Building A Custom Model Of Potential With A Leading Consumer Goods Company

Our client is one of the world’s leading consumer goods companies. With a focus on food, home and personal care products and a workforce of more than 172,000 employees, they own some of the world’s leading brands and have annual sales that total €48.4billion. YSC Consulting’s role was to partner with the client to assess their global middle manager population to identify and develop their future leaders.

As part of their newly identified global strategy our client wanted to make sure that the personal growth of their people was accelerating at the same pace, and to the same standard, as their other organizational developments.

A robust process for identifying talent was well embedded and used across the business globally. While this was proving effective to a point, its focus was primarily on the performance of the individual and our client now wanted to introduce a potential for growth and progression measure to talent assessment. The purpose of this was two-fold:

• To enhance the current framework for assessing talent by creating a more robust and comprehensive talent measure with a fuller view of an individual, and:
• To create a more systematic approach that has a global standard across the organization.

A few different components needed to be addressed in order to implement this change successfully. First, there needed to be clearly defined and transparent guidance on how to identify potential. Second, this needed to work in harmony with the already existing performance measures and subsequent decision matrixes. Third, training guides for the new system would have to be created. And finally, there needed to be a full training program across the global HR and line manager community in order to understand and apply the new approach.

Part of the reason YSC was approached to partner with the client was because we had already developed the well researched and intuitive JDI Model of Potential. The client wanted to develop a tool that embraces clarity and consistency, uses a simple yet robust approach to assessing people and adopts a strengths-based approach to development planning.

YSC partnered with the client to create a bespoke Model of Potential to look at the core qualities associated with:

• How people think and make decisions;
• Their ambition and desire for broader impact;
• How they operate and get things done through others.

The model was tailored for their global audience, allowing for local context and regional differences whilst maintaining the rigor and consistency required in a global rollout.

YSC designed and implemented a ‘Train the Trainer’ approach to the rollout and partnered with local HR and talent leads in eight global hubs to deliver 19 workshops for the HR community. Using an interactive approach to work through the model and explore how the key components might show up in the day-to-day, the workshops also looked at how to calibrate, how to have developmental conversations and how to coach against the model, as well as a full walkthrough of how they as a community were to conduct the line manager training in their local markets.

YSC consultants all over the world were involved in the ‘Train the Trainer’ sessions, to date these have been rated by attendees as some of the most engaging and effective they have experienced.

Through a combination of quality workshop materials, carefully planned pilot workshops and strong sponsorship from the top of the organization, along with YSC’s ability to facilitate compelling discussion around the model itself, we were able to foster a close and longstanding relationship, helping our client begin to shift their thinking and approach to assessing their talent.

The intervention has pathed the way for the formation of a longer term view of the talent pipeline to be part of the everyday, and the language of potential to be globally understood and embedded.