Talent to Value: Identifying and Nurturing High Performers: Jayaram Philkana (CHRO at Indorama)

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So that's the meaning of Talent to Value, which is focusing talent management efforts on the highest value creating positions and asking tough questions. Do you have the right people in those jobs? Are they fully engaged? What are their development needs? Do they have mentors who can break walls if required for them to be able to do what they need to do to deliver that value agenda for the company?

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Joining us today is Jayaram Philkana, JP. JP is currently the CHRO of Indorama Corporation. And he has a wealth of experience that span across three decades in biotech, agriculture, as well as pharmaceuticals. I'm excited to have him on the show and we'll dive deeper into his thoughts in building top talents as well as driving meaningful change.

Welcome to the show, JP. It's great to have you here. For our audience who may not be familiar with you, could you maybe share more about yourself, both at work and also outside of work?

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father, very proud of it. My [: 00:02:00

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I also did some interesting work in a corporate B2B kind of a role when I was based in the US, but I would say I'm a regular HR person in my heart. Somebody whose passion is helping people realize their potential and deliver business results. At the end of the day, that's what I genuinely enjoy doing it.

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Can you tell us more about that?

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Or in Indorama, the big purpose is we are in the business of producing essential materials. That serves to inform why am I working? What am I working towards? So let's say organizations goals. The second is clarity on roles of individuals and teams. Okay. How do I connect with the big picture?

What is my contribution? What should I focus on in my job and what should I help others as they focus on their jobs. And three is fairness and rewards and consequences. To me, that's a better way to describe culture because culture to me describes what is encouraged and what is discouraged in an organization's, you know, ways of doing things.

he people processes for good [: 00:05:00

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our learning and development [: 00:06:00

And we invited leaders to teach because that's the best way to make a leader actually learn something. When you ask a leader to teach, he or she has to put in more effort. So I think that is one example where the power of listening helped us recalibrate where we should focus our learning and development dollars and management time.

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You have a position that is very interesting. It's the Global HR Transformation Officer. This is a role that I don't often hear of. So tell us more about what that role entails.

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I would highlight two things, Dorothy. One is in a regional context, I was expected to lead moving away from one HQ in Singapore, serving 12 countries in the region to creating four regional offices, three of which are co-located in operating countries, which brought in a very good dynamic of people in regional functions being closer to the operating businesses and customers in the field, as also reducing the cost to serve the markets.

rein during the calendar year: 2024

And we tweak the talent management process, wherein they had to focus at the top of the house only on those positions which have a big impact on value so that you're still focused on managing talent in those critical roles. Nothing is at risk. But you also help them save some time by saying this is where you need to focus on.

So that's the meaning of Talent to Value, which is focusing talent management efforts on the highest value creating positions and asking tough questions. Do you have the right people in those jobs? Are they fully engaged? What are their development needs? Do they have mentors who can break walls if required for them to be able to do what they need to do to deliver that value agenda for the company?

I think these are two interesting things I had a chance to do in that role.

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And you would rather want the management to be focused on those 30 and not on all hundred so that they can take their time away, which is saved and focus it on something else. So the what is the same, but the who, on whom it is focused, we narrowed it down. We brought in a lot more focus.

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I mean, somebody's ability to do something very different in a very different kind of a context.

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o you take me back to roughly: 2005

And so we needed to look for people to lead trading teams who are not necessarily the best traders themselves, but who could energize this trading teams to find out what is really that niche gap for the customer, which we need to figure out and spend a lot of time to find out. Because the customer is not going to tell you here is what I wanted to do different.

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So sometimes, it's not only alignment, it's also about transformation.

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So what's your approach to this? Have you seen any initiatives that you have rolled out or you experienced to effectively manage both?

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And it requires a very different kind of energy to be there in both these conversations. My biggest learning is if you try to do both in one go, it doesn't succeed, number one. So we can look at it in two different ways. There are some organizations where I work, where the first one is in the context of the regular performance review or regular check in conversations as to how are you doing.

Then, give feedback on what can be done in a better way. And that organization, it was mature enough to say the development conversation needs to be actually held in at a different point of time, not be part of the performance review conversation. Makes life easy. And some other organizations where I've worked, both were meant to happen if part of the same cycle.

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How can HR better support not just from a process standpoint, but also from a manager capability upskilling standpoint?

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I think that's one thing at a human level. Second, at a process level, make sure that, you know, these two conversations happen at a very different timeframe.

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We know they're all separate. Well, I would maybe argue compensation is more closely tied to performance, but from your experience, how does that then come in in this whole space of talent management?

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tly, it's about fairness and [: 00:18:00

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So in Syngenta,: 2023

Now, things are still not happening exactly the way they need to happen. And that is when one of the leadership team members made a comment. It's not so much about the regional leaders doing something, but the country leadership teams actually taking that ownership and accountability to figure out how to grow the business in the geographies.

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Two day workshops, where you start with, you know, first of all, making them feel comfortable that hey, you know, I'm not here to give you some magic pill to figure out your growth agenda. But I'm here to help you actually discuss and agree on what would growth mindset look like in action. What would it look like in terms of leadership behaviors and the shifts that you need to make, the from to.

And by the way, there is also what is called as limits to growth, because if we just grow the top line without thinking about the denominator, that's not going to be a healthy one. So how do you also manage constraints while, you have all these dreams about growing into bigger.

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You have to think of the short term. You have to also think of the long term, right? So it's not just grow, you know, for you to grow in this, you also have to give up something else. And, maybe do something less of, what is that less of something more of something? I was not there to tell them, but facilitate conversations.

So pretty interesting. I survived to tell the tale. We did that in eight countries. And the most interesting pattern that emerged is, a lot of the leaders telling us. This is eight countries or an average nine people in a leadership team, 70 plus people saying we are so much on the dance floor to use an analogy, busy dancing, we don't go to the balcony, to take that view and look at what the forest is like and who's doing what and we're all behaving like, we're all bricklayers, right?

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One would say, very different cultures. But interestingly, in both the countries, this was what they said. And mind you, I didn't tell them. At the end of their discussion, they said, this is something we need to do more of, which is going to the balcony. And then some interesting conversations on, if I go to the balcony, then who will do the dancing?

How do I make sure that, I still have control because I still need to deliver my monthly targets. So growth mindset to me is a lot about exploring, making yourself vulnerable during the process. But then you do have clarity at the end of such exercises as to what should I do more of, what should I do less of, what are the trade offs?

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What I also love is the fact that you didn't outsource it. You yourself and your HR team trained on this. And to your point earlier, actually, sometimes the best way for leaders to also grow is they themselves teach it back. And I think the very fact that because you as HR, did the training, someone within the company with the same context, I'm also an employee of the company, it makes the training a lot more relatable and personable.

I'm going to switch gears a little bit and ask you about what the future looks like. So if you were to fast forward yourself to many years later, what do you think the ideal workplace of the future would look like?

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Which is the work is something that is meant to be done in the workplace. Two, any and every work can be done from out of the workplace because guess what we did that during the COVID period. But COVID is gone, the world has come back to normal and we can't pretend like COVID is still there and therefore, everything needs to be done remotely. It can't be zero or hundred. Number one i think that's a big learning for me. And why do i say this? Because there are certain functions especially where you learn over a period of time like an apprentice.

Now, if you're simply going to work from home all the time. Who is it that you're going to connect with socially and, get the benefit of their tacit wisdom? I mean, you're not going to be able to get that. The biggest surprise for me was my 22 year old daughter then. She did an internship, which was 100 percent work from home.

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So number one, I want to bust this myth. This generation Z, wants only work from home and that generation will only work from office. No, I think this is not so much about generations. But it's about at an individual level, some people have some preferences. Second, we need to be cognizant of what else needs to be learned by a person.

What else needs to be accomplished by a person other than just work deliverable as we formulate these policies of work from home or work from office or what I would advocate a healthy hybrid. That's one. The other learning I have, Dorothy, on this direction, I want to connect it back to our discussion on development and high potentials and talent.

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And then you cannot therefore say, you have to move from one country to another country necessarily as a part of your career growth. Yeah, it would be good. I've myself lived in four different countries. I've valued a lot. My family benefited, but we can't say it is either that way or no way, right?

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You can be in different parts of the country. Distributed leadership. That's what it boils down to. I think it's a reality. We have experienced it. It will be tempting to see how much further we can build on it. Last but not the least, I also like to believe there is so much of automation.

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The way you treat somebody doing lab work will be different from the way you need to treat somebody doing factory work will be different from doing field work from office work. So that's one point in the triangle. The other point in the triangle is distributed leadership roles, which would allow more families to experience growth together without having to be separated because they have to go in different directions.

And third, understand automation, in terms of how is it changing the human being's role in work being done in the value chains.

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It may or may not work here. And it's very important for you to co create whatever new change you want to bring in with people who are going to experience it. You can also say this is design thinking, right? This is exactly what design thinking tells us. Help the users understand what is the change that is going to come in so that they feel involved.

And then they're vested in this change also succeeding subsequently. So the users for a lot of these kinds of policies are line managers, people managers, very important for us to engage them. If I have to give only one advice, that would be my advice.

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And make sure that there is a feedback loop so that you try to bring the change very fast through some pilots and not wait for everything to be, you know, boiled over a long period of time. I think that's one way to look at it. Sometimes there is also a change which either you are looking around the corner and you're seeing the need, but maybe others are not.

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This was in a geography where historically labor cost was seen as not relatively cheap, but that country was going from a minimum wage to a living wage kind of a model. And so I saw that coming and then when I wanted that change to be prioritized by management team said, but you know, this is a relatively small part of the cause.

Why are you so bothered about it? It was not easy, but hung on to it and they understood why this is probably important. And a year down the line, when that living wage became a reality, we were a much more efficient organization. And that helped. So one, if it is very well understood as to the why is very well understood.

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We need to be trusted at the end of the day that we are not here to implement some best practices, but we are here to bring some change because we believe that is directly connected with the purpose. And the success of the organization.

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And it's essentially bringing clarity around the big picture and also bringing clarity to all employees on how they can contribute to the big picture. Okay, JP, so now I'm going to, you know, switch gear to a bit, hopefully more fun section of this podcast. I'm going to ask you some rapid fire questions, and I'm going to start with what is one thing you wish more employees understood about HR?

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We have emotions, we can be glad, we can be mad about something, we can be sad, we can be scared. Sometimes all four at the same time. I think yeah, it will be great when people see us as human, like anybody else and everybody else in the company.

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We are not running the business. We are here to serve people running the business. And if we know how to make them successful, which is what you learned from this book. Our job will be easy.

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Make a quadrant perhaps, on a quiet Sunday evening and see if you can do it, every week. And the X axis can be important. Y axis can be urgent. And see where is my time, where is my energy going? Is it in that most urgent, most important quadrant or at least the most urgent or the important quadrant?

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And it serves me as a good reminder of what I should do the next week.

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losing jobs and families. The: 2008

I'll never forget that learning of the power of giving how when thousand people give thousand small things, it will become a very, very big thing for the recipient. I wish I started giving more of my time and money and whatever else I could give when I was much younger.

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eople in a marketing role or [: 00:39:00

And I think all of you deserve to be fantastic HR leaders with a lot more knowledge of the business as you grow in your careers.

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Asking great questions is difficult. You're done a fabulous job. Thank you for having me here.

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ct. I'll see you in the next [: 00:40:00