News of Indian HR leaders such as Leena Nair (Unilever) and Rajesh Ramanathan (Mondelez) making it to the top of global HR in their organisations has focused attention on the least-recognised discipline of management. Both XLRI graduates, Ms Nair and Mr Ramanathan continue the tradition of churning out HR gold that institute is known for. (For the rest of the B-school gang, it is another story, but more on that later.)
In India, with the rise of the knowledge economy and high levels of churn in the technology sector, HR has come to assume an importance it was hitherto not given. Five-star panels discussing the latest trends are now a routine occurrence, the ones where participants wax eloquent on the changing dynamics of the profession, the need to nurture and retain flighty talent, the pitfalls of working with geographically diverse employees, and so on.
In spite of the global nature of today's HR practice, however, the impression that HR is only third- or fourth-best persists on B-school campuses. A job needn't even be corporate, as long as it's not HR, goes the wisdom. Anything from a communications role at Google to a regional posting at UNESCO, neither of which is hardcore business, is fair game.
Every time a Nair or a Ramanathan reaches the top deck of corporate hierarchy, one is forced to question this lazy correlation between HR and poor career growth. But tales of corporate success often omit to consider the long and grinding road from B-school passout to corporate superstardom, a path wrapped in the most banal cliches to give it a semblance of dignity. As in Bollywood, for every major corporate success, there are hundreds of others who are left doing the grunt work. They don't create anything new, but like all good people, are able to buy a house and a nice car to park outside. That surely counts for something.
Consider my flatmate Ravi (not his real name), who works for a consultancy. Last week, he returned home every day after 10 pm. When asked, he merely said he was working on an "extremely important" task for a Partner in Singapore. (Partners are senior consultancy professionals who run their own P&L.) Yesterday, he finally showed me what the "extremely important" task was about. It was a PowerPoint presentation with 12 slides to be shown at an investors' conference in Singapore.
I kid you not.
"You did 12-hour days for this?" I blurted.
"Dude, can't you see? There is so much material in there. I had to read reams of reports and scan hundreds of websites. The template itself is entirely new. We otherwise do very straightforward presentations. No smart art, nothing. Look here, I have put so much work into this one slide on retail."
Well to be fair, it was a half-decent presentation. Ravi informed me he received words of appreciation from almost everyone including the Chairman. Ah, that notorious back-scratching tic!
This is not a one-off. I have a sneaking suspicion that what Ravi earnestly calls "back-breaking meetings" are merely hot air sessions to articulate, in fresh lingo and with renewed focus, the same old rigmarole. Turns out a lot of his time is spent collating data and putting it together. Almost all the stuff that he puts on his slides is publicly available. The trick is to present it in such a fashion as to bowl the client over. Once the project is in his kitty, the monies start pouring in.
Who does the real work then? Beats me. And if you are HR, so much the worse. At Ravi's office, the HR department is one woman-strong, someone who also "helps" with admin; in other words, ordering coffee when there is a client meeting.
I am not being fastidious. I am not denying the corporate ascendancy that rigorous HR can provide. There are a number of shoo-ins: Talent Acquisition, Performance Management, Leadership Discovery, Training & Development, and so on. Corporate HR roles at elite organisations involve long-term projects whose aim is to redefine the way companies conduct their business.
Ms Nair, say, is famous for launching "Career by Choice" during her time at Unilever. A hugely successful programme that allows woman employees flexi hours, it has boosted Unilever's competitiveness manifold. Pavan Bhatia, who is set to oversee Asia, Middle East and Africa is his new HR role at PepsiCo, is recognised for "Indra's Advisors", under which rank and file employees are given a platform to share corporate strategy inputs with CEO Indra Nooyi.
But such roles, as I said, are few and far between. They are also mostly appropriated by XLRI grads. There is a common joke among the B-school crowd that all the interesting work in HR, the little that there is, is passed along from one XLRI alum to another. Some corporate HR work, then, can be interesting, but most of it is not. It is merely shifting of goalposts, involving acceptable levels of compromise and a whole lot of hogwash.
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