Are global leaders born, or are they cultivated?

Hiring ready-made global leaders is one of the greatest chal­lenges facing any talent acqui­si­tion team. In some ways, it can feel like you’re searching for a unicorn; you’re looking for a very specific combi­na­tion of skills that create a leader, who is both gener­alist and special­ized. In addi­tion to this, you’re also looking for someone who is able to move seam­lessly between cultures and make a vision rele­vant to people who inter­nalize the message and the mission of the orga­ni­za­tion in a huge variety of ways.

Most managers fall into just one of the afore­men­tioned cate­gories. Some leaders are excel­lent at having an overview of the busi­ness oper­a­tions but lack the specialist knowl­edge required to build and carry out a vision. Alter­na­tively, some leaders have a very specialist knowl­edge base that applies to a very specific niche, and instead lack the overall knowl­edge that enables them to balance lots of different demands and make deci­sions that benefit the whole orga­ni­za­tion. This creates the first major challenge. 

The second chal­lenge is finding cultur­ally intel­li­gent leaders in a global market that is pushing for work­forces to become more local­ized and closer to target markets. This gives future global leaders fewer oppor­tu­ni­ties to gain expe­ri­ence in settings outside of their native culture.

In the face of this conun­drum, one solu­tion is to culti­vate these kinds of lead­er­ship skills in-house. With this method, orga­ni­za­tions have the capacity to create the leaders they need to take the vision forward.

One orga­ni­za­tion that hit the ground running with this, was Citibank. In this article, we’re diving deep into Citibank India’s case study of how they mastered global lead­er­ship devel­op­ment early on — and had to rethink their strategy decades later, when Gen Y appeared on the map. 

An Intro­duc­tion to Citibank

Started in the banking streets of New York in 1812, Citibank has built a legacy that spans centuries. Gener­a­tions of people have worked within its walls as the company has expanded glob­ally into the banking hearts of 160 coun­tries world­wide. Their services span consumer banking, corpo­rate banking, invest­ments and wealth manage­ment with annual revenues reaching the billions.

While Citibank is known for its finan­cial prowess, the real trea­sure is the culture that has gener­ated global leaders who have gone on to be movers and shakers within the banking industry and beyond.

Citibank attrib­utes its success to the internal culture that has been collec­tively built over the years. An atmos­phere of collab­o­ra­tion, meri­toc­racy and a drive to inno­vate, has given Citibank a unique edge in the industry. Their repu­ta­tion for being able to produce leaders estab­lished them not just as inno­va­tors in the finan­cial field, but also as forward-thinkers in the arena of training and development.

Against this back­drop, we take the time to look at how Citibank India achieved a world-class lead­er­ship devel­op­ment program. It’ll also be good to see how their approach to talent culti­va­tion and reten­tion stands in a global envi­ron­ment where a new gener­a­tion is redefining the employ­ment market.

Citibank India: The Global Lead­er­ship Superstar

Citibank India invested millions upon millions in devel­oping a compre­hen­sive global lead­er­ship devel­op­ment frame­work. It was common knowl­edge across the whole of the banking sector that Citibank India’s training was second to none. For employees fortu­nate and talented enough to hold a Citibank staff card, it was like a stamp of approval that they were some of the best in the banking arena.

In the golden age of Citibank India’s lead­er­ship devel­op­ment program, the company would go into India’s top acad­emic insti­tu­tions and hand­pick the brightest talent. The aim was to cata­pult these young, excited grad­u­ates into banking superstardom. 

Every­body in India knew that an oppor­tu­nity to work at the bank was one of the most bril­liant oppor­tu­ni­ties that could happen to any busi­ness grad­uate. So much so, in fact, that Citibank recruiters were able to choose students from the top univer­si­ties in India before any other compa­nies could. An acco­lade in itself.

The Citibank lead­er­ship frame­work pulled together the three E’s; “Educa­tion, Expo­sure and Expe­ri­ence”. Grad­u­ates that entered the program were expected to bring their own tenacity, drive, and ambi­tion to this equa­tion in order to build a successful career. The grad­u­ates were ulti­mately in charge of how high and how fast they wanted to ascend the ranks of the orga­ni­za­tion, with oppor­tu­ni­ties to progress presented every couple of years, if not sooner.

Employees would have the oppor­tu­nity to work across depart­ments in different roles. To stretch them even further, Citibank actively created oppor­tu­ni­ties for employees to work within different geograph­ical contexts and come into contact with a huge variety of people. This approach stretched Citibank’s young leaders in both a personal and profes­sional sense. Their manage­ment styles became more rounded and universal, which further primed them for high-level lead­er­ship roles.

Citibank India believed in placing their grad­u­ates into roles that were between 10 and 20% bigger than their current work capacity. That gap was the space that encour­aged Citibank grad­u­ates to step outside of their comfort zone into the growth that would shape them into world-class leaders.

To help support the fledg­ling leaders further, a buddy system was put into place. All grad­u­ates could be mentored by colleagues that had completed the training program ahead of them or by managers higher up in the orga­ni­za­tion. Program partic­i­pants also had the benefit of having formal and informal rela­tion­ships with each other, which solid­i­fied that feeling of belonging even further. 

Grad­u­ates had excel­lent training, ample oppor­tu­ni­ties to grow both person­ally and profes­sion­ally, and now there was a really strong support network to add to the trilogy. These friend­ships continued for years after the program was completed. The rich­ness that these internal rela­tion­ships added to the lives of the employees at Citibank India, created a family atmos­phere where every­body worked hard and supported one another. This culture was contin­u­ally perpet­u­ated to each new intake of young leaders.

It was this that made Citibank’s Lead­er­ship Devel­op­ment Program one of the most progres­sive of its time.

The Changing Global Land­scape: Gen Y

Fast forward to where we are today in a new time where tech­nology has irre­versibly changed the face of the banking sector. Citibank India’s HR team and top-level managers are starting to find that the industry is changing and the expec­ta­tions of employees are also changing.

This change in the industry saw the rise of hedge funds, private equity firms, and consul­tan­cies. All of these smaller orga­ni­za­tions were now in direct compe­ti­tion for high-quality talent. It created an employees market; grad­u­ates had turned the tables. They were no longer justi­fying them­selves to employers. Employers like Citibank and others had to adopt a mentality of pitching them­selves to their next cohort.

The Gen‑Y contin­gent (people born in the ’80s and ’90s) were hopping into the job market and shaking tradi­tion to the core. They valued different things like sustain­ability and feeling appre­ci­ated, and being able to make an impact as quickly as possible. Employers who were unable to deliver on those things quickly found them­selves slip­ping down the pecking order.

The resulting chal­lenge was to find a way to retain that talent long enough for Citibank India to get the benefit of the exten­sive invest­ment they had made. With this new gener­a­tion, they were eager to jump into projects where they could see the impact they were making. They didn’t want to wait two to three years doing a job in a depart­ment they had no interest in, so they were leaving Citibank for roles that offered faster progres­sion and oppor­tu­ni­ties to engage with projects aligned with their own belief systems. 

Lead­er­ship Devel­op­ment at Citibank India Today

Today, with training budgets down and a new gener­a­tion of talent placing demands on employers to do more than pay a salary, Citibank India finds that compe­ti­tion for the young leaders of the future is stiff. There are new players in the industry offering compet­i­tive pack­ages that appeal to their need to feel like they’re making an impact now. As a result, loyalty is in short supply as turnover increases. In response to that, Citibank India has expanded training for managers that have been hired into mid-level posi­tions from external compa­nies. By formal­izing training for mid-level manage­ment roles, they’ve created more entry points for talented employees to enter the orga­ni­za­tion and make their mark.

Despite this, Citibank India has ongoing chal­lenges. How will the lead­er­ship pipeline fare in a fast-paced world where the work­force is no longer as steady as it was? How do they prepare leaders when the chances for employees to work cross-cultur­ally is limited now as the trend to hire locally becomes more prevalent?

Citibank’s ‘Pyramid Lead­er­ship Pipeline’

For many years, Citibank’s Lead­er­ship Pipeline reflected their commit­ment to training leaders from the ground up. Partic­i­pants in the program started their journey by learning how to manage them­selves. Once they’d completed that stage, they would move into roles that involved them managing others.

Both of those stages are grouped as being program driven. The belief here is that Citibank ensures a basic level of lead­er­ship training that gives their grad­u­ates the tools that they need to be able to manage them­selves and other people successfully.

The next 3 stages of the pyramid are to become a ‘manager of managers’, exec­u­tive leaders and CEOs, which Citibank believes to be stages that are controlled by the indi­vidual. In short, beyond the basic manager level, Citibank employees are the masters of their manage­ment destinies and must take the initia­tive to seek out the neces­sary knowl­edge required to move to the higher levels of the pyramid, should they so choose.

The 4 Pros of Citibank’s ‘Pyramid Lead­er­ship Pipeline’

Every program has its pros and cons; that includes Citibank’s Pyramid Lead­er­ship Pipeline. Let’s have a look at the four main bene­fits first, to see how they’re doing it right. 

1. The Defined Structure

What is really commend­able about Citibank, is that they take lead­er­ship training really seri­ously. They aren’t simply leaving it to chance that the top performers will auto­mat­i­cally make them­selves known and become global leaders without any targeted help. The defined struc­ture details what training will be deliv­ered at each stage of the pyramid showing that the program is resourced and care­fully curated to build lead­er­ship skills into the employees at Citibank.

2. A Clear Path of Progression

The pyramid is a clear repre­sen­ta­tion to Citibank employees that the sky is the limit. Citibank’s commit­ment to a meri­to­cratic culture affects every single level of their orga­ni­za­tion. By setting out a clear roadmap of progres­sion, they have the struc­ture to keep their leaders moti­vated to keep making use of those oppor­tu­ni­ties to develop. It’s a visual repre­sen­ta­tion that if you really want to reach the top of the orga­ni­za­tion, you actu­ally can. It’s easy to under­stand and it’s trans­parent; no glass ceil­ings here.

3. Mentor­ship

As soon as the manage­ment of others appears in the process, mentor­ship is avail­able for those employees as they progress. This is really valu­able because global lead­er­ship is learned less in the class­room and more on the job. Having an expe­ri­enced mentor to guide you through all the chal­lenges of manage­ment is defi­nitely a bril­liant addi­tion to this lead­er­ship program.

4. Plenty of On-The-Job Learning

One of the major advan­tages of this program is the amount of prac­tical expo­sure Citibank’s employees get to situ­a­tions that are going to develop them into great leaders. Looking at case studies will only get you so far.

The 2 Chal­lenges of the Pyramid Lead­er­ship Pipeline

No lead­er­ship program is perfect, and Citibank finds that their pipeline poses the following two specific challenges. 

1. Only One Point of Entry

The chal­lenge with the Pyramid Lead­er­ship model is that there only seems to be one point of entry for lead­er­ship devel­op­ment — which is at the bottom of the pyramid. The struc­ture of the training program becomes more fluid as you continue to progress through the different stages. However, with work­force habits changing signif­i­cantly, it is likely that Citibank will need to recruit expe­ri­enced managers at mid-levels of the pyramid to fill the gaps in the pipeline.

Those hires could benefit from having a bit more struc­ture, similar to that put forward for the partic­i­pants who enter at the bottom of the pyramid. This would give those future leaders the oppor­tu­nity to embed into the culture of Citibank while devel­oping the skills needed for a demanding global lead­er­ship role.

For employees who enter the pyramid higher up, the devel­op­ment is largely self-led which could lead to prob­lems later on down the line. Mentoring sessions can help the managers to accli­ma­tize, but they certainly cannot replace a struc­tured onboarding that helps new managers navi­gate within an estab­lished culture.

2. The Reliance on Mobility

Citibank’s model is built on the premise that managers on the program will get the oppor­tu­nity to move to different geograph­ical loca­tions to get the neces­sary skills to operate in different cultural contexts. However, they admit that those open­ings are now few as the demand for local­ized work­forces has increased exponentially. 

The chal­lenge now is finding out different ways Citibank can create this level of value without the facility of being able to move their managers around. The current model does not have an answer for this conun­drum at present.

Just A Little Change

The Citibank global lead­er­ship program still has strength in the fact that it has been estab­lished over many years and across different gener­a­tions of leaders. It still has plenty to offer an aspiring global leader, but it needs to become more flex­ible and more adapt­able. Are there tech­nolo­gies that can create oppor­tu­ni­ties to work cross-cultur­ally without the need to cross phys­ical borders? 

How can employees entering above the grass­roots level, get the same amount of training as those that started at the begin­ning of the pipeline? It may be the case that Citibank tran­si­tion their resources to focus on managers that enter into the orga­ni­za­tion later on with a bit more expe­ri­ence and give them the intense coaching that takes them further into their global lead­er­ship career.

Ulti­mately it is commend­able that Citibank has been culti­vating global leaders for many years. With some small changes, the lead­er­ship program has the capacity to become cutting edge once again.

If you work for a company in a similar boat and you’re looking for some advice on how to regain the edge in training global leaders, get in touch to find out how we can build a custom program just for you. If you’re a self-starting global leader looking to be equipped to handle even the most chal­lenging global envi­ron­ments, then have a look at the eurac program to see if we can help.

For more case studies, and discus­sions around all things global lead­er­ship, don’t forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter!