Employee Empowerment at Cadbury

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Fresh out of a townhall meeting at Cadbury India's headquarters in Mumbai, Chris van Steenbergen is all excited and energised. Cadbury's employees had lots of questions for their new Chief Human Resources Officer and he obviously enjoyed the interaction. So what's the big HR issue at Cadbury these days? "International careers," says Steenbergen. "Young people here are very ambitious and everyone wants to know if there will be more opportunities for them gain experience abroad. I'm very keen on making that happen." Cadbury has never had a tradition of sending middle level managers abroad, Steenbergen's optimistic pronouncements notwithstanding . Some MNCs have a policy of developing their employees through a stint abroad before promoting them to senior levels, but Cadbury India has never been one of them. Instead, the company has followed the route of promoting its top managers to senior positions abroad, including most of its former CEOs. Ads by Google * St. George's UniversityLeader of Global Medicine Education 97% USMLE 1st Time Pass Rate 2012 www.SGU.edu * BlueChip Stocks 2013 ListExclusive List of Indian BlueChip Stocks for 2013. Get Free Copy Now! Equitymaster.com/BlueChip-Stocks "These things are changing with time," says V Chandramouli, director, HR & Strategy (who's never been posted abroad himself). "Earlier, you went abroad only when you had maximised your career in India. But over the past two years, for the first time, we've sent 16 middle-level executives abroad. Given that we have only 200 employees in the executive cadre, that's actually quite a lot," he says. Through the 80s and 90s, the Indian information technology (IT) industry was able to attract the best available talent because it guaranteed postings abroad. Today, IT services are largely offshored and the attraction of foreign postings for their own sake has reduced somewhat —

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