Photo caption:
Picture 1: Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan, Founder of Lok Satta Party and Mr.Vineet Nayar Founder of Sampark listening to the opening remarks
Picture 1: Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan, Founder of Lok Satta Party and Mr.Vineet Nayar Founder of Sampark listening to the opening remarks
Picture 2: Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan addressing the august crowd of NGO & Corporate leaders
Picture 3: Mr.Vineet Nayar, addressing the audience and underling the importance of investing in leadership for the social sector to bring about transformation & sustainable change
New Delhi, August 24, 2016: Aritra, a first of its kind, sector level leadership development program was launched today. This unique program which aims to identify and groom 100 mid-level leaders in the Social Sector for senior leadership roles is being incubated by Dr.Reddy’s Foundation (DRF), Phicus Social Solutions and the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB).
With not many people opting to work in the social sector as a priority career choice, finding leadership talent is a major issue across the globe. This is further aggravated by the fact that there simply isn’t enough investment happening in talent development. A study conducted by McKinsey reports that while in the private sector the average spend on learning and development per employee is about USD 120, it is only USD 29 per employee in the social sector.
As a result, at the senior levels this problem becomes grave given the impact of the C-Suite of the organization, the larger ecosystem and the cause. One emerging strategy has been to recruit professionals from the Corporate sector.
While individuals from the Corporate sector bring professional management expertise, lack of awareness of the sector and acclimatization are challenges. As the COO of a large NGO ruefully said: “We hired about 15 senior leaders from the Corporate sector to meet our growth needs…five left and for the rest the settling-in time has been as high as nine to 15 months!”
At the launch today at the India Habitat Center, the speakers - Dr. Jaya Prakash Narayan, Founder of the Lok Satta Party and Vineet Nayar, former CEO of HCL Technologies and Founder of the Sampark Foundation - lauded this effort and spoke of the criticality of senior leadership roles in organization-building and mission advancement.
The Aritra program, an intensive, selection-based journey where over an 18-month period, participants will be coached as they attend sessions at IIM Bangalore, and leverage Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as well as relevant exposure visits to gain relevant skills and capabilities to accelerate their own professional journeys. Aritra aims to build a pool of senior leaders who will serve as beacons of change and transformation. Joining hands in this effort with Phicus, DRF and IIMB are the Center for Creative Leadership, CoCoon Consulting, an array of seasoned experts across various domains and disciplines and 50+ NGOs.
Professor Vasanthi Srinivasan from the Organizational Behaviour & Human Resources Management area, IIMB spoke about the imminent need for such senior leadership development programmes to ensure sustainability of the social sector organizations in a rapidly changing ecosystem.
The vision is far-reaching. As the program incubators, Shamik Trehan of DRF and Dr. Vandana Nadig Nair of Phicus jointly echo: “We hope that Aritra is the first step in a longer, more sustained journey of collaboratively addressing the talent issues in the social sector in India”.
The program goes live in November 2016 when the application process for Round 1 commences.