Nobody can build you unless you are ready to build yourself!

The second day of Udyam 2012 was kicked off by none other than the father of Human Resource development in the country, Mr. T. V. Rao. The topic of the session was "Emerging challenges for the human resource leadership in the globalized corporate landscape." He started the discussion by illuminating the audience with his talk on the evolution of the human resource department in India. He described how the   first dedicated HR department, comprising  mostly of psychologists and social sciences experts was established in Larsen and Tourbo in 1974 with the sole aim of promoting all round development of employees. In the 1980's most of the US companies renamed their training department to HR department.  Other countries including India followed the trend.

In today's context, Dr. Rao emphasized the fact that the line between family life and professional life is blurring. With employees spending most of their waking hours in office and then carrying office discussions to home, corporations are fast becoming their second families. The real role of HR is to ensure good mental and emotional health of its employees. He further questioned the classical definition of HRD and discussed how most of the classical HR functions such as employee mentoring and development are today taken over by individual line managers. He opined that the focus should now shift from HR Department driven HRD to user driven HRD. Mr. Rao emphasised that the success of HRD function is when it has attained status of self liquidation. It is not needed any more to promote learning among line managers or other employees. It only provides a milieu and mechanisms and learning happens on its own.

He categorized leaders into the following four categories:

Doers: This class of people (around 80%) need explicit push in the form of Job Descriptions, Job Specifications or WBS.
Achievers: These leaders not only do what is asked for but some more
Visionaries: These leaders have all the characteristics of achievers and they achieve results faster by applying their own thinking. They see opportunities in problems. He explained this class with the example of Dr. Verghese Kurien (Amul revolution)
Missionaries: These people are wedded to work and undertake everything with absolute single minded purpose.

In the 70s and 80s, technology was scarce and hence it was the main strategic variable based on which companies competed. In current times, human talent is in short supply and thus it is the new strategic variable. In today's world it is easy to buy talent but it is very difficult to develop and nurture talent from within. Mr. Rao believed that buying talent would lead to poaching of talent. The present day manager has to plan for long term but deliver results in short run. Since there is no fixed formula to achieve that, every manager has to develop his own heuristics. In the present context, every manager has to manage multiple stake holders including his direct boss. Dr Rao gave two golden rules to better manage bosses - give your suggestions to him only before he has taken any decision. Any suggestion after he took a decision is taken as an open criticism.

He winded the session with 7 strategic challenges faced by HR today

HR should think ahead of the CEO.
HR should influence the CEO's thinking.
HR must restructure their role appropriately.
HR must work on developing leaders and leadership.
HR should focus on continuous learning, including learnings from gen Y.
HR must inculcate values and culture in all employees.
HR must work on developing intellectual capital of the orgranization.
He said that it is easy to determine a company's intellectual capital (Market capital-book value) but it is very difficult for an individual to calculate his intellectual capital. Dr. Rao shared his HRD mantra of "a person's IC is no where except his own mind."

The biggest take away from this session is that no matter which technology, domain or industry we eventually land in, we all need to develop strong HRD skills to become efficient managers.

By Nikhil Bhargava (Media Committee)