Young Leadership: Navigating The Future

The Covid-19 pandemic has unleashed unprecedented challenges on business leaders worldwide. Our professional as well as personal lives have changed drastically since the lockdown began. Young leadership of today has to find a way to mitigate these challenges as well as tap into new opportunities that have emerged from this crisis. With this context in mind, NHRDN conducted the Navigate the Future: Young Leadership Guidance and Experience webinar hosted by Agnivesh Thakur, Lead SAP Successfactors Capability, Accenture and part of the core team at NHRDN, featuring Jonas Prasanna, International HRBPBoeing, Aastha Bhatia, DGM- HR Business Partner, Bharti Airtel, Ankita Poddar, Senior HR, Business Partner, Amazon and Atma Godara, Lead-Digital HR Transformation, OYO, with a special keynote address delivered by Vijay Shah, Chairman, Piramal Glass Ceylon on the tremendous potential the future holds. Corporate Citizen brings you the excerpts

KEYNOTE

"There is a greater demand for computing, AI, machine intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, cybersecurity skills and cryptocurrency"

-Vijay Shah

Vijay Shah: Navigating the future of young leadership is a very important topic. On this occasion, I have the privilege of raising a lot of questions but not answering them. Let me pose some relevant and pertinent questions today. According to a research, by 2025, more than 70% of the Indian workforce will comprise of millennials. It will continue to rise in the future. In fact, the largest young workforce in the world will be from India. This workforce will require a very different kind of leadership, and it is very important that we focus on developing leadership for the future. So what are the important challenges for us in the immediate future?

I was one of those people who never believed in allowing work from home, but today, increase in remote working is a reality. Forty eight per cent of employees are likely to work remotely, at least for a part of the time after the Covid-19 situation. This number was minuscule before the pandemic. Now, organisations and new HR professionals need to prepare how to manage remote work operations, keeping in view productivity and efficiency. How do you engage people remotely, when you don’t have a face to face contact with people? How to ensure collaboration with employees digitally? What about data and information security? There are sociological and psychological issues and mental health issues. Distance creates emotional dryness and less empathy. How do you deal with this challenge? There is also a need for rapid reskilling of existing employees, as the competency requirements will change. In terms of organisational planning, we have so far focussed on designing organisations for efficiency. In the future, we will have to design organisations for resilience to build a more responsive organisation. Now we will have to design roles which will have a built-in agility and resilience in an environment with remote working. Some of the megatrends that can impact and create challenges for HR professionals are the changing business models and the emergence of new paradigms along with old businesses. There is digital disruption going around in the industry. Manufacturing 4.0 is real and has been brought in much faster because of the pandemic. Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things and Machine Learning are things of today, not the future. Smart cities, smart malls, demand-driven mass customisation, contract manufacturing and manufacturing excellence with green and clean technology and practices are the new trends. I could not believe that in a high energy-intensive business that like ours, 33% of the energy is green and produced in house. Today, green energy is cheaper than conventional wired energy that we have at our homes. You can have a solar cell which is cheaper in terms of generating energy than wired energy. You can now have remote energy generation. You now have the challenge of new products and technology innovation as sustainability.

Data is the new oil. This is a reality. Data science and analytics are emerging as very important tools for getting deeper insights and making sharper and efficient decisions. In one of my organisations, we introduced Chief Digital Officer as a function as far as three years ago. At that time, we didn’t even know what that was. It took us three years to regroup the concept of digital in our company, and currently, as we speak, we are in a $4 million McKenzie assignment to scrutinise analytics in my organisation. Within the first six months of the assignment, we are getting such great results from analytics that we are wondering why we did not embark on this process earlier, and what would be the next step. The next step, I believe, will be machine learning and artificial intelligence. The point is that it is a different organisation.

Data science and analytics are emerging as very important tools for getting deeper insights and sharper and precision-based decisions. Today morning, I was on a call while reviewing the McKenzie assignment, we felt the need to recruit 18 data scientists. Do you know my challenge? I do not have people in my company or HR function who can interview them. We do not know how to get the final round of interview done. So we have outsourced it to firms who would understand what to expect. We are recruiting and inducting talent which we do not really know how to recruit. This is not an old paradigm. This is a completely new paradigm. We don’t know today whether consumerism is going to give way to minimalism and whether it will bring new challenges. How many of you (audience) have worn full pants in the last four months or formal shoes? I bet that very few of you have. Things are changing very rapidly. We are realising that we do not need some of the stuff that we used to. I know that a lot of people have started discussing minimalism in many areas, from oil economy to experience economy, these are the new challenges.

What are the changes that will be brought about in consumer behaviour in the area of customer intimacy and customer-centricity? More than 55% of consumers are going for online shopping. I am 62 years old. I and my wife have been forced to do online shopping in the last four months. Today, we wonder why we didn’t do it earlier. We are getting more choices online, and we are able to order whatever we need from the comfort of our homes. Why waste time, energy and petrol and deal with traffic when we can get everything delivered at home? Things are changing. Building customer relationship on the pillar of value selling and solutions offering will be more under focus in the marketplace. I can give an example of new skills and competencies, but many more such skills will be introduced in the future. We will see new opportunities in data literacy, data sciences, data analytics and data visualisation. Today morning, my entire leadership team decided that we will all learn to code. We all want to know what is new significance of coding. Unless we learn to code, we will all be dinosaurs soon. There is a greater demand for computing, artificial learning, machine intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, cybersecurity skills and cryptocurrency. All these buzzwords will have to be learnt by us. Robots may become far more popular going into the near future. Cyber bots are already popular. In our company, HR is not the first point of contact. Cyber bots are the first point of contact for any query on HR, and then it is migrated to the HR if the cyber bot is not able to explain. Oversees migration and intercompany migration may also slow down.

The future challenges are bringing opportunities for India. Aatmanirbhar Bharat is the call of the day. There is a trust deficit with China, and this will bring a lot more opportunities and a lot more challenges. New leadership competencies will be needed, such as agile leadership, humility, compassion and engagement. We have heard of IQ, EQ and SQ. We now need INSQ (Inspirational Quotient) more than ever before. I think new HR professionals can define this better. Dealing with ambiguity, managing contradictions, crisis management and unlearning, e-learning, and learning virtually will be essential. I would like to end on the need for compassionate leadership with a quote from Dalai Lama. “When we are motivated with compassion and wisdom, the results of our action benefit everyone, not just our immediate self”. Great leaders care about connecting with the people they lead. Basic connectivity is the conduit for almost everything they do. Compassion is the key. Compassionate leadership inspires people with purpose, hope and optimism because they resonate, empathise and connect.

Excerpts from the Session

"Talking about staying relevant, I think it is very important to know what is happening around. I have attended a lot of webinars. I think it really helps"

-Atma Godara

Agnivesh Thakur: The only thing certain is uncertainty. What were your key challenges you are facing at this time? How are you being risk-averse and adding value to your organisation?

Atma Godara : I remember having a detailed conversation with you when the pandemic hit the hospitality industry. You told me one thing which stayed with me. Everybody is in a different situation. Everyone is going through their own kinds of stress. First and foremost, we need to think about how we come out of this situation without having a mental burnout, professionally as well as personally. Meditation and yoga have helped me a lot. I work in Oyo. The hospitality industry is badly hit as we all know. It is very important to be agile, come what may. Talking about staying relevant, I think it is very important to know what is happening around. I have attended a lot of webinars. I think it really helps. I try to learn new things, read about things on the internet. I volunteer with school kids and college students. These are some of the things I am doing to keep relevant during the pandemic.

"I also got thrown under a lot of pressure due to this expectation that we have a lot of extra time due to this pandemic"

-Ankita Poddar

Ankita Poddar : I feel quite strongly about this. When 2020 started, I felt that this is quite a good year. So like everyone else, I was quite upset when the pandemic hit. It threw out all the plans I had for the year. At work too, it became crazy. There were so many questions. I realised that I was dealing with ambiguity. The muscle had to be flexed more than ever. I did a couple of things. Learning to be calm has been my number one practice. I also got thrown under a lot of pressure due to this expectation that we have a lot of extra time due to this pandemic. I also focused on writing blog posts as well as reading a lot more. I took up new courses to see what would be my alternate profession if the need arises. I learnt that our HR function is such that we can utilise learning from every other space. I feel all of this will help me come out of the pandemic a better professional than when I went in.

"What I tend to do when I am going out for a walk is that I listen to a podcast. This way, I am getting my exercise as well as learn new concepts"

-Jonas Prasanna

Agnivesh: How much time you spent on learning new things and how much time do you spend listening?

Jonas Prasanna : There is a reason God has given us two ears and one mouth. So you should listen twice the time you speak. We have talked about participating in conversations. The unique thing that has happened right now is that pretty much everywhere across the world, people are virtual. That has levelled the playing field. You can now engage in conversations like never before and connect with people that you traditionally didn’t have the opportunity of connecting with before. What I tend to do when I am going out for a walk is that I listen to a podcast. This way, I am getting my exercise as well as learn new concepts. I also use twitter chats for micro learnings.

"If the employee is well and emotionally stable, only then can he perform. Engagement is directly proportional to productivity"

-Aastha Bhatia

Agnivesh: A company’s ultimate goal is the productivity of its employees. It becomes challenging to keep the employees engaged when they are working remotely and that too in a crisis. How do you address this challenge?

Aastha Bhatia : Being in the telecom sector, our organisation has been one of those who have been entrusted with keeping the lights on and ensuring that we have connectivity in each and every home and office. Needless to say, this brought a lot of pressure on employees because they were working 24/7. The first few days went in the struggle to co-ordinate with all of the people who are working in different time zones. But slowly and steadily, we need to bring the processes back and we need to bring the focus back on the overall wellbeing of the employees. Productivity is essential to the company, but this has a direct correlation with the wellbeing of the employee. If the employee is well and emotionally stable, only then can he perform. Engagement is directly proportional to productivity. We looked at various platforms to ensure that employees are heard and resolutions were provided. The second thing we focussed on is the wellbeing of employees. Several webinars and sessions were organised where employees could anonymously use this counselling or mentoring service. The third point is upskilling. The only thing that is in control of the individual is upskilling themselves and making themselves relevant in these times. We really opened those platforms for employees and had those awareness campaigns that it is your choice if you want to learn. What we saw that our online platforms were utilised 50% before the pandemic but after it, the utilisation has gone up to 89%.