Assignment – 1

Talent Management
Kartik Sharma
19BBA10015

Case Study on ICICI Bank

The case discusses the talent management strategies at India-based financial banking
institution, ICICI Bank Ltd. (ICICI Bank). Since the 1980s, the bank had fostered a culture of
nurturing young talent. This was a bid to create a talent pool and develop a leadership pipeline
at the bank. The process of empowering young people, nurturing talent, and developing a
leadership pipeline became part of the bank's culture and was carried forward by former CEO
and MD, KV Kamath (Kamath) and present CEO and MD, Chanda Kochhar (Kochhar). Kamath
was instrumental grooming several people who later took up key positions at the bank. He
spotted people with leadership potential at the bank and moved them from one assignment to
another and mentored them to take up different leadership roles and serve the bank.
The success of the mentoring process led to the bank institutionalizing a formal leadership
development process that identified talented employees through a performance appraisal
system after which they were assessed for future leadership roles.
According to experts, ICICI Bank's focus on nurturing young talent reaped several benefits for
the bank. While the leadership grooming process helped it tackle the problem of attrition, it
also enabled the bank move ahead of others in the Indian banking sector. The bank's focus on
nurturing young talent also helped ICICI Bank develop businesses that accounted for half of
ICICI Bank's profits. Industry observers felt that going forward, the challenge for Kochhar would
be to maintain the bank's momentum, continue international expansion, expand product
offerings, improve technological innovation, and continue to nurture young talent.

Q.1 Critically analyse talent management strategies at ICICI Bank.

Ans. There is a strategic imperative for organizations to manage talent. Changing demographic
patterns mean that more people are approaching retirement than entering the workforce.
Younger generations have different needs and are renegotiating the psychological contracts with
their employer. They are quick to move if their organization is not meeting their expectations.
Retaining and developing key people in the organization will be a critical success factor in the
next 5 years.

As per the different programmes in the ICICI Bank, the different talent management strategies
are:
Sales Officers Programme - ICICI Bank hires young graduates to join its dynamic front line Sales
Force. The selected applicants are trained at ICICI Bank Sales Academy. This training ensures that
the applicants are well equipped in Selling Skills, Product Knowledge and Rules a\nd Regulations
pertaining to the job responsibility. The Sales Academy is one-of-its kind in the world and confers
on its participants a Certification in Sales Management.
Probationary Officer Programme - Probationary Officer Training Programme is an initiative of
ICICI Bank in partnership with Manipal University. Probationary Officer Training Programme aims
to attract young talent who wish to pursue a career in banking. It is a vocational training
programme designed to develop a pool of first level managers with banking knowledge and
required skill-sets to perform efficiently in their day to day activities.
ICICI Business Leadership Programmeme - The Post Graduate Certificate in Securities Markets is
a one year programme with NISM, an institute established by SEBI, the market regulator. This
specialized and integrated programme focuses on providing conceptual grounding, skill building
and industry exposure. The programme curriculum is aligned with the needs of the industry. The
unique design of the programme focuses on providing a high degree of industry exposure, by
academic and functional experts, from the BFSI sector. The Programme has the much-desired
blend, wherein participants undergo the industry-linked internship at ICICI Group for a period of
three-months during the one- year course duration.
ICICI Academy for Skills - ICICI Academy for Skills, to empower underprivileged youth, especially
women across the country. Within an accelerated timeframe, ICICI Academy for Skills has set up
22 training centers that can train 30,000 youth annually. Of these 10 centers are exclusively for
women, to enable young women with no access to formal employment markets to overcome
socio-cultural and economic barriers and become important stakeholders in India‘s growth story.
These centers are designed as women friendly centers run by women trainers and staff, have
convenient timings and are based in convenient locations. ICICI Academy for Skills‘ training
model focuses on building true marketplace competencies in partnership with industry leaders.

Q.2 Discuss the mentoring process adopted by Kamath to groom young employees at the bank.

Ans. Kamath’s vision was to enable ICICI Bank to surge ahead and capture a vital share of the
market.He planned to create leaders within the organization who could foresee opportunities
ahead of others. The mentoring process started with picking young employees who had joined
the bank as management trainees and giving them hard-to-achieve targets to test their
potential. Employees passing the test were promoted to lead senior-level positions. One of the
first things Kamath felt he had to do on returning to ICICI after an eight-year stint with the Asian
Development Bank in 1995 was to create a talent pool in a bid to transform the government
promoted project finance institution into a universal bank. During this time, the bank also faced
the problem of young employees leaving the bank for better options. Kamath told that to lead a
group of people whose average age is 28 it is important to have leader who should also be age
towards 28 Kamath's poser may sound provocative. CEOs across India Inc. are looking to nurture
leaders to take their companies to tomorrow's youthful market.

Q.3 Discuss the need to set up a formal leadership development process at the bank.
Ans. The top companies have leadership development processes that cater to the unique needs
of individual leaders. At ICICI, leadership is defined in terms of Conviction - to set the change
agenda and Persistence to live through the period of change whatever the challenges. With
more than 2,500 employees in the Talent Pool, ICICI aims to create a pipeline of eligible talent to
cater to all critical jobs in the bank. This does not happen by default but by strategic design. The
company puts serious resources, time and effort behind this important activity of identifying and
grooming talent. In 2002, the bank started to grow at an accelerated rate and the previous
process, which was heavily dependant on the contribution of board members, had begun to look
obsolete. In 2002, on Mr. Kamath’s initiative was to began set up a leadership development
process to cater to a different scale of business. They got ideas and inspiration from practices
followed by GE and Unilever, said by Board Executive Director & HR Head, K. Ramkumar. They
took the best practices in the industry and made a process for Leadership Identification and
Development that essentially moved the ‘ownership’ of this key activity from the MD level to a
larger group of people. The prime objective of this process was to scale leadership development
to a new level and ensure that the organization had enough talent and leaders available from
within to execute their growth strategy. In terms of leadership development programs for those
within the talent pool, the objective is to help leaders deal with adaptive challenges which are
not amenable to analysis.

Q.4 Discuss the issues and challenges faced by the mentors while mentoring employees.

Ans. Issues and challenges faced by the mentors while mentoring employees are as follows:

• The most common challenge organizations faces while starting a mentoring program is
getting the right number of mentors to participate. It’s hard to find an experienced
employee who wants to invest their time in shaping others’ futures. When there are lots
of talented, inexperienced employees, ready to be mentored, the demand for mentors
surpasses the supply.
• A mentoring relationship can fizzle before even engaging in any development because of
a wrong match. That’s why finding the right mentoring pair should be on the top of your
priority list. Indeed, it is difficult to find the right mentor for a mentee and vice versa.
Though few matches can be perfect, there is no way to get a 100% right match for all the
participants.
• It helps you understand the progress of the program, and the relationship between
mentor and mentee. However, getting honest feedback from the mentee is not always
 easy. It’s common for a mentee to be reluctant, especially when the mentor is in a higher
position in the organization.
• Expectations are natural in a mentoring relationship. Be it general or specific, if
expectations are not articulated, they can lead to disappointment. Unrealistic mentoring
expectations, too, can be a hitch in a mentoring relationship.
• We all know the benefits of mentoring program. But when we have a specific goal for a
program, the tracking of its outcome becomes necessary. 65% of organizations do not
formally evaluate mentoring, rather, it is judged by the outcome. Because mentoring is a
long-term relationship, keeping track of its success manually is an uphill task.