Podcast

Question 1: Please share a memorable college lecture or an academic moment that significantly influenced your career path in HR management?

Answer: It won’t be a college lecture, but it was one of those times when I was working and

I would see different teams in my organization, you know, with different kinds of success.

So, there was my team, which had a lot of variety, and they were extremely successful.

There were a lot of collegialities and collaboration, and then there were other teams that had many dysfunctions and fingers at each other.

I would always ask HR why this is happening. It’s the same organizations, the same policies, and why teams behave in different ways.

That is when my HR told me about courses in organizational behavior and said, why don’t you study about it? And that’s where I developed an interest in studying more about organizations.

I joined a fellow program in management at IM in Nepal. And that’s where my journey was in understanding organizations and how they function.

Understanding teams and individuals and how they function started.

Question 2: Please share a memorable teaching or a mentoring moment that had a significant impact on your students or yourself?

Answer: Initially, when I was teaching, I would think that most of the students in the class have the same style of learning.

So, I had one way of teaching them or one way of creating a learning plan for them. However, later I realized that there is so much variety and it’s important to adapt that style based on every badge that I’m interacting with.

So, if I’m interacting with an MBA badge, the style is going to be very different. And when I’m interacting with an executive batch, the style is going to be very different.

The whole philosophy that students do want to learn is something that I changed in myself. And when I work with that philosophy, it’s easier to provide that learning.

I can differentiate between executive training program and the MBA education wherein you don’t have much experience of people who are joining the MBA program for executive training. A person who is coming to a training program with 20 years of work experience, needs to build on their work experience.

So, I need to customize a session plan that builds on their experience, provides them an opportunity to come up with what they have learned over the period and an opportunity of unlearning.

So, this whole concept of I need to customize based on my audience is something that has been a very significant moment in my teaching career or training career.

That’s how I think I have been able to create more value in the classroom.

Question 3: What do you see as the future challenges and opportunities for HR professionals and how should educators prepare students for these changes? I think it’s very crucial how we tackle this problem.

Answer: This question relates to the ever-changing landscape of HR roles. We are seeing huge technological advancement; we are seeing shifting work-based dynamics.

In this era, what we called earlier is that HR needs to transform businesses, HR needs to have come, come out from their traditional roles, and it has been going on for a long time.

But more and more HR professionals need to understand the changes and the business changes in the industry and what kind of changes that would bring to their organization.

We all know that HR is something that provides value to business.

If HR professionals can appreciate that, it becomes easier to do justice to the role.

So, I’ll give you an example of the kind of competencies that we try to develop in the training programs here is when the landscape is ever changing, it’s very difficult to teach what is changing in the landscape.

But if somebody can ever, you know, somebody is able to tap that irrespective of the change in the landscape, how can I notice that change and how can I find my own solution is a much greater learning for HR professionals, rather than learning specifically technical skills.

To give you an example, let’s say now, nowadays we are looking at a lot of change in AI. So, AI will bring a lot of disruption to workplaces.

But this is not new. Earlier there been something else, and now it is something else.

So, there is always an opportunity for HR to do justice to the role in terms of what is changing. And outside is their ability to continuously think and identify.

The problem is what helps them perform better, so it requires them to develop competencies in diagnosis.

If this changes, what kind of changes do I need to envision for my organization?

It requires them to see organizations as systems, if one aspect of the organization is changing, how it impacts other aspects, and most importantly, how HR can offer value. In fact, it is the changing circumstances where HR has the most potential to offer value because they have this role.

So, how executives generally struggle is when they spend too much of time in firefighting, rather than looking at organizations as systems or even developing their own skills for future.

So, finding time for doing some in depth diagnosis about their organization, finding time to look at it from a system perspective and getting away from firefighting is one of the approaches where HR can really benefit in changing circumstances.

Question 4: Please share your views on how CHROs, or chief people officers, can foster a culture of innovation and agility to adapt to rapidly changing business environments.

Answer: We need to understand what happens when we are looking for developing innovation or agility in rapidly changing business environments.

So, what we need to understand is that this is a new domain.

Nobody has mastered this domain. Therefore, if CHROs are expected to deliver solutions related to this domain, one thing that they must understand is that they don’t have the solution themselves because they are not an expert in that new domain.

It’s an ever-changing domain. They don’t know everything about it. So, I think what I would suggest as a first approach to this is to realize that I don’t have the solution.

Therefore, the solution can only come from a collaboration mindset with multiple individuals who are part of that rapidly changing business environment. So, there are multiple people who are going through the same thing.

How can I motivate them to come up with ideas? Because people are out there to give CHROs multiple ideas.

How can CHROs motivate people to solve the challenges for the organization? And this requires a very different kind of learning for leaders.

It requires learning how to create participation. How do I get an idea discussed in a group and a solution is a very different skill?

So, what I’m saying is if there is a rapidly changing business environment, what works in that environment is collaboration and multiple ideations.

So, if you are working on just one idea, it’s difficult to create an innovation that is likely to work.

I might have to have multiple ideas developing in parallel to be able to probably get one or two ideas that will probably be successful and will have the potential for the market.

So, for most of the innovation, what is generally known is that it is a result of collaboration and iteration.

When CHROs motivate people to do that, people also become more motivated, and these kinds of challenges could be solved in a much better way.

Rather than taking the complete honors on themselves to find solutions for this, which might not be right case, because a new situation.

Question 5: How can CHROs develop change leadership capabilities within their HRT?

Answer: When we look at change leadership, there are multiple things that an individual who have competency in change leadership. They demonstrate these competencies.

So, in those aspects, are you able to find a space for a problem to be solved or even to define a problem better?

Is the problem about motivation?

Is the problem about KPI?

Is the problem about competency?

Is the problem about training?

What is the problem there that is being voiced to you and it requires multiple iterations.

So are you learning to define a problem better or do you just jump and solve the problem the moment your bosses tell you to?

Many times, middle management do not get continuous mentoring from the top, and therefore they have to do a lot of things themselves. And the ability to be able to define a problem better, ability to diagnose a situation better, ability to look at organization from a bird’s eye perspective, and understanding the process of change.

So where are we in the process of change?

What are likely issues in this particular phase of change?

Identifying how organizations can address those changes, how I can address that change? Or, how can I take more initiative to get it done?

I think these are the aspects that are very important to learn from an HR team perspective or all the managers that are part of HR, and then they won’t be too much dependent on senior leadership to find solutions to the ever changing, you know, situations that could happen during a change.

So that is the first, wider aspect.

The second aspect, I would say, is the success of HR depends a lot on your persuasion skills, because you have to really persuade a lot of people in doing multiple things.

So, developing their own persuasion skills and having multiple ways of persuading, rather than only one, is something that is likely to give them a lot of success.

Lastly, we must realize that HR is a, you know, service function, and therefore the CHROs must develop that culture of a service mindset in HR professionals because ultimate goal is to add value to business.

If this mindset is there, it really helps in increasing performance.

Question 6: What role does coaching and mentoring play in supporting leadership and managers during change initiatives and how does CHRO facilitate these developmental interventions?

Answer: A lot. Really.

Coaching and mentoring can really play a huge role, particularly in changes that are more transformative in nature, wherein there is a considerable change in values, there is a considerable change in the way we do things in organizations.

When this is happening, we must realize that irrespective of what organizations ask their managers or leaders to do, they are ultimately also individuals.

So, what I always emphasize is, can you understand how individuals behave? And by understanding how individuals behave, you can probably understand what kind of systems or processes we need to bring in in a particular context.

Say, for example, when a transformative change is going on in an organization, then leaders could be scared.

The managers could be scared because it requires a lot of new learning. They may not feel very confident about things, they may feel confused, and therefore they may have a lot of stress.

Now, this is where coaching and mentoring helps, particularly coaching in this situation wherein, how do we work with leaders to help them see how they can do better? What are their frustrations, what they think, whether they have the self efficacy in performing when a change is going on.

If they are able to do that, they would be probably more open to learning in such situations because they will identify that, you know, the kind of issues that I am going through, there is a solution for that because many managers in a large organization could be left alone to deal with multiple issues that are happening in change.

And it could be a very stressful situation to deal with. And that is where coaching really helps.

So, what I have seen is that successful organizations generally have an organized coaching initiative during any change.

So, they would identify people who really need to have a few coaching sessions to discuss their fears, their apprehensions and how they could perform better. What are the skills that they need to learn apart from what is already identified by the organization? And when the organization take care of these conversations, it also kind of gives a signal that the organization is interested in their well-being organization, interested in listening to them and providing them the support that they need in actually taking the organization in the transformation journey.

So, seriousness in creating this coaching program during the change would go a long way toward the success that the change would deliver. use it’s the middle management who actually has the onus of transforming the organization.

If they themselves do not feel confident, if they themselves are not clear, it’s difficult to achieve the objectives of the change in the defined time.

Question 7: How should HR leaders assess and manage the resistance to change and what strategies should they employ to overcome it.

Answer: I think the first learning for any manager is to understand that the reasons for resistance would be multiple.

Usually, the most important reason for resistance is lack of information during change process.

But this is not the only reason.

If there is a lack of information, you could probably provide information and you can plan for this and therefore the resistance is likely to be lower.

But you have to provide the data in an easy to digest format for the audience to whom you are communicating. But there could be multiple other sources of resistance.

Let’s say if I’m making a very drastic change in an organization, it could really change my identity to the organization. I always believed that my organization cared for x, but now in the change, it probably is not doing.

So, I’ll give an example from a recent case in one of the organization, a change led to hiring more people from lower colleges, which they didn’t use to hire earlier. So the organization only used to hire from top colleges. Mostly, these are engineers.

When organizations started hiring from all other places, many of the earlier employees started feeling that it’s not the same organization, because we were a club of very premier engineering graduates.

But we are no longer that anybody is coming in. And that changes the way you connect with the organization. And there were of course, many other changes.

So of course information is even useful here. But in this case, what had happened that the business was growing and the kind of segment that the organization used to work with that segment didn’t have a lot of growth.

So, then they moved to a different segment, relatively lower, wherein they had to cut costs. And of course they would not have access to the cream de la creme all the time. When you have to manage with lower cost.

Therefore, the number of people in the organization went up. And to allow for that number of people, they started hiring from all other colleges.

But we have to also make people understand that this change in identity is perceiving, because the resistance is probably emerging from change in identification with the organization.

And how can I see a new identity in the change circumstances? So in this case, maybe there is more growth because there is more number of people in the organization. I am already an old employee, therefore I have much more opportunity to contribute in the management role, which I didn’t have earlier.

And therefore I have to redefine this identity for this individual because the resistance is of course due to lack of information, but also due to identification issues with the change. So when people just resist because they don’t have information, information helps. But people could resist because of a lot of reasons.

We need to find out what those, what those reasons are. I’ll give you another example. Sometimes people don’t resist because they don’t agree with. People resist because it’s not that they disagree with change, but maybe they are occupied, they are busy, or sometimes they are lazy.

And that is unacceptable information. And therefore, if people dont find time or they are lazy to work on the new change initiative that you want them to work on, we have to remind them all the time, because if we dont, they might not follow through.

So, understanding multiple sources of resistance and then adopting multiple strategies and thinking that all resistance is due to just one reason would be a mistake.

So find out, interact in the organization, get insights about resistance. And then I would suggest to adjust the strategy, and that would be really helpful.

Question 8: What steps should HR leaders take when addressing the emotional and psychological aspects of change for employees, particularly during times of uncertainty and ambiguity?

Answer: I think first is recognizing that people are going through phases of stress or phases of uncertainty.

They are going through fear, and identifying that this is the case now depends on MNA, because you use the context of m and A, there are multiple things that happens in m and A. At some places, the m and a process would have a lot of fear that would I be laid off. And that’s a very different discussion to go through.

But I would assume that let’s say the process has been done. And of course, the people who are left are kind of expected to be retained now. They might still be afraid of what is going to happen.

They might still be afraid about which process will be retained, whether their organization process or the other one. In this case, it has been seen that if you can even have the feedback assist coming in of the kind of emotions that people are going through, then you can design interventions.

You can probably even assure them about things that are possible within that circumstance. Because it is m and a, sometimes it’s difficult to assure them of continuity, but then it is possible to assure them about improvements.

It is possible to assure them about what the organization is doing and how it is going to add value and how it is, how meaningful their role is here.

So, people need to find that they are, they are the ones who are also meaningful to the organization. They are contributing to the organization, and then the fear might come down. So, depending on the emotions that people are going through, if the emotion is about fear, I can, you know, assuage their fear.

But if emotion is about self-doubt, then I have to probably provide those training programs, and skill sets that could reduce the feeling of self-doubt and increase conversations, increase collaboration, have groups to discuss and have groups to share these emotions, and all of these together probably would be helpful in such a tricky situation if I would say, such as M.

Question 9: In your academic research. Professor Shield, have you come across any emerging trends or innovations in HR technology that you personally find very intriguing and promising?

Answer: Yes, I think this whole AI is really transforming the way we can capture a particular variable in the organization.

So, when earlier change would happen, we would probably have to ask a question about, let’s say, emotions. But now probably I can get emotions from texts, get emotions from emails, and that is something which probably can really revolutionize the way I can predict. I can know things that are happening in an organization.

However, at the same time, it comes with its own issues in privacy. And I have seen multiple organizations that are still trying to adopt this approach, but also providing tools which allow individual employees to remain private. And that’s a very interesting area to go forward.

Question 10: How do you incorporate discussions about HR technology trends and advancements into your curriculum to ensure that the students are well prepared for the future workplace?

Answer: Your take on that push, I agree with you. So, when we are discussing change or when we are discussing design, it’s very important for students to understand how they can work with large amounts of data.

There are two aspects of working with large amounts of data. One is, of course, the technical aspect of how you make sense of the data for which you need, you know, skills related to statistics and so on, so forth.

But I think more important than that is your ability to understand with a particular change what is already some of the data that you are collecting, which could be useful to you.

For example, we do invite organizations who are working in this domain, and there are many organizations who look at some of the data, say, for example, which departments are collaborating with each other more, which departments are having meeting with each other, which departments are overworked.

Or, when a change is going on, this kind of insight helps us understand what’s going on in our organization in a much better way, which is already available as a regular data in the organization.

The second aspect, of course, is to create the data based on the change that is going on.

So, how do we start new metrics?

How do we collect new kind of information?

Then when this is going on, how do you use large data to make sense of patterns of data rather than individuals?

So that is, I think, very, very important.

If there are teams that are more stressed, can you figure it out during the change process and have your focused intervention to those teams or those units where if you don’t intervene, the change may get delayed.

So, large data allows us to see those patterns, which is very useful in changing scenarios.

The second thing that I also use is when we are doing organization design, then how can we use some of the analytics that is there to probably map tasks, map tasks that are common tasks that are related, and then redesign the organization accordingly.

So, there are firms that do that, and we have these kinds of discussions in the class. But I would also emphasize that as technology progresses, what I always tell my students is that a capable leader will always be more important than the technology itself.

So, technologies would always be used as aids, but not replacements, because the insight that an individual can see would still be much more than the patterns that are given by computers.

Together you’ll be able to make sense of an organization in a much better way, rather than relying on just one.

Question 11: Any piece of literature or book that has left a lasting impression on you as an academician?

Answer: When I worked with executives, and let’s say there is a person that has come with 20 years of experience in a session and learns a very different insight in the classroom, we also want them to practice that at the workplace.

I have many executives tell me that we have been doing things in a certain manner since so many different, so many years, and it’s not easy to change.

I completely understand that. One insight that I have found very useful to talk to executives is a book, “Daring Greatly” by Brene Brown.

What Brene Brown says is that irrespective of how successful you are, you always need to learn new things to increase your success.

But when you want to learn new things, you cannot be an expert in that overnight.

So, when you want to do things in a new way, you would be vulnerable because it may fail, it may not result in the same kind of success that you were getting in doing things in your way.

But if we wish to do things in a new way, we will have to take a chance that it is likely to fade.

Long back, I was in a village in Chhattisgarh, and I stayed in that village for one month, and somehow people believed in that village.

Although, I was there for some sociometric, socio demographic analysis. But somehow people believe that I am there to learn Chhattisgarhi so every time a person will just pull me and start teaching me Chhattisgarhi, I learned the language a bit in that process.

So, I would start speaking and there will be many women in the village will start laughing at me and I would stop. I would start again in Hindi.

And one of the women told me that Bhaiya, if I, if you laugh and you stop speaking, you’ll never be able to learn.

So even if you are laughing, you keep on speaking and that’s when you will learn.

And that was so great inside for me and I kept on going and I was very fluent in the language in just one month.

That is a lifelong lesson for me.

So, I can connect it with Brenna Brown when she says that you need to be vulnerable and you have to accept that vulnerability, that you will not be an expert when you are learning new things, when you are doing new things and that connects with change as well, which, by the way, was one of our topics of the discussion today.

Closing Note

Thank you for tuning in to our enlightening discussion with Professor Rahul Sheel.

As HR professionals, you’ve now gained invaluable insights into managing change, fostering collaboration, and developing leadership within your organizations.

The next step is to apply these strategies: understand your team’s unique dynamics, customize your training approaches, and embrace continuous learning and adaptation.

Challenges will persist, but with the right mindset and tools, you can transform these into opportunities for growth and innovation. Stay proactive in diagnosing organizational issues, and leverage AI and analytics to drive informed decisions.

Stay tuned to our podcast channel for more insightful episodes that will further empower you in your HR journey. Our upcoming episodes are packed with expert advice and practical tips to help you excel in your career like never before. Don’t miss out!