The Very Model of a Modern Senior Manager

The Very Model of a Modern Senior Manager^[1]

That was the eighth sales executive to go in the last four months! D’Souza the Sales head at Paragon was a worried man. But more exasperated were the HR Head, Vinay and the CEO, Sameer of Paragon Foods a leading FMCG organization into manufacture and marketing of foods and confectionaries in India.

D’Souza had come up through the ranks. Since he had impressed his supervisors as an aggressive local sales rep, they had put him through leadership training and promoted him to regional manager. After six years in that role, eight product launches, and one regime change, D’Souza was heading up national sales, where his creativity and impulsivity were considered both managerial strengths and potential weaknesses. Just a year or so into D’Souza ‘s tenure as national sales director, Paragon had decided to relaunch several of its classic candy bars in a series of limited edition flavors, hoping to breathe life into the brand. As different functions in the organization worked overtime to implement the new strategy, D’Souza’s impulsive nature backfired on him: He made a batch of bad decisions about how to market the new products, engaged in some questionable selling behaviors, and lost the confidence of his customers and his sales team. Ultimately, he was almost on the verge of losing his job. “We’ve taken a hit on  Diwali sales – I don’t want the same thing to happen with the New Year Sales,” Sameer said with equal parts annoyance and resignation.

Vinay admitted to Sameer that he was wondering if he might be able to use D’Souza’s situation as proof of concept for his ongoing leadership development project. “Here’s a perfect example of why we need to define exactly what we are looking for from our people at the top.”

Sameer had been in on the initial discussions  about building a leadership competency model at Paragon Foods – a framework that would not only highlight the critical values, knowledge, and skills necessary to lead any of the divisions of the consumer-packaged goods  company but also identify the corresponding tasks, behaviors, and measures of success. There was mixed support for such a plan among the members of the senior team. Sameer, for one, was interested in getting more data before making any decisions. “It does get back to what we were talking about several months ago,” he responded.“There are simply too many senior managers operating on their own agendas. The cowboy mentality might have worked ten years ago, but we’ve grown exponentially since then, and the market is much more competitive. There’s just no room for rogue leaders.”

Despite the company’s recent personnel issues, there was no doubt that Mumbai-based Paragon Foods was continuing to grow. Over the past 35 years, it had expanded from a local confectioner with 40 employees to a multinational packaged-foods producer with some 65,000 employees in multiple offices and manufacturing plants worldwide.

Because of the attempts to expand quickly, Paragon’s leadership development process had been reduced to traditional training – which meant there wasn’t enough emphasis on how results should be achieved. Paragon offered comprehensive executive education courses and had created an in-depth company values document that was part of every employee’s orientation packet. But, from Vinay’s perspective, there was nothing in the leadership development framework that explicitly tied the ways executives acted to the revenues they generated within their divisions.