Canadian Pacific Railway (TSX: CP)(NYSE: CP) is in the ground transportation and logistics business. Canadian Pacific (CP) is focused on attracting, developing, and retaining a resilient, high-performing workforce that delivers on providing service for the company’s customers. The company’s culture is guided by several core values, which drive the company’s actions.
Industry-leading team
At CP, the company has approximately 12,000 employees. CP’s strong team of railroaders across North America underpin CP’s success and bring value to CP’s customers and shareholders due to higher profits. The company empowers employees, providing an engaging culture and has cultivated an industry-leading team.
The company offers key development programs for current and emerging leaders. For operating groups of CP, the company’s leadership management trainee program provides internal and external candidates with comprehensive training on the critical skills necessary for railway operations and people leadership. Upon successful completion of the program, participants qualify for a variety of operations frontline leader roles.
Developing railroaders
Leadership skills are long considered a core trait of CP employees. The company encourages staff to develop leadership expertise as part of ongoing training and development through regular performance reviews and CP-specific skill-development programs. CP focuses on creating a high-performance culture and feedback-rich environment at the company. Interactive workshops introduce a practical set of tools and thought processes for instilling communications skills and management capabilities in CP’s leaders and employees.
The company’s goal is to create a constructive environment that improves bottom-line results. To complement training programs, CP has developed in-house training to enhance leadership capabilities among leaders across the organization to ensure a long-term focus on the company’s foundation to develop people.
Robust succession management
Further, CP undergoes extensive succession planning for both executive and management level positions. The company measures the retention of CP’s most critical positions and develops potential successors to be ready to fill critical roles as soon as positions become available. Looking ahead, CP is developing succession and development goals for the many high-potential successors for all critical positions, and has begun to measure the success rate of placing emerging leaders in those key positions.
Also, CP’s career development programs and diverse and inclusive workplace culture help drive employee retention and engagement. The company has adopted a performance-based culture, and rewards employees for dedication and hard work. CP periodically administers surveys to measure employee perspectives and engagement. These surveys help CP to better tailor development and retention efforts. Aside from running trains, many of CP’s employees work in yards, terminals, and shops across CP’s network with machinery and heavy equipment.
High-performance culture
In addition, the company focuses on providing superior service to customers and drives value for shareholders. Diversity is one of the company’s core values. The company encourages diversity of thought in the workplace and believe that different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives enhance creativity and innovation. Fostering an inclusive environment supports CP’s high-performance culture and should result in success as an organization. This is likely to lead to a higher stock price as profits increase.
