Talent Mgmt Conclave: Textbook Jargon To Reality

FORE School of Management, Delhi, in association with National HRD Network (NHRDN) organized the Talent Conclave 2012 - "From Textbook Jargon to Reality" on Friday, 14th December 2012 in New Delhi.

Clearly, the single largest challenge for India Inc. today, is managing it's human capital and creating the talent pool. With the growing demand for more and more skilled workforce, it is imperative today for corporate India to define required skill sets and a long term plan to develop a ground for breeding the talent, in order to keep pace with the phenomenal growth rate and reduce the demand supply gap.

With an objective to seek and explore how to effectively leverage talent management practices to drive business results, the conclave deliberated on linking Talent Management to Organisation Development and how organizations plan to harness talent management to achieve strategic and cultural imperatives.

With Dr. Anadi Pande, Vice President- Corporate Planning & Strategy, Corporate HR, Hero Motor Corp. as the Conclave Director for this Program and a galaxy of eminent panellists, the seminar
was a pragmatic happening, where people shared application-oriented experiences.

Linking talent management to organisation strategy, Anand Bhaskar : VP-HR, Sapient Corporation, mentioned, "Today's successful leader may not be a successful leader of tomorrow. Capabilities, competences and knowledgebase repositories need constant upgradation & evaluation".

Panellists, YV Lakshminarayan Pandit - M.D, SHL (India); Suchitra Rajendra - Director, Organizational Capabilities & Talent Acquisition, Pepsico; Rohit Jhamb - Director, Talent Acquisition, Aon Hewitt, deliberated on the leadership skills sets and agreed upon the fact that while transformational leadership competencies like, strategizing, people management and visionary skills may remain constant to some extent, transactional leadership competencies like, setting goals, plans, business skills are largely dynamic in nature and as per industry demands need to be constantly upgraded.

Prof. Freda Swaminathan, faculty, FORE School of Management, Delhi, with her vast industry experience heading the Marketing Communications team at Goodyear and working with ad agencies like Lintas, JW Thomas, adeptly led the session for ‘Best practices in Building future leaders', introspecting on the academia-industry roles in mentoring and balancing higher aspiration levels of youngsters and the organisations'. 'Most difficult task is to mentor people. Mentoring is not about offering a solution. It is more about assisting the mentee towards finding a solution for themselves', said, Anil Sharma, VP-HR ITC Hotels. He added, "Many things cannot be learnt through simulated learning system or case studies as they can only be learnt from a situational learning environment."

Sameer Khanna - VP & Head-HR, Ericsson India, talking on cultural differentiators in talent management, mentioned how the IT & ITeS organisations successfully led the industry in breaking-away the hierarchal patriarchy and making the work culture more and more open. "Even a junior employee can question the policy, if he has a valid point". While, everyone would agree to this in the Indian context, many may wonder how true would that be when it comes to Sameer San's office culture in Japan, where a clear demarcation exist between the white and the blue collared worker.

With interesting brain-storming sessions, involving the best of the minds from the corporate world, the Talent Management Conclave, turned out to be one of the best in recent times. Some of the other eminent speakers included were, SY Siddiqui - National President - NHRDN & Chief People Officer, Administration (HR, IT, Finance & COSL), Maruti Suzuki India Ltd; Dr. YV Verma - COO, LG Electronics Kamal Karanth - Managing Director - Kelly Services; Krish Shankar - Director-HR, Bharti Airtel; Dr. AK Balyan - MD & CEO, Petronet LNG Limited; KS Bhullar - President, Group HR, Anand Automotive Limited; Veena Swarup - Director - HR, Engineers India Ltd; KS Bakshi - VP-HR, InterGlobe Aviation Limited; Sabih Kidwai - Director HR Schneider Electric.

Source: nitin|talent creation|DebriN Synergy