Genesis Park, PwC’s global leadership program for high-potential staff, is a critical element of the organization’s global talent management strategy. Genesis Park has a global focus, targeting PwC professionals from more than forty-five countries and across all business lines. High-potential individuals who are approaching the partner level represent ideal candidates. The program is structured as a four-month, full-time residential experience with three cohorts per year running concurrently on each campus. Each cohort is culturally diverse, with a minimum of ten countries represented at any one time.

One of a suite of programs, the focus of Genesis Park is to promote:

This focus reflects the challenges of a changing business environment in which the quality and depth of PwC’s leadership have become increasingly vital determinants of success. Genesis Park was PwC’s response to this challenge. The program was established in 2000, and our commitment to and investment in it has deepened over time. Genesis Park’s annual enrollment has grown from twenty-four people to more than one hundred. And from its original site in Washington, D.C., Genesis Park has expanded to a second site in Berlin, with a third site in Asia under consideration.

Genesis Park emphasizes business leadership and people leadership and uses multicultural immersion, extensive professional coaching, and a balanced and intensive curriculum as its methods of leadership development. Business leaders drive value when they have strategic vision, executive insight, and relationship skills to develop their organizations and the self-awareness, authenticity, and confidence to lead and develop others. Because of the nature of our network, PwC depends on strong relationships among its leaders around the world. Consequently, Genesis Park also emphasizes the importance of multicultural understanding and commitment to building personal bonds across national boundaries.

When individuals are immersed in an intensive experience in which trust, support, and challenge are coupled with feedback, learning, and insight, a personal transformation can result, and the qualities essential to leadership can be developed. This is the core aim of Genesis Park. In creating Genesis Park, our intent was to build a program that would fundamentally alter the fabric of the organization, and we are well on our way to accomplishing that goal. We estimate that by 2021, more than a thousand partners across member firms will be alumni of Genesis Park. And in demonstrating strong business leadership and people leadership skills, they will be fulfilling the promise of the program and shaping the strategy of our organization.

PwC’s business model creates some unique challenges in terms of talent management and development. In most countries, PwC is organized as a partnership. Individuals join PwC at a relatively young age and work, on average, more than twelve years before reaching the partnership level, at which time, as owners of the business, they acquire an equity stake. Given the average length of time necessary to complete the partnership track, coupled with the importance we place on long-term succession planning, it is essential that we engage our people throughout their careers so that we are assured a sufficient number of highly qualified candidates for consideration as PwC leaders.

PwC has traditionally struggled with the problem of retention. In part, this is a consequence of our own success. In most markets we continue to be the most attractive employer in our profession according to a variety of sources. As a consequence, we are able to recruit highly capable people, to the degree that other organizations frequently target our people right at the point in their careers at which we might begin to take full advantage of their learning and experience. While some turnover is desirable, we must work hard to keep our turnover rates below 20 percent annually. Across the globe in 2007, PwC firms hired more than thirty thousand professionals and had annual turnover rates of 18 percent.

Clearly, in order to retain the best people and maintain a full pipeline of future leaders, PwC must pay careful attention to what they expect from us as an employer. Through surveys and focus groups, it is plain to us what they want and expect:

Our talent management and development approaches are also shaped by what clients want and expect of us. Our clients operate in an increasingly complex and interdependent marketplace. In 2007, PwC provided services to 368 of the companies in the Fortune 500 and 422 companies in the Fortune Global 500. These are companies with global reach and global needs. Through surveys, conversations, and careful analysis of market trends, we have found that our clients expect PwC to:

Our people and our clients are our most important stakeholders. PwC has listened carefully to them and committed itself to some key talent strategy objectives over the next five years:

Key to delivering on these commitments is the ability to provide leadership development opportunities for PwC’s high-potential staff. Genesis Park is the oldest, largest, and most intensive of PwC’s programs to do that. The program grew out of a collaborative effort between a PwC global business leader and a PwC senior consultant. The goal was to create an experience for high-potential staff that would accelerate their development as leaders, expose them to PwC’s global strategy and business challenges, and equip them with the skills, at an earlier time in their careers than had been traditionally the case, to shape the future of our organization.

Consequently, leadership development programs must understand exactly whom they are targeting. PwC, for example, has a range of leadership development programs designed for staff at different points in their career, from new managers to new partners and beyond. Genesis Park’s target population is high-potential professionals who have demonstrated exceptional technical competence and are clearly recognized for their promise as leaders. At PwC a high-potential employee is defined as someone who demonstrates an exceptional ability to move to a position two levels above his or her current level. Genesis Park targets those who are at the top 1 to 5 percent of their staff class, have eight to twelve years of professional experience, and are within five or six years of partnership. Candidates are generally at the experienced manager through director levels.

At these levels, candidates have generally acquired professional maturity. They have had rich and diverse professional experiences that have given them the perspective and context for understanding their own capabilities and potential. They are also in a position where they can put what they learn into practice immediately on returning to their teams. They have demonstrated, by their career progression and success, a level of alignment and engagement with PwC that bodes well for their long-term commitment to the organization. At the same time, because they are not yet partners, it is feasible, albeit still expensive, to absent them from client service for the full four months required by Genesis Park. At the partner level, that much time spent away from client service would be much more difficult to justify.

After articulating the type of person to recruit comes the process of identifying and selecting people who fit the profile. For Genesis Park, identification and selection are done by local territory and business unit leadership with the support of Genesis Park faculty. But for Genesis Park, the selection of participants requires more than just looking at performance ratings or a recommendation from a partner or business leader. The best process is one where potential candidates surface during the annual review process. Ideally, they then enter a competitive process where they are evaluated relative to one another, an application and interview process that addresses behavioral attitudes and capacity for change, and probing one-on-one conversations with the sponsors putting candidates forward.

Getting the right people into the program does not end with setting criteria and establishing a rigorous selection process. It is also about effectively managing the recruitment pipeline. Participants need to be identified far enough in advance to allow sufficient planning, from managing client service obligations to obtaining visas. At the same time, the assessment process needs to consider relevant performance and development data. We generally find that candidate identification is best done six to nine months prior to their prospective starting date in the program.

Genesis Park’s short-term value proposition was to use the program to help deliver think-tank-style innovation and strategic insights to PwC. The longer-term value proposition was the quality of leadership and networks that would emerge from the program. This seemed compelling to sufficient numbers of PwC management so as to enable Genesis Park to enroll eight people from around the world in its first class. Relatively quickly, as they began to see fundamental differences in the behavior of Genesis Park alumni and the added value they brought to the business, PwC’s business leaders sent more people and advocated the expansion and continued investment in the program. Ownership of the program in terms of faculty, curriculum, design, and selection process was always firmly in the hands of PwC’s business leaders. Although human resources (HR) has played an important role in supporting Genesis Park, management’s ongoing proprietary interest in the program protected against any perception that Genesis Park was simply an HR “flavor of the month.”

Approaches to ensuring continuing leadership support of Genesis Park take several forms. First, it involves maintaining the sponsorship of the individual members of PwC’s global management team—primarily its human capital and global business line leaders. These sponsors play an important role in terms of governance, strategy, and advocacy for the program and play a critical role in the life of Genesis Park. The sponsors meet and get to know program participants and serve them as mentors and resources long after participants have completed the residential component of the program. The sponsors’ role is very hands-on and critical to the Genesis Park experience.

Genesis Park is also in vertical alignment with business unit leaders in the individual countries in which PwC operates. This is important for us. Without a direct connection to leaders at every level of PwC’s complex management matrix, Genesis Park might easily be viewed as a program that was being forced on local country firms from outside. Consequently, on a regular basis, we reach out to the sponsor of each Genesis Park participant to discuss the participant’s progress and performance and to share with the sponsors some aspects of the program and invite their engagement in program activities. Indeed, we regularly invite a broad spectrum of PwC people who have distinguished themselves in some way—as business leaders, subject matter experts, or excellent mentors—to participate in the program as speakers or project sponsors. They give their time to Genesis Park because they value the ideas, insights, and perspectives that participants provide. For example, a PwC leader working on a global strategic initiative might want to spend time at Genesis Park in order to use a culturally and professionally diverse group of accomplished high-potential staff as a sounding board for ideas.

Genesis Park’s recruiting approaches reflect the markets, geographies, and industry segments in which PwC is currently investing. For example, as China and India have become more important to PwC’s business, we have increased the percentage of program participants from those two countries. On a selective basis, we have also recruited PwC people who work in strategically important support roles rather than in client-facing roles.

Genesis Park operates three classes annually at each of its two campuses. There are multiple classes each year in part to accommodate the business cycles inherent in our diverse businesses and to allow larger and smaller classes based on the resource needs of PwC’s business. This kind of flexibility has served us well.

We are also opportunistic in terms of taking on cutting-edge projects for PwC’s business leaders. We arrange schedules and project plans to accommodate these projects and update or revise our core curriculum in order to accommodate sudden shifts in PwC’s business.

Business leaders drive value when they demonstrate strategic vision, executive insight, excellent relationship skills, and the ability to develop others. These qualities require self-awareness, authenticity, and self-confidence. At Genesis Park, we focus attention equally on the development of business leadership and people leadership.

Global networks deliver on PwC’s promise of distinctive client service when those networks are based on people with a deep level of multicultural understanding and a passion and commitment for building relationships across national boundaries. Genesis Park’s emphasis on relationship building and cross-cultural understanding is one of its most distinctive aspects. It is defined in part by the diverse mix of participants targeted for each class. There is always representation from each of our business lines, and in classes of twenty-five participants, often more than fifteen countries are represented. While many PwC people have the opportunity to gain international experience, nowhere else in the organization are such deep and intense bonds being formed among people of such diverse cultural backgrounds. Adding to the international flavor of the experience is the current faculty of seven who come from six different countries. In addition, the curriculum and the strategic projects that the participants take on address globally focused business issues.

The other notable aspect of Genesis Park is that it is transformative: participants experience a developmental shift. The personal and professional development that occurs is sufficiently significant that when participants finish the program, they can be said to be operating at a higher level. Their relationship to PwC shifts as well in that they view themselves as owners with a personal stake in the business. This sense of ownership makes the shift sustainable.

Two key elements of the Genesis Park experience account for its transformative effects. The first is intensity. From one perspective, Genesis Park provides participants with a break from the intensity that is typical in providing professional services to clients. In reality, Genesis Park introduces a new sort of intensity to its participants. For a period of four months, participants are focused daily on their own capabilities, potential, and development. Coupled with the high expectations of PwC’s senior leadership, as evidenced by the time they spend at Genesis Park and the scale of PwC’s investment in the program, this intensity makes it clear that “to whom much is given, much is expected.” The bar is set high.

The second element is support and challenge. The Genesis Park culture is one where support and challenge are present in equal measure because both are vital in creating an effective learning and development environment. Support is provided through the relationships with the coaches, fellow classmates, and alumni and the inclusion of family in elements of the experience. Challenge is provided through open and direct feedback, difficult assignments, and a high level of accountability. Support and challenge encourage trust and openness, providing participants with space to learn.

The learning objectives of the program encompass each ring of the diagram in Figure 18.1 with self-development at its core and a balanced approach to learning about business leadership and people leadership.

Target candidates are generally at a point in their careers where they have focused their energies primarily on developing technical expertise and delivering solutions to clients. Now, as they begin to think about themselves as leaders, they must step beyond the realm of the technical and raise their game both as businesspeople and as mentors to others. Many leadership programs struggle with finding a balance between the development of hard skills and soft skills. If a program focuses too much on personal growth and development, the experience runs the risk of being disconnected from the business and confusing to participants because the learning does not tie closely enough to their career progression. If a program focuses too much in the other direction, the experience runs the risk of lacking meaning and depth—of simply being a training experience focused on skill building. Our model reflects a balance of self-reflection, analytical rigor, and challenge and with strong links to the business. In other words, the experience is about the whole person because it is only at that level that true transformation can occur.

Underlying our development focus is an emphasis on four behaviors that are key to PwC’s culture and help drive the learning objectives at Genesis Park:

Faculty members are predominantly from the client-facing side of the business and have some experience with strategy, teaching, and facilitation. We also recruit specialized practitioners with expertise in coaching and training design and delivery. While most faculty members are at PwC’s director level, one of the more distinctive elements of the program is our use of retired and second-career partners who serve as site leaders. Genesis Park participants benefit from gaining the perspective and expertise of a highly experienced partner, and those partners in turn are able to have a positive impact on the future of the firm by helping to create PwC’s future leaders.

While the faculty deliver the program under the guidance of the two site leaders, the program’s managing director together with the program sponsors provide the overall strategic guidance and direction and ensure our alignment with the business.

This list is adjusted over time as situations demand and opportunities arise. Although we use a blend of faculty and external contractors to deliver this content, we get the best results when we have in-house faculty involved in the delivery, often by cofacilitating.

While the projects are diverse in nature, they must all meet certain criteria. Projects must:

With the help of a coach, participants use this feedback, together with their own self-reflections, to narrow in on two to four development priorities for themselves. During their four months in the program, they undergo two additional formal feedback events during which they hear from their peers and the Genesis Park faculty. Additional informal feedback sessions occur frequently during the course of the program. At the end of the program, participants close out their development plans by completing a self-assessment that is paired with a faculty assessment and shared with their sponsors in their home business unit.

The second priority for Genesis Park is to explore ways to establish a physical presence in Asia through an additional campus or the alumni program. Asia continues to be a strategic market for PwC and is strategically important to Genesis Park’s future.