SUPERVALU, Inc.
Analysis of Professional Development Program
There were only a few strengths in SUPERVALU’s Professional Development Program (PDP). The mere fact that they recognized they needed a program to develop leaders was one positive. As Paul Cimmerer indicated in the article, “SUPERVALU was not doing a good enough job of bringing new people on board or grooming them for growth and effectiveness.” That was the genesis behind the PDP program - to attract and prepare high-potential college graduates for successful management careers. In addition, it did provide rotational experience for the new hires, as they would spend one year in their work area of choice and then next year would spend six months in the two other areas before returning to their home bases for career assignments. This provided the employee with the opportunity to broaden their knowledge of the SUPERVALU, Inc. business. Both of these items indicated that SUPERVALU, Inc. was at least thinking about what it took to train a leader to do the basics of leadership. The last positive outcome of the PDP effort was that SUPERVALU recognized it as just the beginning of training and development programs within the company. This indicated they recognized they needed to do more in the area of training their leadership.
The fundamental problem with their PDP effort was it was focused at creating leaders, not a leadership brand. In fact, the PDP was not even covering all the basics of developing a leader. It was really just providing training to develop employees into lower level line managers. This is evident by the fact that the training didn’t cover topics like strategy or talent development. The second fairly large flaw with the PDP initiative was that they did not tie it to their strategy. The article indicates that the company’s philosophy was “total commitment to servicing customers