Leadership Case

The leadership pipeline in the organization in quite clear, one of the key differentiator being the specialization, training and the experience of the manager. Since the company deals primarily in the distribution space, the structure starts from the front liners who are called the FOS or the feet on the street where they have to manage their own selves and their targets. These are the generally young employees with an experience ranging from one to three years ,even more in some cases, who unfortunately did not move up the ladder because of certain reasons. The contribution mainly is that they have complete the work assigned to them within time lines.

Managing these FOS are the team leads who have to manage the day to day activities. They have a broader horizon of work where they have to manage a team of fos's. These are primarily those promotes who understand the system and had joined the organization as FOS some time back and kept completing tasks assigned to them as per the requirement and were promoted as team leads. That is they shifted from doing things to getting things done from others. This is the first step towards planning.

Those who did not change as per the requirement continued as FOS, although being performers. Training here plays an important role. The training in our organization involves three phases . The Yellow band, The Green Band and the Blue band,The FOS's are identified based on their performance and taken through these training programmes spread over a year with minimum qualifying criteria .Achievement of targets being the central decisive criteria.

Once done they are promoted to the Territory Manager level,where they have to only manage the down line comprising of Team leads and the FOS as per the company values and the stratagies. This they do for the territory assigned to them. The next level they move to is the Zonal Sales Manager where they are accountable for the entire sales of the zone, thereby managing a larger team and being responsible for the sales of the entire zone.

Moving ahead from here the Zonal Sales Manager is promoted to Zonal Branch Manager.In this capacity he has to manage a team of ZSM's who in turn manage their teams. The next level is that of a Distribution Head followed by The Sales Head .This is a functional manager position.The level next to this is the Operations Head which is the Group Manager and finally the Chief Operations Officer which corresponds to the enterprise manager.

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