How, where and when did you start your career, specifically in HR?And then, how did you shape your career?
A. I started my career way back in early eighties in Mumbai with a consumer product company. It was a people management support job covering manufacturing plant and HO. The job responsibility was centered more on employee relations in a highly unionized environment of those days, and the term HR meant personnel management and industrial relations.
But a good grounding in basic people management issues, especially in highly unionized environment was an excellent beginning as I look back upon my career graph. Mumbai was the industrial, commercial capital of the country. Industry and commerce was not so global those days.
There was monopoly in many businesses and cut throat competition was not such an engrossing issue. Industrial relations was the prime attention seeking and crucial issue. However, training and development, performance management, career planning, talent acquisition and retention were definitely important issues.
Stay trim, fit, agile, and lively. Laugh often, make others laugh, don’t lose your self-esteem ever, manage your own intrinsic motivation and most importantly be humble. Being humble has a strong connect with psychological age.
I got an excellent break in a large German organization, Bayer India as it was called then, where my career got a good shape. I got much better international exposure in people management, training and development and plant productivity related issues.
A good exposure to plants in Germany and other European countries in relatively early years of my career, opportunities to move from plant to HO in HR and also in project management and plant management helped me get groomed well.
I got an opportunity to move out of HR and get into project management and later into role of a plant head, which helped me a lot to widen my experience and mature myself in being recognized as a senior industry professional.
Besides my strengths in Industrial Relations, I started being seen as a well-rounded, experienced senior professional who could do more than HR. However, with some job rotation, I preferred to stay in main stream of Human Resource Management & Development.
I left Bayer when I was heading a plant operations assignment. Later, I moved to bigger Indian organizations as well as a multinational organizations.
Q. Why did you choose HR as your professional field?
A. Well, I knew my personal profile was not suitable for a job in laboratory or sales or finance and accounts. I was not at all interested in a routine government job. Therefore, after my graduation, I decided to join a post graduate program in a field that was akin to working with people. I shifted my base from a small town – almost a village to mega city Bombay.
Q. Could you briefly describe the initial years of your career – what were the challenges you faced, the areas you enjoyed the most, the lessons learnt?
A. I have answered partly this in first question. But let me add on. Smart work, hard work, good communication, pleasant disposition, high relationship orientation, good speaking and presenting skills and a good capability in leading teams have been some of my strengths. A little shyness which could be attributed to my small town base coupled with absence of urban sophistication were my weaknesses.
I was very fortunate to get good seniors, colleagues and bosses wherever I worked and more specifically in Bayer, RPG group, who spotted my strengths and helped me to build on them while working on countering the weaknesses.
These people, that includes some German seniors, helped me a lot. They gave me opportunities, they encouraged me, they coaxed me to push myself forward and build my personality.
They deputed me to several training programs in India and abroad, encouraged me to take on different assignments outside HR and infused lots of confidence.
They helped me to develop urban sophistication as I call it. I owe a deeper debt of gratitude to these mentors for the metamorphosis of a shy rural youth into a smart young man who could later take on global HR responsibilities.
Currently, I am Head of HR for India and global operations of JK Tyre. The global operations of JK Tyre includes 12 plants in India, a fully owned subsidiary in Mexico and strong market presence in several countries including South East Asia, Latin American Countries and USA.
I worked most of my career in Mumbai when the environment in the industry was highly unionized. The challenge was to maintain harmony in relations. Continuous dialogue with people was the most important dimension of job in HR. Be it a plant, office or sales, people were represented by very strong and mighty unions. My ability to strike a good emotional chord with people including some mighty union leaders helped me handle complex scenes.
In this journey there have been plenty of challenges like understanding different cultures, working under bosses from other advanced countries, internalizing new things in HR domain etc. Bayer brought Assessment Centers in India way back in 1988 when it was a rather new concept in the country. I got trained as assessor and also got assessed which formed the basis of my job rotation. A quick learnability was an important competency and somehow I seemed to have got that in adequate measure. Nevertheless, industrial relations continued to be critical dimension of HR or plant management responsibility and my proven competency in that area helped me stay ahead and grow well in career.
Q. What would you describe as the highest point of your HR career?
A. There have been many such moments. Managing the merger of a big acquisition by parent organization, selecting, appointing people in large numbers and managing people issues in large infrastructure projects in different countries, working in such different cultures and making project successful, keeping employees’ morale high by continuous communication in times of business downturn, rationalizing manpower numbers in fairly high numbers in unionized environment, managing succession in senior critical positions without any disruption have been some such moments that crowd my mind on looking back. Not to forget, I must also add moments of high pitched negotiations with that I conducted with trade unions for avoiding strife, giving high wage rise coupled with contributory productivity.
Q. How did these achievements transform you personally and professionally?
A. Getting selected for job rotation of managing a green field project and then getting the job as plant head at that plant, getting training in plants in Germany and other European locations as part of preparation for that assignment has been one such moment. Managing a merger, more specifically being responsible for taking inventory of senior management team of acquired business and deciding whom to retain in new restructured business was yet another big moment. Getting recognized as best performer of a year and getting fat performance pay together with an overseas vacation have been some peak moments.
These moments not only gave me joy, they revalidated me on my competencies, they prompted me, motivated me to keep upgrading my own personal worth, my esteem, my pride in myself albeit with humility and respect for people around.
Q. What advice would you like to give HR practitioners of the next generation?
A. I am not a Guru or a Pundit, neither such a high profile big professional. Neither do I wear any aura around me that would give me any authority to render advice. Nevertheless, since you ask, based on my personal experience I would say:
Be business savvy, know your business reasonably well so that HR can be truly strategic partner.
Keep learning, don’t feel shy in acknowledging our own areas of improvement. Resharpen your capabilities.
We have no control over chronological age but other ages – physiological and psychological are definitely under our control. Stay trim, fit, agile, and lively. Laugh often, make others laugh, do make joke on yourself once in a while but don’t lose self-esteem ever, manage your own intrinsic motivation and most importantly be humble. Being humble has a strong connect with psychological age.
At the same time, have friends around you, continue to participate in some professional and social engagements, enjoy life and play some meaningful role beyond work and family life, don’t carry office pressures home .I know it is easier said than done. But generally speaking I have been successful in keeping office worries, pressures away from my family and social life.
Build rich relationships around, have a good mentor and do take up mentoring when you think you are ready.
