India?s second largest bank, ICICI Bank, plans to institutionalise a leadership development process that will groom successors to all key positions at the top level. The process, billed as the most broadbased in the industry, will give a large number of employees a stake in identifying the next generation leaders of the bank.
K Ramkumar, executive director of the bank, said the leadership initiative will focus on the entire ICICI group that has about 80,000 employees. For this, the bank has created a 200-member panel across the country, comprising seven to eight people in each panel for talent assessment.
Explaining the dynamics of the process in an exclusive interview with FE, Ramkumar said in the current decade, the level of macro-economic complexity in India, and therefore of the group, required a realignment of the entire leadership development and succession planning process. ?It cannot be centred around a couple of leaders (instead, it has) to be institutionalised?, he said.
Incidentally, the bank has also featured in the recent Global Top Companies for Leaders Study of Hewitt Associates, an international human resources consultant. ICICI Bank has populated a significant swathe of the Indian financial sector, including Shikha Sharma of Axis Bank and Kalpana Morparia of JP Morgan.
The leadership initiative comes at a time when the bank has weathered the impact of the global financial maelstrom successfully. It had to shrink its balance sheet, as a result. But it has now decided to move to a faster growth trajectory and expand its branch network about 500 from its current 1,500, said the bank?s CEO, Chanda Kochhar, recently.
Ramkumar said the business environment of the ?80s and ?90s offered the luxury to leaders at the helm of the ICICI group, like S Nadkarni and N Vaghul, to take decisions based on their wide industry level expertise.
But that scope has got whittled down now. He said the leadership selection process has been on for some time, but has got intensified now.
He said the bank?s managing director and executive directors are getting personally involved in identifying potential talent. Non-executive chairman KV Kamath and Chanda Kochhar would join the process in January to spend a week, involving 40 to 48 hours of their time, in helping the process.
The process of getting the right talent for senior management positions will focus on those now in the lower rungs of management as well. So, instead of seniority, all key appointments such as senior general manager, general manager and executive directors will be culled from this talent list.
Ramkumar pointed out that more than a dozen CEOs and directors have been picked up in the past two years, from within the group. These include other than Kochhar, Madhabi Puri Buch as MD and CEO of ICICI Securities, Vishaka Mulye as MD and CEO of ICICI Ventures, V Vaidyanathan as MD and CEO of ICICI Life, Sandeep Bakhshi as executive director of ICICI Bank and Bhargav Dasgupta as MD and CEO of ICICI General.