The Power of Empowerment

Amazon India Operations: 2025 BEST Award Winner, #10

Bengaluru, India

Photo | Mallikarjun Katakol

Amazon India Operations has emerged as a leader in strategic talent development through two high-impact initiatives that address critical workplace needs: the Women's Leadership Program and an innovative Empathy and Inclusion Workshop program. Both initiatives demonstrate how data-driven, employee-centric approaches to TD can deliver measurable business outcomes while fostering a more inclusive and empowering workplace culture.

Filling a need for women leaders

When the TD team analyzed feedback from focus groups, surveys, and exit interviews, it identified significant gaps in development opportunities for women leaders. They needed comprehensive, targeted support in four key areas: communicating bold career visions, demonstrating the ability to disagree and commit, influencing without formal authority, and adopting a long-term strategic mindset.

The gaps represented a significant missed opportunity to nurture and advance women's careers, ultimately limiting the organization's ability to build a diverse and high-performing leadership pipeline. The existing women-specific development programs weren't effectively addressing those crucial skill areas.

Rather than implementing generic leadership training, the TD team designed a program to specifically address the unique needs of midlevel women leaders. The program creates both skills development opportunities and a peer support network.

The effects have been measurable. Data analysis shows positive variance in six out of eight key leadership behaviors, indicating meaningful application of learning on the job. Retention rates also have improved: Participants have an attrition rate of just 1.8 percent, compared to 5.8 percent for women leaders who didn't take part.

Beyond the quantitative results, the program organically fosters transformative personal growth. The company reports that participants spontaneously created informal mentoring circles that transcended program boundaries, establishing what one leader described as "a sisterhood of women who lifted each other up."

Perhaps most telling is the profound effect the initiative has on participants' self-confidence and leadership presence, captured in one individual's reflection: "WLP wasn't just about acquiring skills; it was a transformation. My voice, once barely a whisper, now resonated with conviction."

Igniting a culture change

The Empathy and Inclusion Workshop program addresses a broader cultural need the company identified through internal research, including focus groups, one-on-one interviews, and employee surveys. The findings highlighted an opportunity to embed greater empathy and inclusion into the company's cultural fabric.

The TD team customized immersive workshops for different cohorts: frontline managers, midlevel managers, and senior leaders. The comprehensive curriculum is both theoretical and practical. The training modules cover the what, why, and how of empathy and inclusion, pairing conceptual frameworks with role-play videos, real-life case studies, and practical exercises to help participants deeply internalize the learnings.

The empathy module focuses on building five critical skills: self-regulation, listening, acknowledging emotions, speaking truth with love, and enabling solutions. The inclusion module addresses microaggressions, allyship, biases, and intersectionality in the workplace.

Beyond standalone sessions, the TD team strategically wove the workshop concepts into the fabric of its entire TD ecosystem, making them recurring themes in all leadership forums and communications across the organization.

That systemic approach is evident in multiple programs. The Propel+ initiative for people managers, for example, incorporates empathy and inclusion as one of four core pillars alongside leading self, leading team, and delivering results. Similarly, the Leaders as Coaches program features dedicated Leading With Empathy sessions supplemented with situational leadership skills; approximately 82 percent of senior leaders have completed that training program.

Embedding the principles across various development pathways rather than treating them as isolated concepts has enabled Amazon India to create a consistent cultural thread that reinforces the company's commitment to "Empathy in Action" as a foundational leadership capability.

To evaluate effectiveness, the TD team partnered with the company's internal research science team to conduct a comprehensive causation study. The results are compelling: Managers who participated in the program demonstrated higher job satisfaction (87 percent favorable) and inclusion (96 percent favorable) among their direct reports, compared to the control group (80 percent and 89 percent, respectively). Meanwhile, teams led by managers who attended the workshop experienced a 3.7 percent drop in attrition—a tangible business impact underscoring the value of cultivating a more empathetic and inclusive workplace.

Much like the participants of the Women's Leadership Program, those who attended the Empathy and Inclusion Workshops reported feeling more empowered and psychologically safe to address challenging situations. Also similar, workshop graduates began sharing insights and tools with their teams, creating microcommunities of learning throughout the organization after the workshop ended.

The company notes that those organic outcomes have created lasting organizational value that extends well beyond the program's original objectives, demonstrating how thoughtfully designing leadership development can catalyze broader cultural transformation.

Future enhancements

Looking ahead, Amazon India is evolving both the Women's Leadership Program and the Empathy and Inclusion Workshop program through four strategic dimensions: technology integration, content optimization, program design enhancement, and cost-effectiveness. Plans include developing hybrid learning experiences, implementing artificial-intelligence-powered personalized learning pathways, creating mobile-first microlearning modules, and integrating virtual and augmented reality for immersive leadership scenarios. The company also is building an in-house content production hub and implementing real-time analytics to measure program success.

Such evolution focuses on making TD programs more accessible, personalized, and effective while optimizing resource utilization. The approach also ensures that TD maintains program quality while expanding reach and measuring return on investment more effectively.

By putting people first through the two transformative initiatives, Amazon India is unlocking new levels of innovation, resilience, and market leadership—creating a model for how organizations can leverage TD as a driver of both cultural change and business success.

View the entire list of 2025 BEST Award winners.