1. How is the Leaders’ Day different from a typical talent development programme at Sanofi?
What is Leaders’ Day?
As the first of the series, we are excited to launch Leaders Day in the week of 9 th October in Bangkok, Shangri-La Hotel and embraced this as a key talent milestone event for our region.
Talent Management CoE is pleased to introduce the Leaders’ Day which is an epic 2-day Talent Forum designed to
empower our key talents by integrating Experience, Exposure and Education, to accelerate our talented workforce’s
succession readiness.
Leaders’ Day aims to Power Up their Careers: 
Enhance your professional expertise and effectiveness
Inspire and broaden your horizon on achieving a meaningful career in Sanofi
Enhance your visibility and interaction opportunities with transversal and cross border leadership
TM CoE has also leverage on the Leaders’ Day to launch The Talent Champion Award. It is an Employee towards Manager Recognition program originated from Sanofi North America. We are now delighted to introduce it to our region in AsiaJPAC, this award provide the recognition to Sanofi managers who are active people developers.
Purpose of the Talent CHAMPION Award
Grow deeper awareness of the wealth of talented people in the company
Promote further people development activities that help us to meet the current and future needs of our organization
Support the movement of talent across teams and business units
Create a culture where managers who develop people are recognized
In short, the purpose of the talent champion award is to award: Employee-to-manager recognition program for people managers who excel at developing, coaching & mentoring employees
Prior to the Leaders’ Day, we have kicked off inviting our employees to submit names of people managers who have touched your lives in Sanofi –these are the Talent Champions those who have helped them to grow, develop professionally, as well as those whom they have observed to be relentlessly committed to developing people in Sanofi.
2. How many are taking part in this inaugural programme?
For the inaugural program, we have a total of 166 delegates and 65 over regional leaders and guests joining us in this epic Leaders’ Day in Bangkok coming from over 20 countries.
3. How were these delegates selected for the 2-day forum? What was the criteria?
Nomination Criteria
From a ring-fenced pool of the high potentials (HIPOs) across Asia China and JPAC, nomination is prioritize those who are on succession plans, on key positions and thus 166 delegates enterprise-wide we nominated. We have shortlisted nominees against the outcomes of the 2017 Talent Review based on the following nomination criteria:
– High or medium potential
– Successor to Key Roles
The nominations were also proposed and sponsored by our local business unit heads and endorsement from the country chairs as well.
The intention is to keep the bar high and numbers low, to drive an amplified return on your time and energy investment on a targeted pool, to create high-touch interactions with you leaders. The aim is to animate the talent reviews and enable ventilation and visibility of the talents transversally.
4. What kind of projects and business challenges have been undertaken by the selected delegates and business leaders since Leaders’ Day?
Delegates attending the Leaders’ Day must be nominated by their leadership team to participate in Leaders’ Day, a 2-day forum that integrates experience, exposure and education to boost your career development. Delegates are joined by Sanofi colleagues from all across Asia China and JPAC.
Important to highlight that as part of the program design, Talent Management CoE as the organizing committee have set aside 4 hours for an action learning exercise ‘Powering The Business’ where delegates will be grouped to work on solving business cases and presenting solutions to our panel of regional guests and business leaders.
“Powering the Business” is an action learning session with the aim of honing the delegate’s ability to solution for a Sanofi Business Challenge. Each Business challenge reflects a need to solve or implement a solution. During this business challenge case study exercise, it provides an opportunity for the delegates to observe these HIPOs in action, to fully bring to life discussions and dialogues that our business leaders have participated in at talent reviews.
The key aim is to:
– Gain more interaction and exposure with cross functional business leaders
– Develop business insights into organization, strategy and business
– Apply Leader’s Day learning and knowledge to real business case
– Get the learning opportunity from business leaders through the live feedback session
– Learn more about themselves and concepts and processes that they are applying in the project
5. How will you measure their results and learning from this summit?
Our delegates and regional leaders, business unit heads and HR heads who participated in this epic Leaders’ Day event will play an active role in provide us their feedback. We have collected the survey results and learnings by asking audience to POLL using the Pigeon Hole Tool via online. 100% percent of the participants indicated that they will highly recommend the Leaders’ Day to other colleagues.
6. In terms of tracking ROI, how will you assess that for Leaders’ Day?
Follow up from Leaders Day
If Leaders’ Day is the chance for leaders to meet with the high potentials being showcased, the follow ups from this event to track are success and ROI are the following:
– Key talent visibility leading to opportunities for transversal projects to solve business issues
– Mentee/mentoring opportunities to accelerate growth and succession readiness
– Talent brokerage – enabling meaningful career moves cross-borders and transversal moves
7. Did you face any challenges in bringing this programme to fruition? For example, in business leaders giving up their time for such a dedicated effort.
With thanks to many internal regional and global business unit Heads, who joined forces with us as speakers and panelists, as well as a panel of external pro-bono speakers, we are able to keep the production costs very modest and yet put up an exciting agenda themed “Powering” our key talents with hands-on coaching and impactful action learning activities. Talent Management CoE has produced the contents and materials internally and these initiatives are at no program costs to the delegates. Attendees will only need to bear travel, accommodation and some incidental expenses. In the spirit of leadership in-action, TM CoE has garnered the support from our regional guests, Country chairs and Heads of HR, their involvement in as Coach/Mentors to provide reflections, feedback, leading by example in sharing their learning experiences and developmental growth. The Leader’s Day
is intended in an intensive process to ring-fencing our talent pool for accelerated development at this event. We are grateful that our key business unit heads and Heads of HR has spent their valuable time to join us as speaker, panelist or a session leader to facilitate the learning outcomes for the delegates. The aim of this event is to provide a cost and time effective opportunity for our leaders to meet the curated talent pool across all the GBUs and Global Functions from across Asia China JPAC at one go.
8. Apart from this high-potential leadership programmes, what other unique initiative do you have for those who are not selected for this one?
Against the backdrop of the recently concluded Talent Reviews, Talent Management M CoE Asia China JPAC has created and rolled out a series of talent acceleration programs, known as “Talent Management Boosters” targeted for Key Talents currently in key positions and/or have been identified on succession plan in the 2017 Talent Review. We have curated a list of exciting Talent Management program initiatives where our talented workforce can be nominated into. They are:
– Evolve 2.0: Updated Sanofi flagship leadership self-awareness program
– Emerge: 18/24 month early talent/millennials career acceleration program
– Expedite: 10 month talent acceleration program targeted at mid-career key talents identified on succession plans
– Explore: Talent brokerage managed by TM CoE to proactively harvest and leverage on open positions across the enterprise to accelerate careers and succession readiness for identified HIPOs
– Empower: Annual Talent Forum known as Leaders’ Day to recognize and nurture self-leaders, team leaders, function leaders and business leaders
People developers are the anchor of Sanofi’s Talent Culture. They are the guardians of our workforce and have spent time and effort to coach and support peers and colleagues around them, enabling professional development and career aspirations while creating business successes.
At Sanofi, we are counting on every one of you to be with us building together an environment for the talented to thrive in Sanofi!
