While profits and targets remain vital for CEOs, they are also responsible for nurturing talent and charting out growth paths for employees parallel to their organisation's goals. And CEOs need to know employees beyond targets in order to achieve their goals, experts said on
Thursday.
"It's important for CEOs to understand individuals beyond projects and tasks etc," said Sudhanshu Vats, Group CEO, Viacom18 Media.
He was speaking at a panel discussion at the 3rd Hindustan Times-Shine Human Resources (HR) Summit, organised by Hindustan Times and Shine.com, HT Media's job portal. At least 200 HR chiefs, and business leaders attended the summit.
Panelists at the discussion included Rajan Anandan, managing director, Google India; and E Balaji, managing director, Randstad India. The session was moderated by Sukumar Ranganathan, Editor, Mint.
Anandan, who started his career at the consultancy firm McKinsey, said he discovered the importance of HR in an organisation a little later in his career as functioned in an aggressive meritocracy in which external influences were minimal.
"Though for the first 11 years of my career I had no idea what HR did there," he said. "Later in one of the companies where I worked I spent months to hire a new recruit after senior leaders left the organization. This happened after I had spent significant time on succession planning," he said, emphasizing the importance of planning in recruitment.
Balaji said CEOs should know the difference between satisfaction and commitment. "When he is happy with everything he's getting, does he push hard enough?" he asked.
"Ownership of talent is central responsibility of leadership," said Rajan.
Rajan said Google's flat structure helps employees find their space in the organisation.