Corporate Success with a Human Touch

Deepa Navani
August 2014
Culturama

Dr. Santrupt B. Misra, CEO of Carbon Black Business and Director of Group Human Resources of the multi-billion dollar Aditya Birla Group, is known as the "guru of HR" in India. In this exclusive interview with Culturama, he touches on the essentials of leadership, his learning over a 19-year journey with the Group, and what it takes to thrive in today's global economy

When asked about the secret behind his successful handling of two important wings of the multi-billion dollar Aditya Birla Group — the Carbon Black Business and Group Human Resources — Dr. Santrupt Misra points to two things: his own ability to multi-task and juggle things, and the fact that he is supported by excellent teams on both ends. It is clear that it is all about people for him — little surprise, then, that he started out in the field of human resources. "I was an HR person, am an HR person, and will be an HR person. I am proud to be one," he says. His commitment to his people is exemplified by the fact that his team members have remained with him for over a decade — a big achievement in a corporate world where rewards seek out talent at twice the speed.

Prior to joining the Aditya Birla Group in 1996, Dr. Misra, armed with two Post-graduate degrees and two PhDs, worked with the J.K. Group, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and Hindustan Lever Ltd, and was also a trainer and consultant to about 40 organisations in India. He joined the Aditya Birla Group as Vice President of Human Resources at the age of 30, and rose to become its youngest director at the age of 35. When he took over the Carbon Black Business as CEO, it stood at number four in the world. In 18 months, Dr. Misra brought it to the number one position — an achievement that speaks volumes about his leadership capabilities.

Speaking about his own long-standing career with the Aditya Birla Group (19 years and counting), Dr. Misra touches on the "soul" of the organisation — the core of social responsibility — be it scholarships or welfare schemes. This, he says, is something not many organisations can lay claim to. In a global world, where competition and advancement are becoming the order of the day, such commitment to deeper values is heartening, even inspiring.

What would you say are your key learning points from this 19-year journey at the Aditya Birla Group?
There are many points of learning — it's very hard to capture all of those, but here are my top five:
Nothing risked, nothing gained. I have taken a lot of risks, maybe some have paid off, and some haven't paid. But then, looking back, I would have always taken the same risks...because, unless you take risks, you don't know what works and what doesn't.

You can't do it alone - reach out to people. You shouldn't try to do it alone, and you should never believe that you did it alone. So, you have got to reach out to people and you never know who can help you in what way. You have to keep on trying to sell your ideas to people, try to enlist them about what you want to do — and you will always find people who think alike, or who are doing what you want to do.

Don't let surprises stop you - recalculate. No matter how meticulously you have thought through an issue and planned for it, there will always be surprises. And don't get stopped by those — learn to take them in your stride and reroute yourself like the GPS devices do in the United States. So re-position yourself and find a new route.

Be responsible for the 'multiplier effect'. Joy lies not in making things happen, but in sharing your learning and insights with other people and thereby inspiring them to find their own way...to make things happen, because at the end of day, the only way you can c;reate a multiplier effect is by having more and more people think independently and differently and find new ways of doing things. Otherwise, you can't change a large organisation.

Be nimble; believe in transient advantages. Perhaps there is nothing called a sustainable competitive advantage. You will keep finding transient advantages — and that will keep you ahead of others; by the time others copy and reach you, you would have found something else to move onto. This means you have to keep your organisation very nimble, agile, learning-friendly...and keep people comfortable with change so they can adapt to and adopt new things, and continuously find the new edge that keeps you ahead of the curve.

And since Culturama serves a global readership, let me add: Be comfortable with both who you are and who you are with to make the most of what the world has to offer. If you are worrying about being like other people, I think your mind space is getting occupied and you are not able to learn and enjoy the diversity, the beauty of it. And if you are not comfortable being with other people, then also you miss out, so watch out for how others communicate, pick up their signals. You need to be able to achieve both of those to really enjoy the global experience.

You wear two hats — one of Group Human Resources and the other of the Carbon Black Business. You have grown the business from fourth largest to the largest in the world. How do you balance the two very different sets of resources and the results you are hoping to achieve?
I have been asked that question many times in the last five years, and I am hoping that, someday, someone will be willing to give me a million dollars to give a truthful answer! Having said that, there is no magic formula to it. I think, one, I have been fortunate to have two very capable teams on both sides — and that makes my life easy.

Second, the fact that I am not a micro-manager makes my life easy. I am able to trust people, I have confidence in them. I don't worry and lose sleep about every little thing that goes wrong, and don't try to tell everybody how to do their job. So I think my sense of security helps me not to over-supervise — that's something if you do, you cannot do a large job or multiple jobs because you get drawn into too many details.

The third thing that helps me is to be able to prioritise, to say: What is important? Where am I uniquely positioned to add value that others cannot? And make sure that I give my time and attention to that. If you can do that, then you can handle multiple responsibilities.

Lastly, one of my strengths is being a juggler. I can do many things and change channels in my mind, and yet remain focused on each one of them. I think I am personally highly productive. So, some of these personal characteristics and my personality type have helped me to cope with two jobs.

The visionary Aditya Birla Group Scholarship, which you are part of, aims to foster academic talent and encourage humane leadership values. What are the key principles that students should follow to become leaders of tomorrow?
The eternal truths of leadership remain few, always. One is courage — a deep sense of personal courage to do things, take on things, speak your mind, go perhaps where no one has gone before. So, courage is very important. You've got to display a sense of personal courage that is thought through, which is not impulsive.

Second is taking initiatives. Once you have the courage, it has to translate into action, which is taking the initiative. Third is hard work - there is no substitute for hard work. Every leader, I think, is a leader because he or she works very hard. People think leadership is about being smart, but I believe leadership is all about doing hard work... it is working hard — 16 or 18 hours — with a sense of passion... When you do something you are passionate about, you don't feel tired. You can give your best. Initiative, courage, hard work, passion — these are all internal to you, so you have got to draw on that eternal internal fountain of inspiration to be able to do that. The last and most important thing is to be able to connect with people, and harness the collective power and inspire them. I think that is what leadership is all about.

As a student, there are many opportunities — how you relate to your classmates, professor, your course, exam, internship, community work, role in youth organisations — to bring that differential passion, courage and hard work. And if one is consistently able to do it over and over again, one not only gets a lot of motivation, inspiration and energy out of it, one also learns what works well for one's self and others. Leadership is the end product of a lot of small things, not big things. If you get the small things right, the big things will happen.

What are some Aditya Birla Group best practices to follow?
There are so many admirable qualities in this organisation — that is what has kept me here for 19 years. I was the youngest director in the organisation; I was elevated to the Board of Directors by the age of 35. That was the beauty of it — diversity in age or gender does not matter. Meritocracy is what matters.

The culture of the organisation is one of respect... care. I have a colleague who unfortunately had a heart attack, and has been in coma for over two years; we continue to pay his family his full salary and look after his medical requirements. There are very few organisations in the world that do that. The soul of this organisation is in the right place. We have an employee value proposition called 'a world of opportunity'. We tell our potential employees that here is a world of opportunity.

We said, 'Let's not keep this only as employee value proposition', so we took it forward to c;reate a World of Opportunity Foundation, to which we as managers contribute money, out of which we give money to our workmen's and supervisors' children who are bright, who get admission into universities but do not have the money to fund it. This year, we collected over Rs. 4 crore in contributions — not many organisations can boast of that. We do so much of community work — we have 45,000 students studying in 42 schools of ours; over 20,000 out of that get free education.

I don't lose people in this team not because I am a great guy, but because this organisation's soul is in the right place. After a point, people connect to it, and they stay. At the senior manager level, the attrition rate would be 0.001%.

You are a Human Resources professional who later became a CEO. What are the essential qualities you had to imbibe to become a CEO?
I did not try to be a CEO. All I said is, 'Let me leverage all the strengths I have built as a human resource professional to be a CEO — which was connecting with people, managing people and teams, inspiring them, creating a big vision, rallying people around that. When I took over this job, we were world number four in Carbon Black; within 18 months, we became world number one.

One of the things that human resources function teaches you is to keep your ego in control, because you have to deal with people and address their issues. I think that helped me learn faster, helped me reach out to people and ask them stupid questions without bothering about what they would think of me. As I said earlier, you need to be comfortable about who you are — so, the fact that you do not know is a fact that you need to be comfortable with. The moment you are uncomfortable about it, you try to play games and hide it — and you don't learn.

One of your areas of specialisation is training and development. How important is it for an organisation to invest in training its employees, especially in a global context?
It is extremely important — the kind of explosion of knowledge and information that is happening around [us], the rate at which skills are getting obsolete, it is important that people need to be trained all the time. It is good for you [the organisation], it is good for them [the employees]. They remain employable and you remain productive as an organisation. Those who do believe in investing in learning and training, I think, are making the biggest mistake – they are fast-forwarding their own death.

In 2009, when the world collapsed and the economies were falling, our Chairman wrote to us asking us to be cost conscious, to tighten our belts, but the one budget you do not cut is for training. That was a fantastic message for a Chairman to deliver to the organisation during an economic downturn, because training is often seen as a discretionary expense by most people.

To have a global mindset and capabilities, you should expose yourself to cross-cultural training, language training, training to communicate in different settings, being comfortable with different kinds of decision making.