Ensuring that there is a pipeline to succeed existing talent is a perennial problem for every company – but it’s a bigger headache for a company that believes in growing its talent from scratch.

At the recent Human Resources Peer Briefing at Meritus Mandarin hotel recently, head of global human resources for Olam International, Joydeep Bose, shared about some strategies in which the company takes in order to develop its talent.

Bose first explained how the company plays an unseen role in the food that people consume everyday. For instance, 35% of all cocoa beans and coffee grounds are sourced by Olam, with the probability that 75% of all cashew nuts would have passed through the company’s hands. The company handles the full chain supply of logistics from buying nuts (among mostly food commodities) off small farmers until the time the product is delivered to their customers that includes Starbucks, Kraft and Nestle.

Olam always has had a history of promoting from within, Bose explained. Furthermore, the company has even had to stall operations in Angola until the organisation was certain that they had they had trained a manager who was competent enough to be launch a new business there.

In a 2005 Hewitt survey, one thing that all top 20 companies had in common was that its CEOs were actively involved in developing its leaders. In the rest of the companies surveyed, only 65% could attest to that statement.

As a commitment to developing its leaders, Olam conducts a Core Process Workshop that is held at least three times a year. Spending three full days with new hires in leadership positions, the CEO aligns the leaders on the vision, strategies and the culture of the company. Holding a workshop like that also helps to open the channels of communication between those in leadership positions and the CEO, Bose said. “This is a very powerful process, and I have not seen this in the organisations that I’ve worked with, but I have found that this has helped HR immensely,” Bose added.

While the organisation has found that formal training is useful in an employee’s early career, the company aims to grow leaders by giving them opportunities by experiential learning, stretching their leadership capabilities in the meantime. The company first identifies 10 to 12 critical experiences, such as leading a cross-country task force, in which an employee must undergo in order to move up the career ladder.

At the end of the day, Bose says that Olam is trying to move away from its reliance on corporate training and is starting to place more energy and effort on tools such as assigning special projects, performance evaluation and mentoring to develop its talent.