In the corporate world today, we are working in a hyper environment. Targets, deadlines, and performance have become the three buzzwords that our corporate life seems to revolve around. Meetings, conferences, conclaves and even personal interaction with bosses have only one central theme – performance, performance and performance. Competition has unleashed its own unintended consequences. Infatuation with performance has created widespread anxiety in managers. Without performance, no doubt, no organization can survive, let alone succeed. But high performance culture without compassion and care can be dysfunctional as it can lead to alienation, withdrawal or resignation. We can never hope to get the very best from others unless we have feelings for others’ pains, agony and distress, with a caring and helping attitude in their difficult times. Even mere empathizing has the potential to soothe and comfort those in distress.

A major leadership challenge is succession planning. Presently, with all the progress in leadership, succession and building next generation leaders, while some are doing an excellent job many corporations cannot still find top level talent to take charge of corporations. Our public sector banks are a pathetic example of poor succession planning. In the next 3 to 5 years, most top level managers of PSBs are going to retire and nothing is being done by most. We do not yet have a mature methodology to identify and train future leaders. The only methodology we have is to provide them general management training and some training in foreign soil and by foreign experts who have very little idea of leadership or leadership development in India. In India, leadership, besides other things, is an emotional connect. Foreign scholars have limitations in understanding and training leaders for Indian corporations. While there is some work happening in India, we have a long way to go.

Managing workforce diversity and developing an inclusive work culture is imperative for businesses that strive for efficient talent management. Gender, race, nationality, ethnicity and disability are some of the commonly used criteria for employee segmentation and diversity definitions. However, it may be interesting to note that workplaces of today have yet another unexplored diversity dimension, that of the generations. Social, political, cultural, economic and technological climates in which an individual grows up are responsible for certain beliefs and behavioural characteristics of him/her and thus birth year can act as a deciding factor behind segmenting generations. With organisations employing personnel with varied, multidisciplinary skills, the average bandwidth of employee ages has been stretched far and wide. It is therefore significant that organizational leaders do not ignore the need to manage this diversity and leverage the underlying generational differences in the best interests of the organization.

The bar for accepted standards of transparency and accountability are rising and fast. Fair practice, equal opportunity employment, social contribution and preserving the environment will begin to matter for the employee and the consumer - and hence the investor. While agility, ability to manage employee expectations and to proactively tackling competition will continue to remain the focal points for leaders and organizations, Corporate Governance is slowly emerging as a critical intangible with an altogether new definition and role to play. In real sense of the word, Corporate Governance will be reckoned as that aligning force that will bind together the expectations of the stakeholders of the organization, business strategies and objectives, their impact on social, economic, political and cultural factors, and the future vision of sustainability and growth. The concept of corporate governance in India is, in essence, different from that in western countries. While in the latter it deals with accountability of management towards shareholders, in India it is more to do with protecting the minority shareholder from the dominant shareholder or promoter. Apart from the Satyam saga, there have been numerous instances of unscrupulous promoters in India.

Companies today struggle to implement strategies because of over reliance on structural changes in their organizations. Structural change is important and has its place, but most powerful executors of strategy focus on two different aspects from structural change: 1. Decision rights – Who makes decisions and how? 2. Information flows – Does the right information reach decision makers quickly and across organizational silos? Tackle these two first, and the third and fourth aspects of driving implementation – ‘structural change’ and aligning ‘motivating factors’ can follow later to support these moves. Our findings are surprisingly consistent across countries. Indian companies are no different from the global average and face a similar set of execution challenges.

Standard practices in industry and commerce today are largely the legacy of an ecologically innocent time, before we could assess such impacts, says Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence. Visionary leaders tackle great challenges with grand consequences over long timespans. How long? Well, the current crises in the global economy and the consequent reshaping of capitalism will work themselves out over a decade or two. But the threats posed by the potentially inexorable ecological meltdown of our planet will play out over centuries. That meltdown has direct implications for business leaders. The vast majority of industrial platforms, designs, chemicals and other habits of commerce were developed blind to their ecological impacts. The discipline that reveals these impacts is but a decade or two old: industrial ecology, which measures the manifold consequences of any product with an engineer’s precision. The main method, life cycle assessment, renders values for the environmental, health (and, more lately, social) impacts of an item over the course of its entire life cycle. Standard practices in industry and commerce today are largely the legacy of an ecologically innocent time, before we could assess such impacts. Now that we can measure those impacts, we need to rethink and reinvent almost every man-made thing. We need to innovate on a vast scale, finding new technologies that are at least neutral in their ecological impacts — and, ideally, some technologies that replenish our debts to nature.

Albert Einstein once said: ‘A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty’.

Very simply Macbeth overreached himself. His level of competence was as the second most powerful man. This is where he peaked and would have surely been a great success as King Duncan’s next in command, quite like George Patton who was, in the opinion of his senior, the world’s best subordinate. Compared with Claudius Macbeth has alienated everybody. Claudius, on the other hand, has alienated none. Also when Claudius murders the King, nobody knows. When Macbeth murders the king, everybody knows. Once moved by ambition, Macbeth moves very fast and is soon on the other side of ruthlessness. He would kill everybody as for Macbeth, greed is greater than ability. To begin with, Macbeth murders Duncan against his will, that is, against his svadharma. He is mediated by his wife but the action itself acquires a momentum and forces a series of actions that are intended to cope with the outcomes of the first. But these in return have further consequences. Before Macbeth knows it, collective outcomes are in excess of his ability to cope.

The advent of the hybrid way of work has completely changed how a new hire is integrated into the company and its culture. And it’s much more than welcoming them and lining up a series of one to ones. In today’s era of war for talent, helping new joiners develop a sense of connect and belongingness to their new organization goes a long way in positively impacting employee engagement, employee retention, motivation, and productivity.

HR Technology has been used to streamline operations, to enhance efficiency, and to improve effectiveness across business functions. With a hybrid workplace shaping the future of work and the modern worker, the use cases for HR technology are amplified. Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Automation, Internet of Things are ushering a digital HR transformation. This is aided by the fact that digital savviness is one of the key talent magnets for a generation of millennial and GenZ workforce. To meet these expectations, it is important that organizations embark on the digital HR journey with a clear purpose and process. This starts with identifying the HR areas that will truly be benefited from HR tech.