A cross-discipline initiative to groom future women leaders

With the aim to encourage and prepare more women for leadership roles across various business sectors, the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIMB), IBM, the multinational technology company and Catalyst India WRC, the non-profit organisation promoting women in business, will collaborate to start a women’s leadership development programme called Tanmatra.  

Taught by the faculty at IIMB, the idea of this cross-industry development programme is for corporations to nominate a few of its “high-potential” women employees with more than 15 years of experience or above for the programme. It will be spread across 10 months starting from October this year to June, 2015.

Vasanthi Srinivasan, Associate Professor, IIMB and programme director, highlighted how the upward movement of women from junior to mid-level and senior positions in companies was very less in India.While in South East Asian countries like Malaysia, the condition was better than in India, this was only to a small extent.

“Already, 48 organisations have shown interest in the programme,” she said. Dilpreet Singh, Vice President, HR, IBM India/ South Asia pointed out that corporates such as Unilever, Walmart, CISCO, ANZ, Dr Reddy’s and Amazon had shown interest.
The programme consists of three modules that will be a blend of “academic, reflective and experiential learning” on themes like impacting business outcomes, exploring the self and owning careers.

It will be taught in three residental modules of five days each over the 10-month period as well as in virtual sessions between the residential modules. The programme will include activities such as cross industry learning, assessments, stretch assignments, mentoring, networking with leaders, to name a few.

Deborah Gillis, president and CEO, Catalyst, said, “Through Tanmatra, we can communicate with working women, discuss the daily challenges they face and suggest effective strategies based on extensive research,” she said. 

A company can send a maximum of four applications and a minimum of two applications for the programe. Individual or self-sponsored applications will not be entertained. 

While IBM is the knowledge partner in the collaboration, IIMB the education partner and Catalyst, research partner.