Career Conversation with Nathan SV — Partner and Chief Talent Officer at Deloitte India

Career Conversation with Nathan SV — Partner and Chief Talent Officer at Deloitte India. In this 40 minutes long conversation, he speaks about

a) His formative years across Kolkata, Chennai and Nagpur; and the impact his grandmother had on his value system,

b) His inclination towards HR, doing his MBA from XLRI Jamshedpur,

c) How HR profession has evolved over the 37 years he has spent across manufacturing and service sector , across factory workers and professionals at ICI, Sterling Holidays, Microland, Planetasia, Reliance Infocomm and now Deloitte,

d) His view towards recruitment, engagement and managing growth expectations of the millennials

e) Experience with the finance professionals such as CAs and MBA( Finance) ‘

f) what if someone are not from XLRI / TISS but still in HR, he cites the example of someone who was in secretarial function (steno/shorthand etc) and now is VP (HR) in a large company

g) How to stay positive in a post hashtag#Covid19 world’

h) His mantra for fitness and

i) Lines of advise to youngsters.

Worth every minute of your time

Q1. Before we plunge into the professional part, could you please tell us about your formative years, schooling, college and the values you learnt from your family?

Ans: First of all, schooling, one of the most exciting parts of my life is schooling. I was born into a very modest family and I had my primary education in Calcutta. I studied in a school called Auxilium Convent School, Dum Dum, and we all ran away from that place because of the Naxalbari movement, and they were after people who were not really sons of the soil as it were, otherwise I would have been very happy continuing in Calcutta itself. It’s still a fantastic place, I love the place. I moved from Calcutta to Madras and did the rest of my primary education and middle school from Madras. High school was from Nagpur. So it’s a strange thing. I did primary in one place, middle in another city, high school intermediate was from Nagpur and so it was learning new languages, meeting new people, but at the core of all of this was something that I will never forget. Years ago I remember that there was this family, they were modest and they used to have just one room and everything around them was just common including common bathroom, and so there was this old lady, a grandmother who used to feed all her grandchildren telling them stories on the sidewalk. So on the platform she used to sit down which was their living room in some sense. I was very very interested because the lady gave us great stories and it so happened that one day, I joined the group and she was speaking about something very exciting and she used to take some curd rice and give it to each one of the people around. One day, a car went by and when it did one of the people listening to her got distracted and turned around. When that happened the old lady got very upset and she managed to slap the person and said “what’s it I am telling you a story and why is it!” and the boy said “I am sorry I got distracted by the car”, she said “what of it?” and he said “can I ever sit in a car”. You are looking at somebody on the pavement because all they know is that they go to a corporation school, they sit on the ground, they have no vision for themselves. Here was a grandma telling them stories and a boy getting distracted by a car. She said, “If it is a car, then you must own the car, you must sit in the front. And if you are sitting behind, that must be your driver, that must be your car.” I never forgot that story because I was listening to that story, I will always remember that story because every time I sit in a car, I am reminded of this old lady. The person who got distracted is speaking to you and the lady who gave out those wonderful stories was my very own grandmother, and from her, all that we learned was you got to work exceedingly hard and then you got to work right. You got to be clear in what you want and today if I ever look back in life that one thing that I always be grateful to is my grandmother because she gave us the notion of how it is to work hard and say I am going to do something in my life. If I had to run which is what I did participating in all kinds of athletic competitions when I was in school and in college. My single-minded purpose was that I should do exceedingly well and in middle and long distance running, I always was at the top, and even about running I could tell you something, I wanted to run because I felt my father was a runner, so I mut be a runner too. I went to the playground and asked my coach and I said “Hey coach! Tell me if I am a good runner.” So he said okay do the 100 meter dash and I did the 100 meter dash and he looked at me and he says “you are no good as a runner” and then he shooed me away and I came home and when I met my mother and I was weeping, she asked what happened, I said “Mamma, they are not going to select me because I am not a good runner.” So my mother said, you asked the wrong question. She said, “Go back to the coach and ask him the simple question, in running what am I really good at.” So I went back the next day, same playground, went to the coach and asked the same and this time the coach said, “Now start running around and let me tell you what are you good at.” After almost 6 or 7 rounds of a 400 meter track, he looked at me and told me to go come near him and said, “You are good at middle and long distance running, and I will coach you.”

Very early in your life you have to know what you are good at and that was very inspiring for me because the coach just a day before told me I was useless, next day you ask the right question and the coach tells me this is what you could be good at. I represented my college as the college athletic Campton. That to me was fantastic. I wanted to be an engineer and this was in Nagpur, I had admissions to engineering colleges in Nagpur, VRC then which is NIT now. My father couldn’t afford me to stay in a place like Nagpur. We had transferred to Madras, and there what happened is simply this. I could not get admissions to engineering colleges. They were all closed for admissions. Then I went to every college saying give me some admission to some course and then I came across a college named “Vivekananda College” and they said will you take up mathematics. Did I like mathematics? The answer is no and did I have to take it, yes I had no choice. Did I do well in mathematics? I did exceedingly well. I was the best outgoing student of Vivekananda College. My learning from that was if you don’t get what you like, you like what you get, and do a good job of that. Post that I went to XLRI and then again I was a topper from XLRI and so on I moved on.

Q2. What prompted you interest in HR in XLRI? Did it just happen?

Ans: One is, I was academically very good, because of my grandmother. She said “If you got to do something, do it exceedingly well or don’t do it at all.” So I had all the requisite marks. My uncle, my father’s younger brother, was a trade union leader, and I had a choice of taking up business management or getting into HR because then I would learn a lot more about what is the industrial relations, what is it with factories, unions and so on. It is that curiosity that got me to human resources. Of course my uncle was mad at me because he said now you are sitting on the other side of the table, but that’s what I did.

Q3. In 80s was MBA as much in vogue as it is today, the passport to success? How was campus life in Jamshedpur then?

Ans: Whether it is today or in the 80s, it’s no different. I mean only the best of the best could even secure admissions, and it was very very clear, well, in those days it was not really called passport or that sort, but it did get you to some of the best companies that one can work for, and that is what got me to really applying myself at XLRI. We had great companies that came in for campus, so I believe whether it is then or it is now, there is always a huge calling for people in the field of MBA. I majored in human resources, but I could have majored in marketing and so on. My very first job on campus when I got it was not even in human resources, they said why didn’t you come up in marketing and that was from a leading consumer brand in India and I could have gone into the company but I didn’t. I said my calling is human resources and I stuck to it.

Q4. How have you seen the HR profession evolve over the years in terms of stakeholder expectations, workforce expectations, so how has the transition been?

Ans: My very first job was with a company called Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), an outstanding organisation, I served the organisation for 12 years. I would have never gone to any other company or retired from this company because I think it was the best of the best organisations then. The values that it stood for, what it taught me in my life was incredible. The best of the leadership stories that I have are always centered around my early days in ICI. The company demerged into ICI and Zeneca, and Zeneca went into AstraZeneca and so on, and I therefore I left the organisation. Otherwise I would have continued to stay in ICI. In ICI I was in the manufacturing part of the firm. ICI is a manufacturing organisation so I was into explosives, part of pharmaceuticals and agro-chemicals so I have been in these kind of businesses, and I have a fairly good idea about what is industrial relations having dealt with the Unions, having understood what it is at the grassroots, what people like and want and what really drives people. So when you move into a manufacturing organisation, you understand the true value of what each person brings to the table. You understand the value of time, you understand the value of a process, you understand the value of being disciplined, and more than anything you understand the value of interdependencies. If you are working in an explosives plant, you will know what it is to understand the value of hand on and hand off. You make a mistake about that and it could endanger the life of many around you, including your own. So you learn a quite a lot and you understand what it is when dealing with workmen and the workmen are no different from you and me. It has happened that they are skilled in a different way and we are skilled in a different way, that’s all. Ultimately if you look at it, the food that you eat would be no different than the food they will eat. The air that we breathe is not different than the air that they breathe, and so on and so forth. It just teaches you to be normal, so if you are working in a manufacturing organisation, what it taught me was to be normal and industrial relations is more about understanding the wants and desires of people. That by the way, has not changed. The laws in India will undergo some minor changes but you understand that labor cannot be exploited, because the moment you start to look at exploiting labor, then know that one day, you will get exploited by the people who are your superiors and all of us in some way we labor at something or the other, that is manufacturing.

From manufacturing, I moved into service. Service is a completely different gamut of what human resources is about. I moved from an organisation which employed only chartered accountants, people who are MBA from the top business schools and engineers from only the IITs, they never got people from anywhere else so you are really looking at them crème de la crème walking into an organisation. I moved into an organisation where we got very normal people, when I say normal I am talking about people who have just done their undergrads, B.Sc., B.Com., people may not even have completed all of this, we got them in sterling holiday and we were ordinary people in some sense to do extraordinary jobs. I understood the value of what motivation is. How do you empower a team, this whole business of understanding selling and what is the notion of adding value. All of this, undergoes a tremendous change when you get to truly understand people at the grassroot level. So in more ways than one, you are getting to understand services is about serving a customer, a customer comes first.

From there I went into another services organisation, I went into IT and telecom. IT, Telecom, all of this is no different because today that human resources were more to secure the best of talent and how do you get that talent, how do you build a brand, how do you attract people to an organisation, that’s what you learn there and then you come into a professional services organisation like Deloitte and Deloitte in those days, I was a part of the US firm then and we were trying to build a brand, how do you build a brand in a place where people have not even heard about this organisation. That is very exciting. It’s almost like a startup, and today if you look at the size of Deloitte and where it is, it is stupendous, and by the way you focus on culture and how do you nurture culture. How do you build the right kind of culture, so those are very exciting days. I have continued to stay in Deloitte because Deloitte is where the best choose to be. Deloitte is a fantastic place and you might think that I am biased, yes I am because this is a wonderful organisation to be with.

Q5. What’s your view on the millennials now? What is the HR strategy different in terms of recruiting them, engaging them on the workfront, their growth expectations are very different, so as an HR how do you manage this pull of individual for the millennials?

Ans: 85% of our people are millennials. We have a millennial partner, we make sure that the millennial partner is in the executive leadership of the firm, because then they will be able to drive the millennials agenda. Now what do the millennials want, clearly there must be a purpose to what you are doing, something that we articulate. If they want to grow, then we must provide avenues for their growth. It’s important for the millennials to also feel that this is an organisation that cares for them and by the way cares beyond all of this with an environment at large. Are we caring for the society that we live in? as you are well aware Deloitte, one day on the impact day it’s all completely tools down and we go and serve the community the entire 250000 people across the world. On one day, they will stop work and go into the community, serve the community and come back, and by the way it’s just not a one day effort, it’s our commitment to say that this is how we will do it day upon day and one day is just an expression for the solidarity we demonstrate. Millennials also want to feel connected so do they believe that here is an organisation that cares to listen to them, do we connect with them, do they believe that they have the freedom to work and why not, if there is a bright, young person that can make a partner in 10 years, why not. I think we should allow for that. I believe that if you do not make opportunities for our millennials, they will vote with their feet, they will leave your organisation, they will look for organisations that will say okay I think this is a better place, I think this is where we should invest our time.

Q6. How is your view towards this as a career choice, in terms of commerce degree and then going for a CA, MBA?

Ans: I will go to a story that happened in Sterling Holiday Resorts years ago. I talked about people who are just graduates, undergraduates who had come on board, they wanted a future for themselves and many of them said that look I don’t think I have the luxury of time on my hand but I still want to go, and we put together a program called core management skills seminar. This CMS program ran for 6 months, where the best of inputs came in to people in classrooms on a Saturday or even a Sunday, and people started to learn and at the end of 6 months they all went their own ways. 20 years later we started to track every single person who went through that program. I am happy to let you know that every single person part of that CMS program has done exceedingly well in their lives. Often times when I have an opportunity to go to the US I will always call upon somebody who was a part of that program because it just tells us that it doesn’t matter where you start, it matters what you do with the education that you get. So whether you are a chartered accountant or a person who has just done a B.Sc. Physics to start with and decided that’s all you want to do, what do you do with that education, that matters. Do you have the right attitude towards work, people of course, if they get to be chartered accountants, their chances of getting ahead in their live gets to be slightly better. It’s almost like you are saying that a person who is running bare feet is that person a better runner than a person who has got the best of the Nike footwear and who is a better runner. So it matters what the person has in his mind, does the person have the hunger, the willingness, to go the whole nine yard and say I am going to do something. That is the big difference. My only message to everyone will be that it doesn’t matter where you start or how you start, it matters what you do with it. I had a secretary who came and joined me and I say this with pride, he was B.Sc. Physics and for almost 20 years of his life all he had done was short-hand typewriting. When I looked at him, I found that there was something special about this gentleman. I said in 2 years I am going to fire you and he asked what will he do and I said you do something else but certainly you are not going to do what you are doing right now to be employed as a secretary. Today the same gentleman is working as a vice-president human resources in a very large IT company. Much of this is about what is it that you believe in truly yourself.

Q7. What if you are not from XLRI or TISS and still in HR? What should one do?

Ans: Be good at what you do. I know when we left XLRI, we were bunch of people. It’s not every person who came out of XLRI or continued to come out of XLRI would be terrific in what they do because they all of us will find our own edge, and all the top HR leaders in the country, not necessarily all of them would be from these portals of significant brands. Many of them would be people who decided they will do something in their own lives and do well in their lives because they say if I am going to do something I am going to be really good in this job, and once you decided that, there is no stopping you. Talent will be recognized. Nobody looks at what degree you come from.

Q8. In this COVID situation, how can one stay positive amidst all the layoffs that are going to happen?

Ans: I will give you my personal story at some stage in my life I moved out of one organisation because I just felt that somehow this was not the organisation for me, and when I did that everything was absolutely fine with the economy at that point in time. When I left the organisation one of the things that happened to me personally was the fact that I was out of a job, I had two growing children, I had EMIs to pay, and I had to pay for the car, and you know what it is for somebody who is struggling to make ends meet. One of the advice I would give to a lot of people is that go easy on getting large loans, don’t do it it’s not worth it. I mean start to afford first before you can spend and I am saying this all out of my experience. It took me almost 3 months to find another job, and everyday I used to wake up in the morning and I used to look at all the, in those days we didn’t have these fancy Naukri websites and LinkedIn profiles, job portals, nothing. My children used to go to school and they would ask me dad what are you doing today. “I am going to search for jobs”, that’s when you start to network. I wrote down on a piece of paper what I was really good at and what I was not good at and I told myself I will continue to remain positive, not because it’s the right thing for me to do but because it’s the only way I can survive. How will you survive? You read. What does reading do? It just at one end distracts you, at the other end, it also gets to enhance your capabilities. Just because I read and spent a lot of time on that, connected with all my friends, I can tell you suddenly there were offers that had started to come in and like most of us when the first one comes in, then you say let me wait for the second and the third, and then you choose the right one, that’s what I would say to all of us here. There is nothing called a dark day, darkness is what you make of yourself. The moment you close your eyes everything is dark, even when the sun shines outside. So the best thing for you to do is stay positive. I also used to run everyday, physical exercise releases a lot of endorphins, at least that’s what I am told. You go meet people who are optimist people, you don’t meet people who says the world is going to end in three days. Jobs will come with time. I have seen what happened in the 80s and 90s and 2000s, in 2016 we had a big showdown. I have been through a lot of these cycles and one thing is clear, when there is a rebound, that rebound is going to be a very good one. We just have to prepare ourselves for the tsunami. Sometimes what happens is we must continue to learn how to swim, run and how to keep ourselves. The moment you stop doing that, is the day when it hits you, you are not ready for it. This is a great time for you to offer your services even if it is free of cost because you are learning something. Look for internships in some place, they will cry and say but I can’t pay you, doesn’t matter, don’t pay me at least I will be engaged. I will get to learn what’s happening. Do free internships, do your networking right, because your network is your net worth. So start to get people who you have never connected with. Anything that you write and say has got to come within your third and the seventh rib on your left, i.e., your heart.

Q9. What’s your formula for unwinding and getting rejuvenated for the next day?

Ans: I do a little bit of exercises; I make sure that I eat right. So the key is, if you stuff yourself, you are getting your body to be stressed out, so eat right, read right and I always write something before I got to bed and I will always some thoughtful stuff that I post on LinkedIn as part of my office truths, and I love watching movies, maybe in Netflix or Prime, Hotstar, etc. but I have a personal collection of over 500 movies. So what I do is I keep revisiting some of the older ones and I watch them. Today we are lucky because we have some very good equipment where you can watch a nice, cool movie so I enjoy that. Of course when we didn’t have this COVID, I used to go watch movies in the theatre and write a review and post it on Facebook and would have a reasonable readership on that. I just like to have a digital detox which is I just switch off, I don’t look at my mails, nothing for at least an hour and a half. Just log off and you will be fine, the world will not come to an end.

Q10. What thought process went behind in making the Office Truth Series in LinkedIn?

Ans: I think I started this about 3–4 years ago and it so happened that I came home from the office one day and there is something happened in the office and there was something that I observed and something that happened to me and I wrote it down, and I just felt that if this is something which is so personal, is there something that I can post as well? So I came up with this thing called “Office Truths” and of course it made sense to me and I didn’t realise whatever that I wrote, made some sense to a lot of other people as well and some of this it quite revealing in it’s nature but some of them are also something that people look forward to because what does a person rely on and this is what I want to share with all the readers today. There will always be a time when the yellow river will turn clear and the wheels of fortune will turn in your favor. So stay positive!

Q11. Any one line to the youngsters that you would like to share?

Ans: Each and every one of you, are going to be outstandingly successful in your life. Start to believe in it, even a little bit of faith in that and you will see a massive difference both to yourself and to people around you.

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