Yes. There is actually a fairly well-established idea behind the phrase “manager factory” or, more recently, “leadership factory.” It is not simply that these companies conduct more training. The distinguishing feature is that developing other managers becomes part of how management itself is practiced.
McKinsey uses the term “leadership factory” for organizations where colleagues deliberately invest in developing one another through apprenticeship, feedback, coaching, role-modeling, and real work—not primarily through classroom programs. McKinsey traces the phrase within its own history to former managing partner Ron Daniel in the 1980s.
For the kind of work you are contemplating with NPCI, this distinction is extremely important.
Why GE became the archetype
GE is probably the classic corporate example. Its Crotonville management development center was established in 1956, initially because GE was decentralizing and needed a much larger population of capable general managers. It became one of the earliest major corporate universities.
But the physical campus was only part of it. GE developed managers through a combination of tough operating assignments, systematic performance discussions, exposure to senior leadership, cross-business movement, and formal leadership education. Under Jack Welch, Crotonville also became a vehicle for organizational transformation. Initiatives such as “Work-Out” challenged bureaucracy and gave employees and managers greater permission to question existing ways of working.
So GE's implicit equation was roughly:
Assessment → Stretch assignment → Feedback → Reflection → New assignment → Broader responsibility.
That is much closer to coaching than conventional management training.
Unilever built a somewhat different kind of factory
Unilever's reputation came from taking young talent relatively early and deliberately giving them broad business exposure. Its present-day Future Leaders Programme still explicitly combines real business assignments with leadership development and mentoring, with the objective of accelerating people toward management roles.
Historically, the consumer-goods environment itself was a powerful developmental laboratory. A manager might have to understand consumers, brands, distribution, finance, supply chains, people, and sometimes multiple countries relatively early in a career.
That creates what I would call a general-manager mindset.
Instead of:
“I am a marketing manager.”
the developmental aspiration becomes:
“I understand how the whole business works, and marketing happens to be my present responsibility.”
That is one of the most important characteristics of organizations that consistently produce leaders.
P&G belongs in the same family
P&G is frequently mentioned alongside Unilever because its philosophy has traditionally emphasized internal leadership pipelines, strong functional schools, early responsibility and developing leaders from within.
Its particular strength has been what I would call disciplined managerial craft: how you write a recommendation, analyze a consumer problem, make a decision, manage a brand, coach a subordinate and defend your reasoning.
People coming out of organizations like P&G often carry not merely knowledge but a recognizable way of thinking.
And that gives us an important diagnostic:
Great manager factories teach a common managerial language without producing identical managers.
PepsiCo is another important example
PepsiCo has also historically invested heavily in leadership pipelines and giving managers sizeable operating responsibilities. FMCG companies have an inherent advantage here because young managers encounter measurable outcomes quickly—volume, margin, market share, distribution, productivity, people performance.
That creates very short feedback loops.
You make a decision.
The market answers.
Your boss challenges you.
You learn.
You try again.
That is an extraordinarily effective coaching environment.
Toyota teaches another lesson entirely
Toyota is not usually described in exactly the same language as GE, but I would absolutely include it in your study.
Toyota's managerial system evolved around continuous improvement, structured problem solving, “go and see,” experimentation and leaders developing the problem-solving capability of others.
In that culture, a manager's job is not simply:
solve the employee's problem.
It is:
help the employee become capable of solving increasingly difficult problems.
That philosophy has subsequently influenced lean management, continuous-improvement systems and coaching approaches throughout manufacturing and beyond.
And notice how close that is to contemporary executive coaching.
So what do these companies actually have in common?
When I compare GE, Unilever, P&G, Toyota and organizations McKinsey describes as leadership factories, I see about seven recurring characteristics.
| Characteristic | Ordinary organization | “Manager factory” |
|---|---|---|
| Leadership development | HR responsibility | Line-manager responsibility |
| Learning | Courses | Work + coaching + courses |
| Feedback | Annual event | Continuous |
| Career movement | Vacancy-driven | Developmentally intentional |
| Difficult assignments | Risk to avoid | Development opportunity |
| Senior leaders | Decision-makers | Teachers and role models |
| Management success | My results | My results and the leaders I produce |
That last row may be the single most important one.
A truly developmental company asks a leader:
“Who became stronger because they worked for you?”
Something has changed in the last 10–15 years
The old corporate-university model has weakened.
Companies are discovering that you cannot take managers away for a five-day leadership program, give them frameworks, send them back into the same environment and expect durable behavioral change.
Gartner reported that leader and manager development remained HR leaders' top priority going into 2025. More than half of surveyed organizations were increasing spending on leader development, yet Gartner also reported substantial dissatisfaction with outcomes. It specifically argues for repeated peer connections and experiential development rather than relying heavily on seminars and lectures.
By 2025, Gartner reported that 76% of organizations had revised leadership-development programs within the preceding two years, yet nearly 70% of CHROs still said they were not effectively developing senior leaders or midlevel managers.
That tells us something significant.
The problem is no longer lack of leadership content.
There is an enormous amount of content.
The problem is behavioral transfer.
And this is why coaching is expanding
The coaching profession itself has grown very quickly.
ICF's 2025 Global Coaching Study estimates about 122,974 coach practitioners globally, up 15% from 2023. Estimated annual coaching revenue reached approximately $5.34 billion. The study also shows increasing convergence between coaching, facilitation, training and mentoring rather than these remaining completely separate professions.
The earlier ICF study had already shown very rapid growth—109,200 coaches and approximately $4.56 billion in annual revenue—with especially strong growth in Asia.
So coaching is becoming less of an intervention reserved for a troubled executive or CEO.
It is becoming part of leadership infrastructure.
Mid-level managers are becoming the center of attention
This is perhaps the part most relevant to your NPCI assignment.
Organizations have spent decades investing heavily in senior executives and high-potentials. But the real transmission layer of culture is the middle manager.
And middle managers are under unusual pressure.
DDI's 2025 Global Leadership Forecast, involving almost 11,000 leaders, found very high levels of leadership stress. Trust in immediate managers had fallen substantially, and leaders identified areas such as managing change and setting strategy among their biggest capability gaps.
LinkedIn's 2025 Workplace Learning Report similarly found that 71% of organizations offer leadership training, making it the most common career-development practice in its survey. Yet only 15% of employees said their manager had helped them build a career plan during the previous six months.
That gap is fascinating.
Organizations are training managers.
Employees are not necessarily experiencing better management.
The global trend therefore looks like this
We are moving from:
Leadership Training
toward:
Leadership Development
and now toward:
Leadership Ecosystems.
A contemporary system increasingly combines assessment, manager coaching, peer coaching, stretch assignments, simulations, mentoring, short learning bursts, reflection, feedback, AI-supported learning and actual business projects.
Gartner's current guidance is even quite revealing: managers should increasingly coach the person rather than simply solve the person's problem, build trust, encourage peer skill-sharing and connect employees to others who can help them grow.
That is almost exactly the philosophy you were describing to me earlier.
AI is creating another interesting shift
AI will probably make leadership education much more personalized.
The old model:
30 managers attend the same two-day program.
The emerging model:
30 managers have 30 slightly different developmental journeys.
AI can support scenario practice, reflection prompts, role-play preparation, meeting analysis, goal tracking and personalized learning.
But paradoxically, the more AI handles information and routine cognitive work, the greater the premium seems to be on distinctly human leadership capabilities—trust, judgment, difficult conversations, empathy, influence, creativity and relationship building. Recent business-school and employer discussions are emphasizing precisely those “human” capabilities alongside AI literacy.
DDI similarly argues that human connection, trust and growth capability are becoming more—not less—important as leaders navigate AI and continuous change.
This gives you a powerful proposition for NPCI
I would not go to NPCI saying:
“I would like to run a six-month management development program.”
I would propose something more ambitious:
“Let us build a small NPCI Leadership Factory.”
And I think that phrase could become the intellectual backbone of your proposal.
You could argue that the objective is not to train 30 or 50 middle managers.
It is to create managers who themselves become developers of managers.
Your six-month intervention would therefore measure three levels:
Self → Team → System.
First:
Can I manage myself better?
Then:
Can I create clarity, performance and psychological safety in my team?
Finally:
Can I develop other leaders and strengthen NPCI's leadership culture?
That is an entirely different proposition from delivering leadership workshops.
And it connects beautifully with the six-month architecture we discussed earlier: diagnosis and contracting in the opening six weeks; experimentation, coaching and real business application through the middle; then evidence, stakeholder feedback, team impact and leadership legacy in the concluding six weeks.
In fact, Mrinal, I think there is enough research behind this that your eventual NPCI pitch could be built around a very compelling title:
NPCI Leadership Factory
From Managing Performance to Multiplying Leadership
with GE, Unilever, P&G, Toyota and modern leadership research appearing only as supporting evidence—not as models NPCI should blindly copy. The real question would become:
“What would the uniquely NPCI way of producing great managers look like?”
That, to me, would be a very strong starting point for your engagement.
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