Leadership Development Series

Morningstar India and SHRM recently hosted a knowledge-sharing and learning forum to better understand the challenges and opportunities of leadership development. We spoke to Pratik Parikh , Head-Talent and Culture, Morningstar India, to discuss how organizations can take constructive steps in ensuring the growth and development of current and future leaders and Morningstar's efforts.

How would you say the role of leaders has evolved in the past decade in India?

The world has become more dynamic, and the global environment has started shifting regarding social and political turbulence, work-life fusion, and flexible work arrangements. With changing times, there is much focus on organizations building an inclusive culture, and leaders need to be more agile, collaborative, adaptable, and empathetic. In addition to driving business objectives, leaders today face challenges like managing high stress in their teams, dealing with the thin line between work and personal lives, and providing more varied opportunities in work patterns. The need to build psychological safety and nurture a growth mindset across diverse generations is more important now than ever. This has increased the demand for leaders to balance organizational goals and employee well-being. Further, with a hybrid environment being the new standard, autocratic and micromanagement styles are changing to more trust-based leadership that requires an adequate balance between empowering team members and maintaining control. Organizations are also heavily investing in upskilling their leadership to adapt to these changing needs.

During the Leadership Incubation session, there was a discussion on the importance of good and perhaps transformational leadership in the post-pandemic world. What do you believe were the biggest real-time challenges for leaders during the time, and how did you, at Morningstar India, work with leaders in combatting those challenges?

Well, this was one of the biggest challenges in recent times. However, such a massive global disruption also allowed leaders to be progressive and enable their organizations to deal with an increasingly uncertain business environment.?Leaders had to swiftly get their act together to balance business continuity with the health and safety of employees and their families. At Morningstar, we created a steering committee comprising of business leaders and corporate function leaders to ensure we extended all the medical and office infrastructure-related support at employees' residences. Leaders created a transparent communication model to regularly stay in touch with every team member to check their health and mental well-being and make them feel safe and connected to the broader Morningstar family. We collaborated with leaders across the Morningstar groups to create a war room represented by employees to provide twenty-four-seven information and guidance on critical health support resources and organized multiple COVID-19 vaccination drives for employees in the office.

Given that we live in such uncertain times, the importance of good leaders is imperative. How can organizations help create the necessary tools required to develop leadership talent for the future?

Leadership development is one of the top priorities for most organizations in this hybrid and dynamic work environment. Every organization is working on empowering employees across levels to be potential leaders and creating development programs for first-time leaders, managers, and senior leadership. There is a significant investment towards building a solid learning & development culture to acquire new skills & competencies and be more self-sufficient in filling organizational needs through homegrown talent. Leadership Development champions to partner with internal leaders and external training partners to help leaders improve on strategic self-awareness, identify their leadership skill gap, explore opportunities to upskill and reskill employees, and fast-track them on the managerial path. Coaching and Mentorship programs and social learning programs are also on the rise to groom high-potential talent to create a solid and diverse leadership pipeline.?

Yes exactly. Coaching and mentorship have been discussed as essential tools in leadership development.?Could you talk briefly about the mentorship program at Morningstar and how you create?a platform that helps transfer knowledge and expertise from experienced high performers to future leaders?

Coaching and mentoring are powerful tools to nurture new leaders and unleash their potential to contribute immensely to an organization's success. At Morningstar, development for every leader occurs through a combination of experiences, relationships, and training. This also allows for flexibility based on individual needs and experiences. At Morningstar, we have created a robust ecosystem to identify potential coaches and mentors and groom them with the right resources for a formal coaching and mentorship program. Being a global organization with a presence across 29 countries, we have the advantage of a cross-cultural coaching program to pair a coach and coachee across locations to develop a diverse and organizational perspective and unearth the potential within. We run comprehensive talent review exercises to identify the high-potential future leaders and top talent and help them network with highly experienced global leaders as a part of Morningstar's Coaching and Mentorship program. Over the years, we have seen the success of our coaching program transform leaders to take up broader responsibilities at regional & global levels, and the mentorship program has made a positive influence across a wider spectrum covering early career employees and those transitioning from individual contributor to people leader roles.

Please discuss the importance of not just developing the most senior people in any organization but also creating a pipeline of talent that are better prepared to be leaders in the future.

COVID-19 has opened the talent pool across cities, age groups, and diversities. Organizations now have access to a blend of energetic and inquisitive talent in their early careers looking for a purpose and highly experienced and niche talent looking to add strategic value to an organization's objectives. Organizations must tap individuals' potential across levels to create a healthy environment of creativity, innovation, and performance-driven culture. We have programs like Advancing Leaders to identify potential leaders and prepare them for leadership roles based on their stage of the leadership journey. At the heart of the program are?Morningstar's leadership competencies?in the areas of "leading yourself," "leading others," and "leading for impact."?These competencies highlight the collective characteristics of successful Morningstar leaders while recognizing that successful leaders combine strengths in these competencies in different ways.?

Lasty, how do you identify talent that gets leadership learning and development opportunities??Is there a criteria or benchmark you look for?

One of the many ways of keeping with Morningstar's value of Great People is by offering continuous growth and developmental opportunities with a supportive environment to help our leaders succeed personally and professionally and, importantly, align with their career aspirations. We also combine our developmental efforts using a data-driven method supported by a critical people process, extending from performance management, job competency skill gap, personality assessments, using talent reviews to identify essential talent, future leaders, successors, and diversity across the organization to eventually align our development efforts to achieve critical business and people outcomes. We constantly endeavor to provide up-to-update learning experiences tailored to Morningstar's needs and support development for every leader through a combination of experiences, relationships, and training, as part of their jobs or even stretch projects. There is room for everyone to grow at Morningstar.