Satyam's new leader development program takes a long-term investment approach rather than trying to churn out as many participants as possible. To this end, the program takes a year and uses a holistic approach by combining coaching, a leadership development consultant that works one on one with the leader for the year, classroom experiences, online experiences, assessments throughout the year and a variety of mentors.
One of the big initiatives currently underway at Satyam is to send every leader back to school. Though they are some of the best technology experts in the world, they are not experts in global business, so Satyam has partnered with U21 Global in Singapore and Harvard Publishing to put together a 6 month, virtually delivered mini-MBA program called the Certificate of Global Business Leadership. Every existing leader is required to go through the program unless they have completed an MBA in the last five years.
Additionally, they have what they call the BEST leadership pipeline, which stands for "Building Excellence the Satyam way Together." The pipeline they put together includes a succession plan of three leaders for each position, an emerging leaders program, an existing leaders program and other lifecycle programs throughout the life cycle. They are currently in their 6th orbit or generation, which is "leadership and innovation." They recognize that the only thing that will keep them growing, as compared to competitors who have stagnated, is the ability to produce leaders faster.
The CLO has to be much more sensitized to the leader's role in the organization and the leader's ability to adapt. To gain a better understanding of leadership in the global economy, a study of 250 global leaders of other major companies was conducted. It included 45 minute to 1 hr interviews on managing differences and many other topics. What they discovered was that the best leaders had the ability to adapt to the environment that they were in. The problem is that most leaders today do not act as "chameleons" but rather feel like their style is ingrained. Instead, leaders must understand that when you parachute into another culture, the people do not have time to adapt to you and you will never achieve you mission if you do not adapt to them.
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