Infosys.”
Barney, who is often approached by several organisations within India and overseas, has from time-to-time been approached for consulting as well. “We have had European organisations coming to us to purchase the assessment tools that we create — along with other courses,” he points out. When O P Bhatt was the chairman of State Bank of India, he too had approached Barney. “We had then suggested that the bank should look at creating an institute on similar lines in Rajasthan. We get such requests, but we have limited availability to do that now. But we will eventually do this,” he adds.
ILI is perhaps the country’s only such institute that has devised leadership training tailored to the requirements of the candidate. These modules are based on the teaching of Robert Cialdini, regents’ professor emeritus of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University. ILI has also created a virtual reality simulation game of ethical influence.
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As the institute starts taking its first step to become a commercial entity, it is also tweaking the structure of Infosys Leadership tier system. ILI has created a pyramid structure to identify future leaders. While the number of senior executives in the top-most tier, closer to the board level, remains same at 50, the institute has added 200 employees in the second layer and 516 in the third layer. The institute assessed 800 employees before finalising the total number of people in the third tier.
Barney says the company started re-evaluating and refining the structure from 2007 onwards. Other than being a labour-intensive programme, Barney also wants a system that will migrate into a forecasting model.
Arti Shyamsunder, a member of the ILI, says the institute changed the approach of assessing the candidates who get into the tier system. “Earlier it was labour-intensive,” she recalls. “The new approach brings down the time of selecting a person into the system from one-and-a-half years to four months.”
As of now, the employee mix at the ILI is skewed towards Indians. About 56 per cent of the total employees in the ILI are Indians and 42 per cent are from outside. But the 42 per cent base represents 13 nationalities.
While most of the process that includes, nomination, vetting process and the panel interview, remains the same. The change in the current system appears when there is a disagreement with regard to a candidate. “So earlier this will lead to a panel interview — and then the assessment process, which would take a lot of time,” explains Shyamsunder. “In the new system, we have included all the assessment parameters, and added some science to the process. We now also assess certain personality traits, performance benchmarks. And also make sure that certain biases do not come in.”
So far, ILI was evaluating employees within the company for the role of future leaders. The institute may, in the future, plan to have a system that will allow lateral hires get into the tiers. “The company,” says Barney, “is also planning to have a system that will have the capability of assessing new lateral hires into the tier process as they join the company.” So far, it has been identifying top achievers from the employees that have been with it for a long period. “The tier leader pool is our way of identifying high-potential people in the company. They get personal coach, and course material created by our intellectual property.”