PoP Sudhir Aggarwal

Let me start with a disclaimer. Principles, values, and leadership are never available in the market for anyone to simply go and buy. The best and greatest institution on earth doesn't necessarily deliver people with good principles, values, and leadership. None of it has anything to do with a person's socio-economic or geo-political status.

There is a saying that it is the environment in which one is born and brought up. That describes, sufficiently and elaborately, how principles, values, and leadership are built and extensively influenced by the many things happening around and across the various facets of one's life and situations.

To me, a good combination of being honest to yourself, holding a positive attitude, building mutual trust and mutual respect, and being aspirational without carrying unrealistic or unreasonable expectations, is a good mantra for a successful career as a natural evolution. Still, if I need to define it in one word, I will say attitude.

With a good, positive, and forward-looking attitude, one can achieve the world and make a real impact. I can work on building the skill of the people around me, not their attitude. One and only one can work upon and build one's own attitude.

In my own context, trust in my leadership helped me embrace altogether out of the box, newer opportunities in my life, where every time I experienced and stepped into newer career choices to shape my journey.

Likewise, trusting and mentoring the people around me, and I am deliberately avoiding the term reportee or team member, and giving them the opportunity to make decisions, has helped me build teams and organizations with a focus on continuing to work and grow irrespective of me. Success lies in making oneself dispensable rather than remaining a power center artificially.

This can be seen visibly in my professional and personal life, across every facet of it.

To me, it is more of a notion than a burden. Senior leadership does often require making difficult choices, but it can be a relatively simple phenomenon. The three I's, an inclusive, informed, and independent mindset, is the mantra. No rocket science.

More often than not, one will find one or more of those elements missing in the thought process behind a given situation. Sometimes the missing piece isn't visible at all; it can be deep rooted in one's thinking, quietly steering a situation in a particular direction. Each of the three I's is powerful and insightful in its own right. Unlearn, learn, relearn, as a continuous process, is a must, more so in these times of disruption and transformation. People who do not change with the situation they are in really struggle and suffer.

It may be worth sharing two situations to make the point.

One: let me share a personal experience of what leadership means. Very early in my career, going to the USA was every IT professional's dream. I had a friend there who wanted me to join him, and I would get almost daily calls urging me to send my papers for migration. I was getting restless to be in the USA as of yesterday.

Somehow, my father was not getting convinced and remained uncomfortable about supporting me. Frankly, he didn't know much about the IT industry or these migration matters, despite being a fine government official. We went through this struggle daily with no end in sight.

Then he found his answer. He had me meet a cousin, an uncle figure to me, who had lived in the USA and understood migration. He simply advised me to ask my friend to process my H1 visa. I followed that advice on the very next call, and the matter was resolved.

My point is this: my father had the vision and the thought process to work through the situation by identifying and connecting me to a knowledgeable person whom we both trusted completely.

Two: this was when I was with an Indian multinational, tasked with building the government business from negative, not zero. I was hired as Head of Government. My good luck was that we got an early window into a large, pan India opportunity. Within a few months we had come up to speed and needed to build Sales, Pre Sales, and System Integration Delivery teams for the government business.

Given my background and position at the time, it would have been relatively easy for me to grab any of these roles to lead myself. But here is where it got interesting: I chose to be an individual contributor instead, and the three roles were performed by the three best people for the job.

That did not mean I became hands off. I stayed very integral to everything happening with the government business, with a shared vision and shared purpose.

Most of the time, it is extremely tough to stay quiet in a government business review with the Chairman of the company, but it came naturally to me, for two key reasons: I trusted my colleagues, and I trusted myself.

Let me respond to the second part of the question first. The future worries me the least, and that is precisely how I have never been anxious about it. I have never allowed myself to sit in a comfort zone. I have always challenged myself and thrown myself open to newer opportunities and possibilities, including the unconventional and the diverse. Let me share some of my career shifts.

I accepted a Resource Manager role focused on hiring to serve global body-shopping opportunities in the mid 1990s. Almost all my peers discouraged me, and that move turned out to be among the best of my professional career, giving me a very different visibility and flavor of career options.

I stepped into the role of ERP Practice Head, having never seen an ERP screen with my own eyes. Identifying and trusting the people around me, with empathy in spirit, helped me and my teams grow. We had some genuinely unconventional experiences and engagements.

I worked on and successfully delivered the recovery of company money from bleeding projects, with zero background in those projects, and did this multiple times across the organization over years. It simply required my aligned heart and soul, in service of the company's purpose.

At 58, I joined Deloitte, a consulting firm, in India.

At 59, I became a faculty member teaching emerging technologies such as AI, GenAI, IoT, drones, and other emerging technologies to government officers, with the Wadhwani Foundation.

At 62, I became a CHRO, a 360-degree shift from the business side to HR, with a purpose.

Has it ever been difficult? Never. Some of these I chose, and a few came my way.

A change with a difference has always excited me. It gives me a kick. More than competing with others, challenging myself and working through that challenge is positive, progressive, and growth oriented. It has broadened my skillset, experience, expertise, perspectives, and my ability to work with people of varied profiles and personalities.

Let me make an acknowledgement here, in the spirit of gratitude. HCL, and the HCL Sales organization in particular, has been instrumental in making me whatever I am today. Working with multinationals like IBM and Oracle helped shape my career and personality, with a level of professional fine tuning and maturity I am grateful for.

I have also developed a formula for myself that I believe applies to anyone: 10:20:70. In today's times especially, there is so much happening around us, at a pace never imagined before. This causes anxiety and discomfort. My belief, held with conviction, is that 70 percent of the innovations and developments happening around me simply don't concern me. 20 percent, I keep myself appropriately appraised of. 10 percent is what actually matters to me, and that is what I focus on and invest in. This simple approach helps me manage my insecurities and anxieties, and keeps me focused on my purpose to stay relevant.

A positive and forward-looking attitude makes the difference in every facet of life.

Know yourself, with a focus on what you are not good at, and leverage PPT, people, process, and technology, to complement and supplement that in creating the big, complete, and comprehensive picture. I hold a copyright on the term WANG@, which stands for What Am I Not Good At.

Learn to know and manage your insecurities. The more you know about and manage your insecurities, the deeper you get into what I call insecurity management, a term I also hold a copyright on. This can certainly make you a different person. I am not saying a better person, simply a person with a difference.

Trust yourself. People don't delegate because they believe the people around them are incompetent. An honest, deeper self-introspection can produce a fairly scary outcome: it is often a lack of conviction, confidence, or belief in oneself that holds a person back from delegating. In a larger sense, insecurities may be the root cause. This is the let-go phenomenon, easier said than done.

Make yourself dispensable rather than being a control freak. This is among the truest growth mantras there is, because it produces results and outcomes on multiple fronts. It creates growth for yourself, and it creates an environment where the people around you can grow too.

Focus on horizontal and vertical growth for all round maturity. Horizontal growth orientation becomes a natural evolution as people grow. As people grow, with some exceptions, their soft and behavioral side plays an increasingly larger role. Look deeper, and you'll see that leadership is really about soft skills and behavior. A Manager – Always a CEO is another one of my copyrighted lines.

Have the courage to own your mistakes, acknowledging them sooner rather than later, and give credit to your team. Never delay or shy away from acknowledging good work, because it helps build togetherness and a relationship built on trust. Never compete with your own team members in any manner; that can be among the biggest foul plays there is.

Mutual trust, and mutual respect.

My personal belief, one I have lived by throughout my life with zero exception, is this: find your guru and your god in your parents.

Do what you like, love what you do, do what suits you, and be expressive without living under the influence of other people's opinions or points of view.

Very humbly, and feeling even more humbled saying this, I am a family values person. All my life, I have tried working with the people around me, offering my two bits selflessly, whatever I could, in whatever manner I had to offer it. Any response otherwise has never discouraged me or diverted me from my fundamentals.

Have gratitude in life towards anyone, everyone, and anything. Give credit to the people who have been kind to you, or who have done or delivered something for you in whichever way. It matters to name them when sharing their contribution, even if they are no longer around.

Zero expectations. Lately in my life, I have been practicing, on a best effort basis. Engaging with zero expectations, meaning I don't expect that things will happen my way, or that people will follow my advice or suggestions. Life is not about my way or the highway. There may be many reasons behind people's actions and reactions in any given situation; I leave that to their own self-introspection and their own actions.

I have always tried to give space to people, whether younger, elder, or peer, in various situations, by not struggling to be seen or visible, believing instead that your efforts speak louder than being seen.

I have learned to extend my relationships to the people around me, as required or as I have wished to. This has helped me build a long-lasting legacy in an institutionalized way.

More than a few people have told me that I am a blessed person, that nothing wrong happens to people like me who have not wronged anyone in their personal life. This despite having gone through professional redundancies twice, survived a brain stroke, and even delivered some genuinely tough decisions as part of my professional responsibilities.

Be honest to yourself.

Be yourself.

It is crucial and significant to know yourself and love yourself in an ever evolving, fast changing world like never before. It is good to be inspired by the people and events around you, but contextualise that inspiration for yourself, within your own abilities, capabilities, and competencies.

Knowing yourself is among the biggest challenges there is, because people do not connect with themselves, do not speak with themselves, do not analyse themselves, and most of the time are not honest with themselves. Most times, people live in denial mode.

Beware: don't be mad about yourself, and don't be self-obsessed.

Those who know me, even a little, will vouch for everything I have articulated and narrated above.