Board India Fall 2007 - The Conference Board

BoardIndia Fall 2007

Human Resources Council — India

Mumbai, 24-25 August

Council members were delighted to welcome two leading CEOs — Sanjay Nayar, CEO of Citigroup India, and R. Gopalakrishnan, Executive Director on the Board of Tata Sons. Both spoke inspiringly on how to ensure better HR and talent management practices in corporate India.

The newly-elected Council Chair, Bijay Sahoo of Reliance Industries and Co-Chair, Nancy Reisig of Ford India, guided the discussions. Three new female members — the HR Heads of Unilever India, BP India, Agilent Technologies — contributed to a more diverse thinking within the group. Among the observations made:

Indian companies are becoming increasingly attractive as a place to work. Add to that their attractive stock prices, it is becoming relatively more difficult for multinational companies to hire and retain people.
Leaders of multinational companies are not so empowered as local company CEOs and senior executives. The matrix organization brings its own advantages of global knowledge and scale. However, they can impede decisions and empowerment at local levels.
CEOs and HR executives are both faced with the challenge of managing contrasting styles and cultures within the same corporation.
Talent management has become too mechanical in many Indian companies. Firms will have to link it to the cultural anchors and ensure good people practices and development of the managers, since people leave their managers and not the corporations.

Council Senior Advisor Vivek Paranjpe led a roundtable on "Shades of Inclusive Work Cultures." From the discussion, some recommendations emerged for creating a culture of diversity and inclusion as regards gender, age, disability and caste. In particular, managerial stereotypes have to change and biases must be minimised. As a first step to creating an inclusive culture, managers need to ask the following questions:

Do people feel valued ?
Can they realise their full potential ?
Are they included in the mainstream of the corporation ?
Are they given equal opportunities for growth ?
Is their voice being heard ?

Members of the Council mentioned diversity networks, genderspeak forums and building external relationships with the larger community as valuable global best practices in diversity and inclusion. They stressed the importance of gender diversity as fundamental to any diversity programme.

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