Chennai born Indra
Nooyi has been assigned the responsibilities of the
Chief Executive Officer of world’s second largest soft drink
maker, PEPSICo. US media has honored her as the first woman of
colour to head a Fortune 100 company. She has also been
named the by Fortune magazine, ahead of illustrious names
like Oprah Winfrey and eBay CEO Meg Whitman.
There are just 11 Fortune 500 companies which have female CEOs,
only two of whom-including Nooyi-are women of colour.
When the company announced Nooyi to become the next CEO, the
news spurtly came into limelight thereby making headlines of newspapers.
As per the data showcased by Catalyst, a non profit research and
advocacy group, women hold just 16.4 percent of corporate officer
positions in US, up 0.7 percentage points from 2002.
The hard work of Nooyi came before when PepsiCo. Decided to see
the progress of women of colours in the company. Interestingly,
turnover among women turned out to be high as compared to that
among other groups. As a part of the same research, the company
interviewed women of colour who had been in the senior positions
but left. The research investigating the cause of dissatisfaction
among women of colours came up with with the result that women
didn’t think they had the same relationship with managers
as their colleagues did.
This encouraged PepsiCo. to begin a program to develop a better
understanding among women of colours and their managers. Thereafter,
a third-party facilitator met the woman and her manager separately
and discussed about their professional relationship, investigating
whether they share same vision towards achieving the targets and
what their targets are.
Then, the three of them created a written plan. They take up the
processes again for the time span of three to six months, this time
with the boss's boss as well, and made assessments how they did
with their plan.
In 2001, 72 of the company's 1,806 holding senior positions were
women of colour, and the number shoot up to 144 out of 2,165 at
the end of the year 2006. Surprisingly, this caused a drastic effect
on the turnover which slipped down by double digits, and the retention
gap is almost indiscernible.
