As Africa’s largest single brand retailer, PEP continuously strives to be a learning organisation.
With 2,450+ stores, 22,500 employees and noteworthy year-on-year growth, a key ingredient of this success is their focus on building the leaders of tomorrow.
Learning Agility has become a core part of the Leadership selection, learning and development initiatives at PEP.
One of PEP’s most significant development initiatives is their renowned Senior Management Development Programme (SMDP). This competitive programme identifies PEP’s leaders of tomorrow and invests in their development, in order to ready them for key leadership positions.
First, business leaders nominate individuals as potential participants in the SMDP programme. Then, the group of nominees is assessed to determine who are best suited to be placed on the programme. Those who are selected to go through the 18-month programme are referred to as the Accepted group, while those who were not selected in the current year are referred to as the Regretted group.
“Learning Agility is something that can make us successful, no matter how bad times are”
Pat Smith, Talent Management Manager
Measuring Learning Agility leads to astonishing results
In 2015, PEP initially decided to include Learning Agility in their SMDP assessment toolset as an external validation of their selection process. They wanted to determine whether their current selection process and assessments were accurately predicting both agility and future potential amongst candidates nominated for the SMDP
The results were astonishing. Not only was Learning Agility the most accurate predictor of the Accepted and Regretted groups, but it also answered a lot of questions about ambivalent cases where other information was not conclusive. The overall group of nominated candidates had Learning Agility results just under the average benchmark of 50%.
After running the comprehensive selection programme, the nominated candidates were split into the Accepted and Regretted groups for the SMDP. When reviewing the results for these two groups, there was a clear differentiation in their Learning Agility.
The 2015 Accepted group had Learning Agility benchmarked at 80%, which is just above the expected management benchmark of 75%. In comparison, the Regretted group had very low Learning Agility.
Whilst leaders did not nominate employees for the programme based on Learning Agility, those who were selected to participate in the SMDP programme had significantly higher Learning Agility than those who were not. Learning Agility was clearly the underlying differentiator of leaders of the future.
Learning Agility increased dramatically between 2015 and 2017
In the ensuing two years, discussions on and educating the leadership about Learning Agility created a natural focus on agility in the business.
For the 2017 SMDP, the average Learning Agility of the overall nominated candidates benchmarked at 129%, which is higher than the global Change Agent benchmark of 125%.
For the 2017 SMDP, Learning Agility was utilised as the key instrument to differentiate between the Accepted and Regretted groups. The Accepted group had globally remarkable Agility. Interestingly, the group that was regretted had as high Learning Agility as the group that was accepted in 2015.
The results from 2017 further demonstrated that Learning Agility is the ultimate predictor of leaders of the future within the SMDP programme.
“It’s not just an assessment. It’s the way and how we are doing things. It is a verification. It is in the DNA of PEP.”
Pat Smith, Talent Management Manager
Learning Agile leaders are more successful
As part of the focus on agility within PEP, research was conducted to discover the long-term prospects of employees who successfully completed the SMDP programme. By comparing the Accepted and Regretted groups for 2015, results showed that the successful group were far more likely to experience career growth in the form of promotions or career mobility. The Accepted group – with higher Learning Agility – were more likely to be promoted or receive career mobility opportunities. Overall, results showed a strong relationship between high Learning Agility and career growth opportunities due to effective performance. As Pat Smith says: “It’s not just an assessment. It’s the way and how we are doing things. It is a verification. It is in the DNA of PEP.”
