Perspectives
A Management Program of a Different Kind
Now in its third year, Genpact’s Women’s Leadership Program serves as a model for advancing women leaders.
July 15, 2025
The problem: Genpact, driven by its commitment to nurturing leaders from within and advancing inclusion, identified a critical gap: Women remained underrepresented at its vice-president and senior-executive levels.
Why it matters: To foster a truly inclusive leadership pipeline, Genpact recognized the need for a targeted, scalable solution that would support women in advancing their careers and reaching senior leadership roles.
The solution: Genpact partnered with Korn Ferry for a unified yet personalized program that has successfully supported the development of more than 500 women leaders as assistant vice presidents.
Geetika Sharma was already considering outside management and leadership development courses when she got an email from her company about a new program it was running. At that point, she had been with Genpact, an advanced-technology company, for about seven years, working as a middle manager and steadily gaining exposure to senior and executive leaders. She was keen to develop her leadership skills, but was wary that, to use her words, the new program “would be just another corporate-management program where you take some generic classes and get a certificate at the end.”
It wasn’t. With a nudge from her manager, Sharma applied and was accepted. She quickly realized the structure, coaching, and feedback in this program was different: It was highly personalized, customized, and actionable. “These guys were interested in looking very specifically at me and my experience,” says Sharma. With more than 200 women going through the program in every cohort—as opposed to the roughly 20 to 50 people in the average management-development program cycle—it’s not as cliché as it sounds.
In the first cohort, 168 assistant vice presidents (AVPs) across Genpact’s global operations completed the Women’s Leadership Program (WLP), which is run in partnership with Korn Ferry and is now in its third year. The second cohort of almost 200 participants is currently going through the program and will graduate in October 2025. Genpact’s global workforce totals around 140,000, with 5,000 top leaders at the AVP level and above. “The goal of the program is to accelerate advancement, and we are certainly doing that,” says Aparna Pathak, global inclusion leader at Genpact.
That’s not the case in the broader corporate world, however. Progress for women has been spotty over the last few years, jumping in the aftermath of the pandemic but slowing and even declining since then. So far this year, for instance, 37% of new board seats on S&P 500 companies have been filled by women, down 4% from last year and the lowest percentage in six years. The number of female CEOs has declined in the S&P 500; among Fortune 500 companies, it flatlined in 2023 and 2024 before edging up this year. Women are still greatly underrepresented in roles and functions that typically lead to the corner office, like finance and operations.
Genpact’s commitment to the WLP is not lost on Sharma, who was promoted to VP within a year of graduating. “I feel grateful that my female colleagues still have the chance to go through this program,” she says.
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Not everyone is so lucky. As companies look to cut costs and maintain margins to deal with the current economic volatility, training and development is one of the areas that has been hit hardest. Corporate training-and-development budgets in the US decreased by nearly 4% last year to $98 billion, the lowest level since 2021. One-fifth of companies in a recent survey said they cut budgets for DEI programs specifically.
At the same time, the general sentiment among employees is that the training they are receiving is subpar. Seventy percent of employees in one recent survey say corporate training programs are ineffective, and more than half feel their managers aren’t supporting their development. More disconcerting is that almost half of employees under the age of 35 say they are looking to change jobs because of insufficient training. Korn Ferry senior client partner Nishith Mohanty, who leads the Genpact account for the firm, says part of the problem with many leadership development programs is that they are designed to filter and fast-track only a select few participants. The result is less engagement in the training firms are offering: Employees averaged 47 hours of training in 2024, an 18% decline from the prior year. “We don’t believe in creating 25 winners out of 1,000 women,” he says by way of example. “We believe in developing all 1,000 to become their best selves. No eliminations. No rankings. Just different paths for different journeys.”
Even before the WLP was launched, Genpact had been recognized for its corporate-training programs, particularly those focused on elevating women. To be sure, women are more represented in the upper echelons of the firm than they are in its overall workforce. While women comprise 41% of Genpact’s workforce, they hold 47% of the seats on its leadership council and 40% of those on its board.
Promotion rates are a key metric firms use to evaluate return on investment from training, but other outcomes, such as engagement scores and retention rates, are also important indicators of a program’s effectiveness. Shivangi Shukla, a principal with Korn Ferry Advisory, says one measure of success for the WLP is the retention rate of women participants for at least three years afterward. It’s an important milestone, she says, because not everyone develops at the same pace. “The moment of transformation is unique to each individual, so you need a landscape of experiences and variety for participants to find an unlock that shifts their trajectory,” Shukla says.
Data on retention rates for the WLP is still being compiled, since the program is only in its third year. But if Sharma is any indication, Genpact is well on its way to achieving its goal. Before joining the company, her own average tenure per job was about two years. This year will mark a decade for her at Genpact, a run that has included changing roles three times and ascending to the VP level at the firm.
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It doesn’t seem like the businesses of Netflix and Genpact would overlap on a Venn diagram very much. But they do, in one sense, at least: They, like every other company in the world, are looking for ways to use AI and other technologies to derive insights from data and analytics to drive business and enhance customer experience.
As in the hackathons popularized by start-up culture—in which a group of people work in long bursts to solve a problem—members of every WLP class are broken into teams and given a business problem to solve. When Sharma’s team was tasked with proposing ways to leverage customer insights from data, she found inspiration in the Netflix model. For her, it seemed obvious this was a purely analytical exercise: The team that could come up with the best application of generative AI to enhance customer experience and engagement would win. After all, data and analytics were her area of expertise. What she eventually realized, however, is that it wasn’t a technological exercise at all. “Hearing outside perspectives opened my mind to how data is interpreted,” says Sharma, noting that her team included fellow women AVPs in legal, HR, operations, and other functions. “It taught me to be a more patient listener.”
It was a full-circle moment, incorporating the three pillars of Women’s Leadership Program strategy: client relationships, people relationships, and storytelling. When she and her team pitched their solutions to a panel of experts, including Genpact’s senior and executive leaders, “it felt like we were being listened to as strategic leaders taking the business to the next level.”
For more information, please contact Nishith Mohanty at nishith.mohanty@kornferry.com or Shivangi Shukla at shivangi.shukla@kornferry.com.
Perspectives
