The alcoholic beverage company’s career development program pushes staff to excel.
When Jasmin Chanana was offered a permanent position at the end of 2003 at spirits, wine and beer maker Diageo, accepting it was a no-brainer. He’d been working as a consultant for the company for more than a year and knew he would find the alcoholic beverage industry a refreshing change from the stodgy world of financial services.
But it wasn’t just being able to say, “Hey, I work for that company” when someone at a bar orders a Guinness that attracted Chanana. What the 30-year-old saw was an opportunity for growth. After less than a year as a project manager working with Diageo’s Web sites and portals, Chanana was given the chance to lead a server consolidation project. Launched three months ago, the project entails consolidating infrastructure and application servers across Diageo North America, which is headquartered in Stamford, Conn.
Chanana had been through Diageo’s project management training program, and his manager recognized his potential to take on the role. “People saw the opportunity for growth for me and pushed me in the right direction,” Chanana says. “My manager knew the specific needs I had and matched me with an opportunity as it presented itself.”
Diageo’s career development program, which includes a formal review and goal-setting process as well as a more casual check-up element, helped Chanana land his new job, he says. Over the course of regular career discussions, Chanana’s manager identified goals, ensured the necessary training was received and gave Chanana an opportunity to test his project management mettle by taking on the server consolidation project.
Diageo’s annual performance reviews, which the company calls people-performance-management reviews, are used to set goals and objectives both by the management and the employee. Monthly checkups, known as call overs, take employees out of their day-to-day work to examine their progress and realign goals as needed.
“Monthly call overs are a gut check of where you are,” Chanana says. “You have your people-performance-management [document], you have your objectives in front of you, and as you go through you get a good sense of where you are on a monthly basis.”
This kind of regular contact to discuss career goals is important to employees, who often feel like their own personal aspirations get lost amid corporate expectations, says Janet Scarborough, founder of career counseling and executive coaching firm Bridgeway Career Development. “What most companies fail to do is circle back around to touch base with employees between annual performance evaluations,” she says.
However, Scarborough warns that monthly meetings such as Diageo’s call overs need to involve action, not just talk, to be truly worthwhile. “If there are no concrete results, the meetings are rendered ineffective,” she says. She also questions whether monthly meetings are necessary, given that often not much changes over a 30-day period.
Diageo, formed in 1997 by the merger of smaller companies, isn’t focusing on career development solely for the benefit of its employees. By identifying career goals and unearthing opportunities for related training, the company’s management can align employees’ efforts with the business goals of the company, says Andrew Lopatynsky, senior vice president of IT. For example, training an IS employee in how the business side of the house works would better enable him to develop systems than if the employee went about his job without understanding his users’ needs.
“IS staff career development is of utmost importance, whether that means encouraging participation in outside conferences, internship programs or short-term special project assignments,” Lopatynsky says.
Throughout the elements of its career development program, Diageo emphasizes two-way, open communication so that employees and managers can highlight opportunities for growth, Lopatynsky says. While senior managers will gather every six months to discuss their employees’ career goals and search for fits within the organization, employees also are encouraged to seek opportunities and outline strategies for taking advantage of them. They’re even given a vocabulary to help express some less-tangible goals.
For example, Chris Brown, Diageo’s director of information management, tells the story of an employee in his data quality group who wanted to become a better “influencer,” a term the firm uses. “We built into her development plan an area called ‘getting better at influencing,'” Brown says. As her manager, Brown will identify courses she can take and books she can read to hone her influencing skills, which in turn will benefit the company.
“We want our people to be influencers, to have a little edge and drive themselves,” he says. “For a technology person, an influencer has the ability to take an idea or concept, look at the business value of that concept and then essentially sell that concept into the business.”
While Brown says that many of his employees are interested in taking their careers to the next level, not all are looking to move into the corner office some day. For those who don’t want to climb the management ranks, Brown says the career development program still can be of assistance by helping employees take on more responsibility or achieve greater success in their current roles.
“We’ve put a program in place that makes sure [employees] are technically growing all the time, not just for themselves but also for the benefit of the company,” Brown says. n
