Kotak Life is going through a journey of transformation guided by its Managing Director, Mahesh Balasubramanian & supported by the business leaders and the CHRO. The organization is all set to depart on its new mission of ‘Grow @ Speed’. One of the key strategic enablers in this journey is developing Internal Talent.
The L&OD team plays a critical role in enabling and grooming talent for preparedness to meet the demands of business for the present and for future opportunities under some of its key interventions that are curated for sales and non-sales roles across the organization.
Ruchira Bhardwaja, Joint President & CHRO, Kotak Mahindra Life Insurance add: “These interventions, jointly identified, designed and executed in partnership between the business and L&OD team, address the following cohorts as outlined in the figure below.”
Additionally, Kotak Life has, this year, also partnered with LinkedIn Learning to enable and facilitate world-class learning for its employees with access to their global learning library that houses 10,000+ courses across sales, management, actuarial, operations, HR, and finance functions.
SKILLS TRANSFORMATION
Kotak Life has launched its skill transformation journey this year that focusses on building preparedness to meet the evolving business needs of the future. This journey began with identifying digital priorities for the organization through leadership listening. This was followed by a session for senior management on current digital and innovation technologies through live sessions from Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, etc. A digital assessment survey called DigiTude was rolled out for the organization to understand current levels of awareness with employees. Based on their current digital awareness level all employees are being enrolled for self-paced & facilitator lead programs.
The non-sales and corporate functions need & grade-based development journeys have been specially designed focusing on building hard skills for the frontline employees & building future skills for the management roles. Topics such as developing necessary digital skills of the future workforce, creating ability to influence digital adoption & developing adaptability of manager to implement change are being covered.
For the frontline corporate team, the company is focusing on 3 areas (i) managing one-self, (ii) managing others including teams, customers, and stakeholders, & (iii) skill development programs covering analytics, story boarding, communication, and presentation skills. To develop the operations team who are a critical and customer-facing function, the company have developed in-house modules on customer service, mindset change from service to sales & change management.
Ruchira delves deeper: “Creating sales leadership capability is one of our most critical imperatives for our Grow @ Speed strategy, as growth will be primary driven by sales volumes & about 80% of our manpower reports to sales leadership. The L&OD team works in partnership with the channel heads to create bespoke development programs aligning required skills to channel & Kotak Life strategy. Each sales leader will go through at least 24 hours of structured development programs; the team will conduct or organize more than 45 sessions though the year only for this cohort.”
Some of the key development areas for the year are creating digital dexterity, agility in execution & planning, coaching, creating ownership & accountability in team, effective delegation, influencing skills, change management & developing emotional intelligence as a leader.
To enable the senior leadership team with the mindset required for transforming digitally & to be future-ready by building both awareness and application, 2 modules were conducted for leaders on (i) making digital leadership happen & (ii) accelerating strategic acumen by introducing to Direction Alignment Commitment and Think-Act-Influence frameworks and its application. This was an experiential physical workshop done by Center for Creative Leadership.
The L&OD team is also deploying ‘We own our Learning – WooL’ as a learning culture development strategy, encouraging all employees to take ownership to develop themself with futuristic competencies. To enable this, Kotak Life has tied up with LinkedIn Learning and now employees have access to its global library. In the last 30 days’ employees viewed 739 courses, watched 4198 videos, and completed 192 courses.
PARTNERS
To make this journey possible we have partnered with more than 20 companies & consultants such as CCL, IIM, Knolskape, DDI, Skills Café, Kabila Consulting, Leadership Centre, Harappa, SHRM & others.
FUTURE PROGRAMS
“We will continue these interventions, jointly identified, designed, and executed in partnership between the businesses/functions and L&OD team. Skill transformation, corporate/nonsales capability development, sales leadership capability development & leadership development will remain our core strategy. We will be increasing our focus on WooL by mandating self-led learning hours & customizing individual journeys,” concludes Ruchira.
