Padagis standardised leadership development across the US and Israel
Mentoring that ran on spreadsheets and goodwill could not cross a language barrier. Padagis needed one programme that worked in both countries.
Industry
Pharmaceuticals
Products used
Coaching, Mentoring
Padagis is a global pharmaceutical company of roughly 1,200 to 1,300 people, operating across the United States, Israel and other international locations. Its talent strategy was being rebuilt around leadership development, succession and business continuity, and coaching and mentoring were named as two of the pillars.
“Understanding SkillCycle’s ability to find Hebrew-speaking coaches was a significant reason for us making that decision. Outside of that, it was about standardisation and simplification.”
Mike Lee
Senior Director of Global Talent Management, Padagis
The challenge
Padagis already had mentoring. What it did not have was a mentoring programme. The arrangements that existed had grown up from the ground, unstandardised and different in every corner of the business, and external coaching was bought case by case with results that varied as much as the coaches did.
The administrative cost of that is easy to underestimate until you are the person carrying it. “It takes a lot of day-to-day time and resources to manually manage a mentor-mentee programme,” Mike Lee said, “and to try to help 10 different people find external coaches and to check in and see how they’re all doing all the time and provide them what they need.”
Then there was Israel. A meaningful part of the workforce works in Hebrew, and that is where most vendors stopped being an option. “One of the biggest challenges we have with vendors is a lot of times they have great products,” Lee said, “and when we talk about Hebrew and we talk about translation and those things, they can’t meet our needs.” A development programme the Israeli teams could not use in their own language was not a global programme. It was a US programme with a gap in it.
What they did
Padagis launched a pilot of ten coaching seats and ten mentoring seats, pairing rising leaders with senior ones and giving senior leaders external coaches of their own. The logic was deliberate, and Lee could state it as a thesis rather than a hope.
Hebrew-speaking coaches, so the Israeli population was inside the programme rather than alongside it
One platform for both coaching and mentoring, replacing manual matching and check-ins
Executive sponsorship from the CHRO and company president from the outset, not retrofitted
“When you take 10 people who are future leaders of the organisation and you match them with current exceptional leaders within the organisation, it’s going to build your talent pipeline, which drives business continuity and increases engagement and retention,” Lee said. “On the coach side of things, you take 10 leaders that are already senior in the organisation and you help them increase their knowledge, skills, ability, really self-awareness and self-management. And they’re only going to be better leaders of their teams.”
Coach matching run by the individual, not assigned centrally
Goals mapped to the competency model already used in reviews
Progress reported to the executive team quarterly
The result
The administrative load came down and the visibility went up. Participation and progress became something the team could read rather than chase, and the programme ran as one programme across both countries rather than two that happened to share a name.
Lee set his own test for what came next, and it was a reporting test rather than a sentiment one. “My goal this year is to come back to our stakeholders and the executive team to say, these are the people we’ve invested in and here’s what the performance and results have been.”
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