How did your HR journey start?
A. In hindsight, I think my HR career may have started during my M.A. Psychology days, when I picked up a deep interest and curiosity about organizational behaviour. That encouraged me to do my MBA in HR from XLRI. I was then officially well and truly on my way to be a HR professional. My first HR job out of campus was in Asian Paints when I joined them as a Management Trainee.
Q. Why did you choose HR as your professional field?
A. HR combines the knowledge and skills from my education: B.Com and a Masters in Psychology. The profession equally satisfies my curiosity into how businesses make money and how people in organizations behave. When I chose human resources as my career profession, I also assumed somewhat too naively at that particular time, that HR mostly meant application of concepts I learned in organizational psychology. That challenge of application was enticing in the early days of my career. It is still a partially valid assumption I hold today, but I have also come to realize over the years that to make positive impact as a HR leader, a foundation in the behavioural sciences is but one of the many enablers for being successful.
Q. How would you describe the starting years of your professional life?
A. There have been several challenges. The things I enjoyed the most in my early days in the profession were jobs that worked closely with the business, jobs that required me to work in new cultures and for reasons that were not apparent to me at that time, my stint in industrial relations. I also liked designing employee development interventions and training content. Among the toughest challenges I was involved with during the first seven years or so, I would count managing a month long strike, shutting down of a plant in India (Aurangabad) and another in Malaysia, and being appointed into the Management Committee for Colgate’s Malaysia & Singapore business as being especially demanding. The key lesson I learned during this period is that listening to and observing people, and using that as a key input to diagnose a business or organizational situation, is an essential skill in a HR leader’s toolkit. We sometimes underestimate the power of being quiet and scanning our internal business environment, and I feel that is a huge mistake.
Q. What might be a few notable moments from your past experiences?
A. During the 2013-2014 period, when I was working at Colgate’s global headquarters in New York, the company decided to expand its footprint and scope of the business services (shared services) enterprise. This task meant defining what our business services capability stood for in the new operating model of Colgate, articulating the brand of the newly formed business services division, setting up new business services centres in the cities of Mumbai and Mexico, transforming and expanding an existing centre in Warsaw into the newer operating model, and most importantly, quickly ramping up the human resources systems/ processes and staffing up all the three internal captive centres in a record time of less than a year. I led the HR and organizational aspects of this journey worldwide, reporting to the Global Chief Information & Business Services Officer of Colgate. I am proud to say that Colgate Business Services has grown to be a genuinely global organization that has been providing services to Colgate’s businesses around the world in Finance, Customer Service & Logistics, Analytics and most recently, in HR. Leading this overall effort over a two year period, right from drawing up the organizational aspects of the business case to branding the new division to staffing the centres up globally has been an exhilarating experience for me and the HR teams based in the US, Mexico, Mumbai and Warsaw that I led during this particular period. The cross-geographical HR experience and perspectives I gained in this business services assignment also became useful when Colgate set out to refresh its Global HR Strategy in the year 2014. I was fortunate to be one among three HR leaders globally, and the only one currently based outside the US, to be selected by the Global CHRO to work along with him for drafting the new HR strategy and for facilitating a global forum of key HR leaders for socializing the new global HR strategy and the new HR operating model. This perhaps has been the best moment in my HR career.
Q. Have these experiences changed your professional or personal orientation?
A. The work I did on the global human resources strategy and the new global human resources operating model utilized the approach of design thinking. It was an entirely new way of looking at opportunities and coming up with a plan. There was ambiguity and points of view in abundance from multiple business and HR stakeholders which had to be listened to, respected, aligned and synthesized into a coherent strategy. All of this had to be done within a team context, against a tight timeline. The patience with differences of perspectives, an inclusive orientation while facilitating and designing solutions, and the ability to synthesize disparate inputs from people across multiple cultures have been sharpened, and I trust I am a better HR leader today on account of this experience.
Q. Some key guidance and advice for the HR leaders of today…
A. It is important for people handling human resources to be proud of the organizations they work for; so choosing one that makes you proud of what you do everyday and feeling as if you belong to that particular organization is absolutely critical. The values that you hold dear as a human being should overlap and resonate with the values that are practised by senior leaders in the organization you work for. Otherwise, it is impossible to be passionate and truly committed to the purpose of one’s HR leadership role. The second advice is to be yourself, staying true to your innate aptitude and temperament. There is space for different kind of HR leaders in this world. Being authentic helps build credibility and trust with our business partners.
The cross-geographical HR experience and perspectives I gained in the business services assignment also became useful when Colgate set out to refresh its Global HR Strategy… I was fortunate to be one among three HR leaders globally, and the only one currently based outside the US, to be selected by the Global CHRO for drafting the new HR strategy and for facilitating a key global forum…
