Next Wave of People Excellence

Dr Santrupt Misra, CEO, Birla Carbon, Director, Chemicals, Fertilisers and insulators and Ditector, Group Human Resources, Aditya Birla Group, Addressing a recent NHRDN conference outlined the challenges of Human Resource Management in an ever Disruptive Milieu, and what was required for the next wave of people Excellence

‘We need to help our organisations to be creating some form of specialisation, develop the ability to go into deep learning by our people, especially against the backdrop of AI dominating our workplace. That would mean going beyond the organisation and collaborating with educational instiutions’

(L to R) Rajeev Dubey, President HR, After Market and
Corporate Services, Mahindra & Mahindra and Dr T V Rao,
Founder President, National HRD Network (Session Chair)
with Dr Santrupt Mishra

Dr Santrupt Misra is currently the CEO, Birla Carbon, Director, Chemicals, Fertilisers & In-sulators and Director, Group human resources, for the Aditya Birla Group. An HR professional and a stalwart business leader for over 30 years, Dr Misra has worked at the board level for close to two decades in several companies and non-profit organisations in India and overseas. he is an Independent Director on the board of Oil and Natural Gas Corporation ltd., Chairperson of the Board of Governors of the National Institute of technology, rourkela, a part of the managing committee of Aston Business School Advisory Board (UK) and the board of xavier’s Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar. he was a member of the ShrM Certification Commission, USA, for three years.

Dr Misra holds post graduate degrees in political science and in personnel management and industrial relations, as well as two PHDs in public administration and industrial relations, from India and the UK respectively. he is a Fellow of the National Academy of human resources (NAHR), USA, an honorary Fellow of the Coaching Federation of India, an Eisenhower Fellow, an Aston Business School Fellow, an AIMA Fellow and a Commonwealth Scholar.

Here, Dr Santrupt Misra speaks on the ‘next wave of people excellence’ at the NHRDN Conference held in Hyderabad.

Late Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had stated, “history can remind us, history can teach us, history can guide us, history can warn us, but history cannot shackle us; we must move forward into the future with a collaborative partnership.” So, how do we move forward our HR community?

The good part of the new waves of people excellence is that we are not talking about hrfunction’s excellence; we are talking about people excellence. however, for too long, I believe that HR professionals like me, who represent big companies, have perhaps monopolised large platforms; we take credit for a lot of work done by other people in their organisations. Many of them are perhaps not backed by any analytical rigour which reflects the real impact they have made. Therefore, it is good that we are moving the focus from HR excellence to people excellence.

The smaller waves

The other beautiful thing about the topic, ‘Next wave of people excellenceis that we always think about large waves. However, those of us who have spent time experiencing the beauty of waves on seafronts always know that the beauty of real waves are the small waves that follow the big waves. Therefore, this metaphor must not be lost on us. Therefore, we must notice, be careful about, be watchful about, must learn from,and be inspired by those small waves in small islands, which are pockets of excellence. Small companies and startups in remote parts of this country perhaps create these oases. While large corporations create the big waves of excellence with lots of consultants, loads of money and large HR teams, small companies often driven by entrepreneurial passion create the small waves.

The ecosystem

The next question therefore is where does the source of new people excellence come from? Besides technology, it will come from the ecosystem of organisations like supplier organisations, customer organisations, HR service providers and all kinds of service providers that are growing in the different kinds of technology. I am simply overwhelmed, but sometimes I wonder to myself what a great loss it is for me that the emails that I receive for HR service providers who have great ideas that will turn wonderful technologies, want to come and sell and demonstrate products, but unfortunately, I don’t find time to personally experience and see what they are doing.

The new waves of excellence are going to come from the shop floor, line managers, and the next wave of HR excellence and not necessarily from the HR function. It is our responsibility to create more capability and excitement in our line managers, to create excellence. When I look at my own organisation, Aditya Birla Group, mostly when I find an HR system, a process, an innovation, a tinkering and adaptation, it is invariably done by the line managers taking their own initiative, sometimes breaking free from the stereotype and that is going to be the future source of HR excellence.

Shape of things to come

Now, what shape is it going to take? We talked about technology and its implications. If I think about what issues of people excellence we need to build, it is to create a sense of meaning and purpose in our people. If we go back to the beginning of my career, we would find that an organisation in the past was held together with either by the hierarchy of the organisation or by its infrastructure. Many large corporations in the It sector created beautiful cafeterias, playing fields, sleeping rooms and whatever. Those infrastructures and hierarchies held organisations together, rolled job distributions and interactions. however, I believe, people excellence of the future requires that we need to create a better sense of mean-ing and purpose in the organisation and help individuals align their own meaning and purpose to the larger organisation purpose.

The purpose

‘Purpose’ is not something that’s going to be created by the top management with the aid of a consultant, but this has to be done brick by brick, excavated exactly the way Mohenjo-Daro, harappa civilizations were excavated by bringing people together. By understanding why they come to this organisation every day, why have they stayed, why haven’t they left? If we can peel the onion and reach to the core, and craft and explain, and communicate the larger purpose of the organisation that will be the foundation of excellence in the future. This would require mass participation and inclusion.

Technology comfort

The second type of excellence that we can create will perhaps be creating the comfort of technology for all generations of employees. technology can be frightening for the older generation of people, who feel that digital immigrants are like aliens. This fraternity will of-ten start developing a sense of inadequacy and a sense of doubt. Imagine, if machine learning and deep learning is allowing a person to learn much faster, is able to beat a grandmaster in chess itself, what would an ordinary employee be thinking, confronted by a supercomputer, chips, chat-bots, and every other form of automation that is happening? We need to create excellence by creating extremely capable people who are completely and supremely confident, who do understand the machines, have the capability to do much more much faster and yet are not afraid of this changing phenomenon. We cannot dream and bring a future of excellence based on people who are timid, not so confident, and are hesitant of their own capabilities.

Of disruptions

Third, disruptions are going to be a natural part of life. how do we create the Japanese mindset in organisations? What do I mean by Japanese mindset? All of us know that Japan is in the belt of earthquakes, but I do not think people necessarily panic. They have learned to live with it, learned to the make most of it, learned to bounce back, learned to retain their sanity, civility, discipline, in spite of the disruption that is happening from earthquakes.

If we are really living in the VUCA world that is going to cross disruption at a much larger scale, much more frequently, much more deeply, then one of the opportunities is to create a sense of calm, confidence, a sense of resilience, a sense of commitment, for people to stay with the organisation and bounce back within the organisation and beyond it. For that we all must un-derstand that life-long employment is no longer a guarantee because of disruption, and therefore as more and more consolidation is happening, more and more companies are coming together, new technologies, and start-ups are disrupting existing business models. The question is - can we create the capacity in our people to be more employable, to be entrepreneurs.

‘Besides technology, it will come from the ecosystem of organisations like supplier organisations, customer organisations, HR service providers and all kinds of service providers that are growing in the different kinds of technology...The new waves of excellence are going to come from the shop floor, line managers, and the next wave of HR excellence and not necessarily from the HR function’

Alternative modes of work

How many of us are preparing to be a part of a gig-workforce? Some of us are perhaps beneficiaries of a gig workforce, by using more of them, but we never prepare our people to be a part of that. And that is going to be the future of excellence where people prepare not for life long employment necessarily, but for entrepreneurship and alternative models of employment. For disrupted employment intermediated by phases of learning and re-skilling and bouncing back into productive relationships with the new employers for a continuous project related workmanship. how we create that is going to be a form of excellence and the theme of the future. We need to create different mental models and when I talk about mental models, one of the mental models will have to be one of inclusion.

Inclusion

Inclusion is becoming the significant need of the hour inclusion in the larger society, inclusion within the organisation. It is going far beyond gender today and the next wave of excellence will mean how we learn to be inclusive. What are the characteristics of an inclusive leader, inclusive HR leader, inclusive line manager, is a question we need to explore more and ask more in an Indian context.

For lGBT, we are talking about a new regulatory framework; the mood of the country seems to be changing on that subject. There are many sections where there are agitations for reservations of one kind or the other. People are living with multiple identities at the same time. I am also a part of it. Being a global citizen, I am part of a scientific community and multiple identities, which means that there are multiple different requirements for being accepted, absorbed and leveraged in different countries.

Inclusive thinking is a form of contextual thinking. Thus, more and more, I believe that we will not have people of one kind; diversity becomes a simple expression. The richness and the diversity of diversity itself is not something well understood by us. Sometimes we simply talk about gender, sometimes we talk about generation, sometimes we talk about people who have come from different cultures, but we need to help our entire organisation and people to develop the inclusive mindset to harness as multiple sources of diversity and this is the next frontier of people excellence.

Lastly and perhaps most importantly, we need to help our organisations to be creating some form of specialisation, develop the ability to go into deep learning by our people, especial-ly against the backdrop of AI dominating our workplace. That would mean going beyond the organisation and collaborating with educational institutions. We need to ask ourselves whether we are really creating excellence and specialisation in young people particularly, who we are regularly churning out from institutions. how do we create partnerships to re-skill our people, to be specialists, who already have work experience and are likely to be having a disrupted career? And perhaps go to reskilling, re-education, re-training and come back? And then, how do we receive them back? today, even when women take a career break for maternity leave, we have not perfected the ability to re-absorb them back into the organisation.

The same problem will be far greater when our careers are disrupted and a large number of people are displaced from continuous employment and career for periods of time. how do we learn to absorb them back, how do we prepare them to come back to the workplace as confident individuals and not those who think that they have a disrupted career? Now, you cannot have excellence from people who are unsure about themselves, so what do we do that is going to be one element of people excellence? Obviously, we have a responsibility in terms of what will the HR need to do as a function.

My last two thoughts-firstly, the HR function itself must learn to be far more collaborative. We need to ask ourselves, do we have the ability to collaborate with R&D people, do we have the ability to collaborate with the finance people, and do we have the ability to collaborate with multiple specialisations that would come into our organisations? I think our ability to collaborate with different sections of organisations, different specialisations need to significantly grow if we want to build people excellence.

The second part is: how do we continue to re-mind ourselves that the way we serve the ends of the business and technology is creating disruptions. So the basics of HR are coming back - where is that human connect? Can you be a coach and counsellor in the organisation, and how evolved is your skill to help and enable people to live through disruptions?