The Economic Times – Corporate Dossier: Cognizant’s Vice-President of Human Resources Talks About the Company’s Leadership Development Philosophy and Initiatives

“Our leaders play an important role in the training process and we train them on how to be coaches for their subordinates,” Sriram Rajagopal tells The Economic Times, highlighting how Cognizant looks at the overall development of a manager at each stage of his career.

The paper chronicles Cognizant’s leadership development philosophy and initiatives in a piece titled “Steady Evolution: Leaders develop leaders at Cognizant”. “Cognizant believes in having leaders develop leaders,” it writes. “Which is why the company’s leadership development process is focused on training leaders to be coaches for their subordinates.”

“The organization has different needs from different people, all of which require different skills. You cannot have a one-size-fits-all approach as there are different elements to this,” Rajagopal adds. “While role-based training takes care of specific skills required, it is still restricted to certain aspects of the business. There are different leadership competencies that we value and require at every level, which are not specific to a job and applicable anywhere in the business.”

“Managers would be trained in broader aspects of the business like building and managing a team, change management, global acumen and so on,” writes the paper. “The focus will be on providing a learning experience that’s a mix of classroom training and technological inputs combined with inputs from global B-schools. The important thing is that the curriculum and training be relevant and experiential.”

The paper notes, “There is a great deal of focus on action learning where different environments are simulated for the managers to deal with.” Rajagopal says, “There is a lot of expertise both within and outside the organization and we try to leverage all of it.”