“Maturity Comes with Making Mistakes, Learning comes through experience and maturity comes with making mistakes.”

By Swaminathan Subramanian

The above quote is the starting point of our discussion with Mr. Swaminathan Subramanian, Chief People Officer at Fullerton India Credit Company Ltd. Also our first CXO featured in the first issue of our newsletter.

Being a believer in learning through observation, he did not have an assigned mentor but learned from people around him. He sees the initial years of his professional experience as essential grooming across MNCs and across markets in the UK, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

He considers his current assignment as more entrepreneurial coupled with strong international standards of governance. In this context, he underscores the approach of continuous learning as pivotal to success. He says, “we leave university thinking we have learned everything, but there is maturity in having the humility of not knowing everything.”

He defines mentorship as a mutually beneficial activity, both the mentor and mentee can see it as an opportunity to learn from each other. It dispels any prejudicial approach to solving business challenges, and a better approach would be to ask questions and have an adaptive style.

One of his CEOs once told him that he still lives by - “every time you do something new, you feel like a management trainee”, which is a concept that stuck with him. By doing new things, the fear of not having complete knowledge also keeps us grounded as human beings.

While his mentoring experience has been largely informal, he also believes in the concept of formal mentoring. As a mentor, he has mostly mentored people he has worked with and informal mentoring of his ex-colleagues, particularly with career decisions. He believes it is important to focus on both employee performance as a manager and carrying the role of a mentor. The mentorship program through Leadup Universe is his first experience mentoring an assigned mentee, and he is looking forward to the structured approach the program has to offer.

We ventured into the conversation around the disruptions around the new world of work and heard his view on Leadup’s new offering - the PG Certificate in HR Technology and Digital Transformation by WDI at the University of Michigan, powered by PeopleStrong. He has observed that several recent events, including demonetization and the pandemic, have provided the necessary digital thrust to transactions and collaboration. He truly believes that Crisis often triggers transformative change. It promotes digital as a mindset that is quick, boundary-less, and paperless with data being central to decision-making. Hence it is extremely important to adapt to the new needs of the modern workplace and adopt technology and learning continuously by investing in self.

Organizations cannot be limited to an annual pulse survey to check employee engagement, it is real-time and needs instant feedback to ensure course correction. Systems such as emoji-based feedback at airports, delivery channels, and cab rides do both, capture feelings instead of activities and give quick data that can be analyzed anywhere in the world, which is particularly important in the field of HR.

As we gathered his last thoughts he thinks blending industry experts to share ideas can create something valuable. Mentorship is a good intervention to network with people and with one another and be a sounding board to each other, which is important once we get out of academics and step into the world of being a professional and experiencing work life. The career of tomorrow will get impacted with all the above things put together.