A Case Study of Leadership Assessment in India and the UK

Xansa wanted to fully understand the potential of its senior management team. Penna carried out e-assessments and feedback interviews for over 600 employees across UK and India.

Xansa is an outsourcing and technology company with ca. 8,000 employees split equally between the UK and India.

There were a number of issues that needed to be addressed both in the UK and India.

• The first line and middle management population included widely varying degrees of understanding, capability and desire to perform the role well
• There was a need to increase the number of effective Managers rapidly to match targeted growth
• Young population in India with few role models which gave inconsistent management practices
• The term Manager was used in very different contexts across the business such that it was difficult to identify and communicate readily with that group to facilitate communication cascades or briefings
• Approximately 50% of employees in the UK had been brought in from other organisations, through acquisitions and transfers, bringing with them varying degrees of management education and varying ideas of what was an acceptable management practice.

The objective was to have the right leadership capability in place and to clarify and encourage high and consistent standards across the organisation, to enable the company to achieve the vision and goals.

Penna carried out some visionary stakeholder interviews to understand the direction of the business and how this programme fits in with this vision. We reviewed and re-designed some aspects of their competency framework to make it robust and objective for the purposes of assessment.

Penna designed an on-line leadership accreditation assessment process against their competencies.

Each manager completed a series of 6 assessments. This was followed up by a two-hour feedback interview. The interview was captured in a succinct developmental report, and then fed back to the HR team and relevant senior manager. Over 600 staff have been assessed already across the UK and India.

Results

Development themes were identified and development programmes are underway. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from senior managers and candidates.

Please contact Jackie Sykes on 07920 501 905 or email Jackie.sykes@penna.com