Enterprise promoted 20,000 employees last year. Here’s its formula for developing future leaders: ‘We emphasize that you can change careers without changing companies’

Sit down with any HR leader right now, and they’ll likely tell you their number one challenge is developing existing talent. Thanks to the persistently tight labor market, promoting from within has become essential to talent strategy. 

Shelley Roither, Enterprise Holdings’ senior vice president of global human resources, spoke to Fortune about how employers can prepare current talent to funnel into the leadership pipeline at the early-career stage. The goal, says Roither, is for employees to have multiple careers throughout the organization. So far, it’s working. Last year, the rental car company promoted about 20,000 employees.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Fortune: How has your career path at Enterprise mirrored the organization’s ethos?

Shelley Roither: At Enterprise, we intentionally provide a corporate lattice. That means you can move any which way in the organization and keep diversifying your experiences. That’s what I did. I came in as a corporate lawyer but grabbed developmental opportunities to learn about the business’ different divisions. Now, I have the privilege of overseeing human resources globally. 

Tell me a bit more about Enterprise’s management training program.

Enterprise’s management training program is where we pipeline our talent, and it is where we source our next leaders. We view everyone we hire in our management training program as future leaders. That’s where these entry-level employees come into play. They learn business management and customer service skills. Nearly all of our operational leaders, including our president and CEO, Chrissy Taylor, have completed the program. 

We emphasize that you can change careers without changing companies. This is just one way we invest in talent and internal mobility, which we know helps retain people twice as long. Reskilling and skilling have been the bread and butter of our organizational success.

How have you tweaked the management training program to suit Gen Zers entering the workplace?

With the new generation, employees want to work for a purpose-driven organization. They want to be fulfilled and have meaning in their work. We have been far more intentional in being clear about how their jobs make a difference in the world and their communities, regardless of their role.

We also emphasize how this organization is committed to supporting purpose-driven activities. For example, we recently rolled out an initiative called ‘My Purpose. My Time.’ It’s a day of PTO that every employee can take and spend doing something that gives them purpose.

What does retention look like at the company?

Coming out of the pandemic allowed us to get back to our core of finding ways to connect, celebrate, and support our employees. As a result of that, we’ve had record retention. Our ‘promote-from-within’ philosophy provides substantial opportunities for growth, change, and recognition. We’re seeing significant, double-digit tenures among those in management positions and senior leadership.

How does Enterprise equitably evaluate performance to help grow future leaders?

We drive equity through the uniqueness of our promotional philosophy. My observation is that a lot of companies are challenged by leaders selfishly hoarding talent. What I mean by that is you get a department leader with a strong team, and they don’t want to let them go. They want to keep them right where they are. But at Enterprise Holdings, we have the opposite view. Leaders want to see employees promoted. In fact, at Enterprise, for you to get promoted, you have to demonstrate that you’ve developed others around you and that you’ve been successful in promoting your employees up and out of your team. 

We ask about it as part of the promotional process, and we’re intentional about celebrating this commitment to others’ development when we announce their own promotions. We track internal promotion pretty closely because it’s part of our story. Last year we promoted around 20,000 employees, and we expect it will be the same, if not a little bit higher, as we continue to emerge from the pandemic. For context, we currently have about 90,000 employees.

Amber Burton
amber.burton@fortune.com
@amberbburton

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