Developing our talent

Performance management

Partners for Growth (P4G) is our holistic approach to performance management. Open and honest coaching and development conversations between employees and managers that focus on employees’ aspirations and growth, both in and out of the workplace, are central to P4G. This approach is based on our belief that holistic partnerships are more likely to release people’s full potential, driving both personal and business growth.

P4G also involves an annual performance and career development review which includes personal objectives linked to overall company strategy. This year, all performance evaluations had to include personal commitments to our Code of Business Conduct and its associated policies, further embedding this element of our Sustainability & Responsibility Strategy.

Gateway is our recently-introduced Global Talent Management tool which facilitates our ability to understand and grow our talent pipeline, enabling us to fill roles faster, and provides a mechanism by which employees can play a more active role in realising their career aspirations and goals. Over time, Gateway will become the talent management tool leveraged globally within Diageo, serving the talent management needs of individual markets, functions, and regions, as well as our global talent management needs for the leadership population.

Training

We are committed to developing our people through training and development opportunities. We have a number of programmes targeted at different needs, as follows.

• Early career programmes: each region has its own tailored programme for junior people to ensure that they get the best possible start to their time with Diageo. We believe this is particularly important to ensure we keep and nurture people to become the leaders of tomorrow.
• The Diageo Academy, re-designed and re-launched in 2010, is a global online e-learning and development resource which emphasises functional learning and allows the vast majority of our employees to access training material in their native language. It had 18,674 users during 2011.
• Breakthrough Performance Coaching Programme: coaching is a key lever for raising the performance levels of all our people. In particular, we expect all people managers at Diageo to be great coaches and to accelerate the performance of their team. The Breakthrough Performance Coaching Programme is designed to raise coaching capability and all people managers will complete it. Piloted in 2010 the roll out has continued over the course of the year, and the majority of people managers at Level 4 will have completed it by the end of this year.
• People Manager Accelerator Tool: we believe that everyone should work for a great manager. We know that becoming a manager can be a daunting experience, so we created a new ‘People Manager Accelerator Tool’ which lays out in an easy-to-navigate, month-by-month format how new managers can quickly build their knowledge and skills.

We also have many functional training programmes in place for sales, marketing, finance, manufacturing and IS teams.

Focusing on new growth markets

Given the company’s focus on the new growth markets - including Russia & Eastern Europe, Turkey, Africa, Latin America & Caribbean, Middle East & North Africa and much of Asia Pacific (excluding Australia, Japan, Korea) – recruiting and developing people in these areas, particularly leadership, is a top priority for us. It is essential that our employees in these markets reflect the diversity of the local populations, while having the global understanding of the business necessary to drive success. We are continuing to provide international development opportunities for an increasing number of employees from these areas.