The Leadership Team Sets Direction
HR led this effort under the sponsorship of one of the R&D VPs. As partners, the sponsor and HR worked with the R&D Leadership to initiate the first stages for these models:
Corporate Strategy Model
- Define the "goals and aspirations",
- Establish the "scope of influence for the training program",
- Provide an initial description of how "we succeed"
Gap Model
- Describe the desired workforce performance by defining R&D Core Competencies (Table 1). These competencies would be needed to strengthen the R&D people and organization to prepare them to meet the challenges of the future.
As part of the R&D Leadership role, the team defined the “goals and aspirations” as follows:
- Cause an increase in innovation (business goal) by increasing networking across the myriad of businesses and silos (success measure). This networking goal is consistent with the long-held belief in R&D that innovation happens when people from different technical areas share their thoughts and issues.
- Provide training, which is both formal and mandatory. (Attendance is a success measure.)
- Help R&D people retool for the future (learning objective). For P&G, a promote-from-within corporation, retooling employees is critical for ongoing success.
Leadership defined the scope of the program as being limited to R&D people and to content areas not covered by P&G Corporate or Business Unit training.
Leadership defined success as re-establishing the tradition of having R&D people teach R&D people. That is, the leaders and corporate experts would pass on their knowledge and experience to those coming up the ranks. This tradition had suffered during the last decade of global growth. Formal training was seen as a way to reestablish this tradition. Revitalizing this tradition could also facilitate more mentoring, particularly with mid-career professionals, thus improving overall performance and job satisfaction.
Defining the R&D Core Competencies led the R&D Leadership to focus on those aspects of R&D that define its equity within the company (Table 1). They ultimately identified six key competencies that touched most R&D people, regardless of their technical area of expertise (e.g. microbiology, calcium technology, consumer research, packaging, process design) or their business unit (e.g. laundry, cosmetics, health). They defined each of these in sufficient depth to assure global understanding and to guide the team which would put together the training on these topics.
Table 1: R&D Core Competencies
- Applying Innovative Technologies in the Business
- Comprehensive Consumer Understanding
- Driving Change
- Holistic Innovation
- Proficient Project Management
- Understanding our Business
With the first three steps of the corporate strategy model agreed upon and the first step of the Gap model covered, HR was ready to gather resources for the next stage – designing the college.