Decentralizing Decision Making for Long-term Success

Welcome to the Vantage HR Influencers Podcast. This podcast is sponsored by Vantage Circle, the simple and AI-powered rewards and recognition platform for employee engagement. Shifting decision-making away from the top leaders can benefit a company. You might find this statement a little controversial, but hear me out. When decision-making is decentralized, it empowers team members at all levels to take initiative and respond quickly to challenges. An approach like this can lead to faster innovation, more agile problem-solving, and a stronger sense of ownership throughout the organisation. Having said that, let me tell you, it's just my take. This is how I think. But I believe to truly understand the impact of decentralising decision-making, having an expert's perspective is invaluable. So for this episode, we are excited to welcome Siddhartha Das. He's the Head of HR Operations for Global People Services at Reckitt. I'm your host, Sanjeevani Saikia, and you're tuning in to Vantage Influencers Podcast. Now, let's get started.

Sanjeevani Saikia: Hi, Siddhartha. Hope you're doing well.

Siddhartha Das: Thank you, Sanjeevani. Thanks for having me on this podcast. Looking forward to our future conversations.

Sanjeevani Saikia: It's our pleasure to have you, and thank you so much for joining us in this episode. So today, we have a very interesting topic at hand, and I'm actually very excited to discuss this with you. But before beginning our conversation, could you kindly give us a quick rundown of your professional journey so far? We would love to hear that.

Siddhartha Das: Okay, given a chance, everybody would like to brag about themselves. I think today's my day. I did my BCom Honours, and then my Masters in Management, and after that I started my career in HR, predominantly in HR business partnering and shared services. I started off as an HR business partner, working with organisations including Fullerton India. Eventually, I moved into the world of shared services because it intrigued me a lot. There was a very interesting insight I had: the world was heading towards a more decentralised approach of getting things done, and that led me to try my luck in this industry. I joined Capgemini back in 2011, and that's where it all started. I've been working with pretty big organisations, and I was lucky enough to work with some amazing leaders in the industry. I moved to Bangalore in 2014 and, after a few years with an organization that was eventually absorbed into what became DXC, I moved into Walmart and was there for three years. I was one of the initial members setting up shared services in Bangalore, which was a huge step in my career, getting a chance to work with a Fortune One company and some of the best minds in the industry. After Walmart, I moved into the FMCG space and joined Reckitt, where I've been since March 2022. So it's been a very interesting journey, a mix of business partnering and GCC model exposure, and it's still continuing. I have to see how it unfolds in the next couple of years, but so far it's been a great time.

Sanjeevani Saikia: Great. Thanks for sharing that. It's great to have you on the show, Siddharth. So with your permission, I'd like to begin today's conversation on the topic, Decentralising Decision Making for Long-Term Success.

Siddhartha Das: Sure. Yeah.

Sanjeevani Saikia: So first, I'd like to dive into the Decentralising Decision Making concept. When employees at all levels get the chance to call the shots, it seems like it could really shake things up, and in a good way. I believe it's more or less like giving employees the keys to the car and saying, "I trust you to drive." That sense of ownership can do wonders for engagement and motivation. So how do you think decentralising decision-making can empower employees across different levels of an organization? I'd love to know your take on this.

Siddhartha Das: I think it all starts from a very basic concept. If you look at the way we lead our lives in our homes, not all decisions are thrust upon us. Somebody in the house doesn't just decide, "We're buying this property, and tomorrow we're moving to this part of town." It doesn't work like that. You discuss it with your family members because it's a big change, you're moving to a new location, a new ecosystem. That's how things work.

In a larger workplace context, everybody loves to be consulted. Everyone loves to be heard. That's the basic. So it's not just about having a task to achieve and asking your team to get it done. I think it's also important to invite the people you want to get the work done to a conversation, to understand their viewpoints as well. That helps them see the change that's coming. For example, if you're trying to make a small change within the team, or implement a change in the process, or bring in a new HCM tool, it's important to understand how your existing resources are going to blend with it. Otherwise, you end up working in hindsight, without considering whether people are adapted to the changing needs of the environment or have the right competencies to evolve. That can jeopardize your goal and create a lot of apprehension in the long run.

So discussions in the first place are very important whenever there's a change coming in. At the end of the day, certain decisions obviously cannot be decentralized, the ones at a very high organizational level. The organization has to take certain decisions to help it continue what it does, or survive tomorrow. Those decisions cannot be pushed down to the ground zero level; they're only taken at a very high level. These kinds of decisions are mostly long-term, or driven by economies of scale or geopolitical factors that help the organization overcome today's situation for better performance tomorrow. The objective is to see that the larger population aligns to that goal and is able to support achieving it.

On the other hand, there are certain decisions that can be decentralized, primarily around processes and systems in a business-as-usual environment. We've seen this mainly for people at the ground level, or in production, who are actually working on the HCM tools, processing cases, or handling requests. Do they understand what kind of change is coming? Because any change that comes without their knowledge is going to impact you first. That can lead to a lot of gaps.

So if I have to summarize your question and my thoughts together: when it comes to any kind of change management, it's very important to have dialogue with team members and prepare them in advance, long before the change actually hits them, so they understand that conditions are not going to stay the same. I think conditioning is a key parameter here for managers. We should continue to condition our teams from day one so we can also explore their capacity to acclimatize to a changing environment. And in this case, even if you're not directly seeking their input for decisions that leaders have already made, this approach of conditioning the environment is critical. That's how I would summarize it.

Sanjeevani Saikia: That's true. What kind of decisions do you think cannot, or should not, be decentralized? Is there any particular set of decisions that must not be decentralized? I mean, decisions where it doesn't help.

Siddhartha Das: Yes, there are certain decisions that don't help you to decentralize, especially when the organization is going through a massive change, or a shift to a more regional model, a Center of Excellence-centric model, or a process-centric model. There are certain decisions that have already been decided from a cost perspective. You can't really involve everybody there, because you're trying to involve the C-suite folks, trying to understand the best way possible to keep the company afloat, or keep the competition intact in the market. And ideally, in such cases, you don't have to involve everybody, because we all know what we were hired for. My competencies aren't the same as somebody actually taking a decision at the highest level.

So you don't really have to include people in these kinds of areas, at a huge umbrella level, that are going to impact pretty much everybody across geographies. These kinds of decisions mostly come up whenever there's a merger or demerger, or when it comes to bringing in any kind of new HCM system into the organization. It could be, from a ticketing perspective, ServiceNow or Salesforce, or from an HCM perspective, Workday or SuccessFactors. You don't involve everybody in such decisions because you have a budget, and a vision at a whole different level, and you'd only leverage the competencies of a few individuals to take a decision in that case.

Sanjeevani Saikia: Agreed. Again, shifting gears, I believe when employees feel empowered, it's not just good for them, it's great for the company too. I've seen that companies embracing this shift often see a big boost in efficiency and innovation, but of course the actual impact can vary depending on how it's rolled out. So what kind of impact have you seen, or do you expect, from giving employees more decision-making power on overall company performance?

Siddhartha Das: Okay, so first things first: the moment you involve people, they feel empowered. That's a given. And the moment you make them feel important, they start feeling independent, of course within the boundaries of the dos and don'ts. But this definitely leads to a unique feeling of being respected and considered. And there's no greater feeling in this world than the feeling of being respected. The fact that they feel you're considering their points, eager to listen to them, or even buying into their ideas, what happens next is actually amazing. The moment this step is taken, first of all, you have a fantastic connection with them. Second, you're basically seen as a natural leader, or an individual, let's not use the word "leader" right away, you're seen as someone who is eager to listen. Because listening is rare these days, honestly. You're also seen as a natural leader who wants to make a difference by involving everybody. Not that you'll necessarily implement whatever they say, but you're eager to listen.

Of course, there are also people who just pretend, who try to act like they're listening. Honestly, they get caught. You can clearly tell if a leader is doing something with a genuine goal in mind, or just to impress somebody. In the long run, people are independent in their thoughts and they're intelligent, let's not question their IQ, and they want to be part of an ecosystem that eventually works. So trust me, when it comes to ownership, the moment you give people power, they start thinking differently. They start thinking out of the box, and that can lead to a massive change in how they want to contribute. This also leads to a tremendous boost in their performance, in how they felt about the organization or their work compared to before. They start looking at the organization and their work differently. I'm not saying it's going to take away the Monday blues forever, I'm not going to say that, but it definitely helps them see their own capabilities differently.

As a leader, you don't always have to wait for a one-on-one to understand what people want to do, or to understand their competencies and skill sets. Many times, we select certain competencies we don't even have, when we do our own skill gap analysis on a learning management system or a learning platform. We always do that, and sometimes we don't select the right ones. Now, as a leader, when you decentralize these kinds of decisions and involve people, you're giving yourself a chance, in advance, to see who's next in line to think differently, and who's next in line to help you achieve certain tasks in real time. So you're cutting down the time spent between ideating, visualizing, and eventually seeing the results at a year-end review. Why kill that time? You can leverage it much earlier.

That's going to make a big difference, I feel, when you genuinely hear people, and that can be looked at as a potential performance criterion. Even for myself, I can start looking at someone's contribution by breaking it down into a 30, 60, 90-day plan, tracking performance overall, and then seeing whether the decentralization that took place in decision-making is really making a difference, or if it's just being done to tick a box. So overall, there are multiple upsides, but it depends on how we leverage these competencies, because everybody is different. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Sanjeevani Saikia: Cool. You know, I recently had a podcast conversation about Gen Z in the workforce, and the guest made the point that Gen Z, this particular generation, doesn't really like a concentrated, centralized decision-making structure, though there are situational exceptions. So working with this generation, do you think companies will really have to increase their efforts to decentralize the entire decision-making process? Because Gen Z has entered the workforce, they're pretty much there, and there will be more coming in. So how is this whole thing going to look a couple of years down the line?

Siddhartha Das: That's a very interesting question. It's actually a common discussion point I've encountered at some of the HR conferences I've recently attended. There are two ways of looking at it. Like every situation, opportunity, or ecosystem, there's a good side and a bad side, and obviously there's always the gray area in between, which is neither good nor bad.

If you ask me, and let's talk about myself, if you give me a chance to look at somebody, I'll definitely look at the positives of that individual. I won't focus on the negative side. All of us have at least one thing in common that we're unique at. So as leaders, it's very important to spend a good amount of time rather than form a preconceived notion about someone. Only when you spend that time do you understand what a person is capable of. There's a high possibility that out of ten parameters you're looking for, nine don't meet the criteria, and the person is only good in one area. So what do you do? You start focusing on that one area, and from there, find a way to connect it to the other nine where you didn't see a match. It can go from one to two, two to four, four to six. There's a high possibility, and it's not that it can't happen.

Number two, there will be people who are extremely fast, from a Gen Z categorization perspective. I know it's easier said than done. A lot of these Gen Z employees didn't experience corporate life when they joined in 2020, 2021, and 2022. They were onboarded online, in a virtual format. They didn't experience a live onboarding session, and they haven't seen leaders in person for at least two to three years. As leaders, it's extremely important to understand that human element they may start to experience, and that's exactly where we can step in. Understanding the creative side of Gen Z is extremely critical, I feel, because when you bring creativity into any task, job description, or target you have to meet by the end of the quarter, mid-year, or year-end, creativity has been seen as a huge catalyst for improving performance. I've seen this myself and tried to practice it in various ways, in my current and previous organizations, and it has helped us retain top talent and reduce attrition.

On the other side, I'd partially agree that Gen Z might come across as wanting change frequently. They don't want to see a task as just a task; they want to get through it and move to something new. I think it's a good way of looking at it, because it also allows us to see efficiencies built at a rapid scale. They'll definitely find a way to solve a particular problem. The flip side is that if a large percentage of your Gen Z population can't focus and are constantly looking for change, that can affect your overall performance and hit your cost, because you'll see attrition happening randomly, and you won't have enough time available for talent acquisition to meet those demands.

So from a global capability center model perspective, we've seen a good shift whenever change management has been brought into place. As leaders or managers, like I said in the previous question, it's very important from day one to spend time with people and understand what they like to do, their flaws, and what they're extremely good at. Convert that into a 30, 60, 90-day plan with realistic, doable targets. Don't make them wait till mid-year; let them own their career. But as managers, it's also important to sufficiently push the pace, don't expect them to push it entirely by themselves, because certain things are already missing that they didn't get to experience.

So it's a mixed bag, I won't completely agree with the premise. But I think it's time for managers to step up, put ourselves in their shoes, and understand what they want to do. Trust me, they're some of the finest individuals I've personally worked with, and I've seen tremendous potential in the way they do things. They think so differently, and it's important that we start thinking differently too, and adapt as well. It wouldn't be wise to expect them to change. The way society is changing, and the way AI has come to the centerfold of the entire pattern of the workforce, I think we also need to flex our muscles and change a bit.

Sanjeevani Saikia: Interesting. Now, making the transition from a centralized to a decentralized model isn't without its challenges. There's often a learning curve, and not everyone is on board right away. There's bound to be some resistance, or confusion at first, especially when employees try to find their footing in this new setup. So I'd like to know from you some of the biggest hurdles you've noticed when companies make the shift from centralized to decentralized decision-making. Something in particular that you have in mind.

Siddhartha Das: Okay. First of all, this is a very common thing we've seen whenever there's a shift in how things are done, whether it's centralization or a new way of working. It's important to understand that people are not always open to change. It's not that we lack the ability to adapt to change, but the word "change" itself is scary. We have to agree, it's not easy, at every step and across all levels, because people start being apprehensive. "Okay, the change is coming, what happens to my job?" That's the first question people think of.

So the first hurdle is basically understanding how we're going to embrace the change, buying into the thoughts of leadership is extremely critical, and that's where we see challenges coming through, because everybody has the right to voice their concerns. It's a paradigm shift at the end of the day. Certain tasks you're doing might not be your responsibility anymore. Certain decisions that get made will be completely different from what you were doing yesterday.

Let's talk about the whole shared services environment. If you're setting up shared services, you're looking at identifying areas that can be completely moved to another location: transactional work, work that's not so transactional but has an element of Center of Excellence experience involved, and areas where you're creating a model with very little dependency on the CoEs, where you take things forward on your own. Now, across all three, there's a huge concern: is the service going to be the same? Will there be evident cracks in the service, because you're used to working in a particular way, on a day-to-day basis? Are you open to accepting this change? So the change management team plays a critical role in understanding what different areas you want to touch to make the change effective.

It's very important to have continuous dialogue, because whenever there's less communication... let me give you a simple example. When you book a flight and you're heading to the airport for an unknown place, you always check the weather, don't you?

Sanjeevani Saikia: Yes, we do.

Siddhartha Das: Right. And if the weather is stormy, or the location doesn't have the right conditions, sunlight, whatever it may be, you're always apprehensive, you don't know where you're going. It's the same situation whenever there's a decentralization of activities, because people want to know: is it a safe place we're walking into? Am I going to experience the same level of superior customer service? Is the implementation of a new tool, from an IT perspective, going to be effective? Is it going to synchronize easily with my legacy tool, or will there be challenges? So there's a lot that can surface from a people, process, and technology perspective, and because all your decisions going forward revolve around these three: people, process, and systems.

Your technology plays a critical role in making tomorrow's experience seamless. If the technology is easy to use, your people either deliver, or they don't. If they don't, you have to upskill them through training programs. If you don't have the right training programs available, it becomes a challenge, there's another gap that becomes a showstopper down the line.

The third thing is people: have you really made your people adapt to the incoming changes? I've talked about this a few times now, because it's very important to create conditioning with your people. You don't have to tell them a change is coming; you just have to understand if they're adaptable to any kind of change. And if they're not, start creating situations or an environment that pulls them in and gets them working on such projects. That way you can understand their competencies. Any area that's gray, or not green, maybe amber or red, you start plugging into mentoring programs and involve them so they blend with the new ways of working.

One of the most difficult areas I've seen that always calls for attention is how we manage data. Because the moment you decentralize any activity, or bring in a change that naturally decentralizes the way work happens, the way data flows from one system, or one step, to another, and the governance around it, raises a lot of eyebrows and a lot of questions about how we're going to work in the future. People are reluctant to agree on how data would flow, so a strong governance structure around this is very important. Otherwise, you'll continue to see failed collaborative behaviors.

I think if you want me to pick the top two areas that can become a hurdle: number one, if we don't consider tech nuances from day one, we're going to face difficult situations every day, and that leads to a poor internal customer experience, or employee experience. The second part is you don't want to lose top talent when you're bringing in change, that's the last thing you want, because it's your top talent who will help you sail through the change and ease the transition. So you should constantly keep that in check, understand what they like or don't like, and try to buy into their thoughts and put it into practice in some way. That's probably how I'd look at it.

Sanjeevani Saikia: Yeah, that's an interesting take, I believe. So, Siddharth, you've mentioned the top two areas where we see the hurdles. I don't expect a one-stop solution, but is there any particular kind of solution that has always worked? Any particular few?

Siddhartha Das: Yes, honestly, if there's a way to find a solution, like I said in the beginning, there are certain things you can't involve people in, and there are certain areas you can definitely involve people in, that's your business-as-usual work. If you want your BAU to function without hiccups, it's very important to understand the nuances people face on a day-to-day basis. The decisions that were already taken, how are they impacting people? It's very important to circle back to the source: this is the decision we took for implementing this particular tool, these are the difficult areas the team keeps facing, and it's not creating a great experience for our internal people. Number two: is there a way to fix it? If it's an investment that's already been made from a tool perspective, the answer might not be yes, but is there a workaround? Yes, if you have great internal tech teams, they can help you fix those gaps. That's one way of looking at it.

Now, the broader answer to your question: if you really want to identify talent, empower them, and see if their capabilities are really amazing, you have to start giving them ownership of activities early on. That helps in two ways. Unless you're scared of losing your own job, thinking that someone below you might come up to your level and take over your role, and if you are that kind of person, then don't do it. But if you're a leader who believes in a bottom-up approach, who's ready to take risks, and is willing to give a task to the individuals reporting to you and see if they can get it done in their own way, give them the freedom and get it done.

That helps you build a fantastic funnel of next-in-line leaders, identifying high potential people who might not become leaders overnight, or in the next cycle, but can be groomed over the next 18 to 24 months and grow up the ladder. At the end of the day, people should know they're doing a job and that their leader is aware they want to grow. Everybody wants to grow, and you need to be very clear that people have aspirations. It's important to respect that, and the only way you can do it is by decentralizing certain areas, asking them to take certain decisions, not that you'll always implement them. There might be situations where you just discuss it and say, "That's a great idea, but unfortunately we can't take this forward," or maybe you take a portion of it and come back and say, "This part of your idea is going to be implemented." I think we should keep these conversations going, so people feel they were invited to a conversation, that they were part of a decision-making process, if not entirely. Maybe they contributed five percent, but they have a five percent stake in a decision that was big at that level.

As leaders, when I say a bottom-up approach, it's very important that we start thinking about how fast we can make ourselves dispensable, and that's where you act as a true leader. You should be in a position where, after a certain point in time, you tell the person just below you, "I have a challenge for you. I want you to take my position after so many months or years, can you do that?" I think those are the kinds of conversations that matter, because when you give someone that kind of power, you're already decentralizing your decision-making at a grassroots level, in terms of how you want to promote somebody. You're already giving that individual the chance to think big. I think that's very key, and I've tried and practiced this always. For me, it's worked. I don't know about others, I'm sure there are many leaders who've tried this before, I'm not the first to try something so unique, but it definitely involves being a bit of a maverick. It's important as leaders that we're a little bit weird, and strong enough to take risks, to see people rise above their limitations.

Sanjeevani Saikia: Again, you've shared your perspective and your thoughts on it, and it was very relatable at the same time. It was really well said, thank you. One thing I find exciting about decentralization is its potential to spark innovation. When teams are given the freedom to make decisions, they often feel more empowered to explore new ideas and, at the same time, take creative risks. This kind of environment can lead to breakthroughs that might not happen in a more centralized structure, I believe. Now, first of all, do you think decentralizing decision-making really helps spark innovation and creativity within teams? And if you do, then how?

Siddhartha Das: It does, it does. If you look at the way we work today, we're constantly talking about innovation, constantly inviting people to be very agile in their thoughts, and we're talking about efficiencies. You don't really have a course to increase your efficiency, to be honest. The only way you can increase your efficiency is by thinking, and you think freely when you're given the free hand to think about anything in your own way, when you're given the power, and everybody loves power, trust me. But at the end of the day, you can't misuse it, so you have to set expectations about exactly what you want to hear from them.

As a senior individual in this industry, I'd always explore the creative side of people, and not focus only on numbers. Everybody's able to hit their numbers at the end of the day, that's not rocket science. What's difficult is finding sustainable methodologies that can be thought-provoking in today's world. When you talk about AI, you're embedding it in the way you hire talent, in the way you decode performance metrics, and you're also inviting AI into dashboards, the way numbers get recalculated. So when you do these things, and allow people to think differently, to play with these tools and technologies and think differently, I think it not only helps bring in collaborative behavior within themselves, but also breaks the barrier between a leader and a direct report.

If you see any leader walk onto a production floor, there's an instant change in the way people start behaving, they become more responsive, their body language changes. We don't really need that, you shouldn't have to behave differently just because you see a leader. I think it's important that decentralizing decision-making should also be seen as a leadership change, in the way you see yourself as a leader, and how you want others to take ownership up to the maximum level of performance.

Increased collaboration and identifying the next batch of leaders is very difficult, when you ask me. I always get this question: "There's been a lot of progress in your part of the world, but who is your next in line?" And I need to have substantial reasoning to back up any individual I talk about. I can only do that when I set context, or share examples, like these five instances where we were in a difficult scenario, or wanted to explore something new, and these are the individuals who came up with the ideas. How do you narrate that kind of story, how do you have that kind of experience to share? That only happens when you allow people to be themselves.

As leaders, it's important to set the right expectations from a leadership behavior perspective, because the moment you give power to someone, like I said, it can be misused. You should set the expectation for how their leadership behavior should reflect, and they should clearly understand what they're supposed to do with the new set of powers. What they were doing yesterday, they can't be casual about anymore, because their clientele has changed, their stakeholder group has changed, and the way they behave and present themselves has to be completely different. I think that's something you can't teach, people have to own it up, and there has to be a constant formula of checks and balances, regular feedback, where you also tell people you can't be critical all the time. If somebody isn't doing enough, maybe you have to change your approach and understand: this individual was given a lot of power to think about, but there's not much result coming out of it. Maybe this person isn't team leader material, maybe they're an individual contributor. And you have to start thinking about what areas this person can think, lead, and perform independently in, and create a roadmap for them to grow in their respective areas, or find a portfolio where this person can move into and even move out of your team.

Like you said, it's not always a happy story. There are also stories where decentralized decision-making has backfired, but in most of those cases, we didn't set the right expectations, we didn't tell people where the line was, that they need to be very careful about every step they take. It's a mix of both numbers and behavior, not just one or the other.

Sanjeevani Saikia: Yeah, so as you've mentioned, there are some people who are, you know, kind of born team leaders, they can work the structure and everything, and there are some people who are individual contributors. Now, for individual contributors, if the structure isn't very decentralized, it's more concentrated, they have to have a different approach. Apart from the employers, individual contributors also need a different approach. So what can they do in such situations?

Siddhartha Das: I'll tell you something very interesting: the best part about individual contributors is there's a good side and a very ugly side attached to it. Number one, you're either extremely good at what you do, and that's why you're not attached to any team, and the team definitely needs you, they can't work without you. For example, somebody who's excellent in Power BI, creating amazing dashboards, playing with numbers, you really can't replace that person. But at the same time, tomorrow, some automation comes into your organization and automates everything, and this person will start thinking, "I don't even have a team," and they won't think twice before replacing me. So there are two sides to it.

But either way, when it comes to how individual contributors contribute, or what kind of contribution they can make, I think they'll always have the maximum exposure in the long run. They're not only able to make an impact at a very minute level in daily BAU work, but even at an organizational level, because they're the ones taking some of the key decisions. Let's talk about quality, for example. There are a lot of individual contributors in the quality segment. Let's talk about audit, even in SOX-compliant audits, you don't have big teams, they've got very small teams. In some companies, you'll just have one individual taking care of SOX compliance audits. Look at the kind of responsibility this individual has throughout the year, the task is absolutely cut out, it needs a lot of precision, very active decision-making, a huge amount of reading between the lines. And at the end of the day, you're rubbing shoulders with the who's who of the company, because whatever identification you make from a SOX compliance perspective, from an audit perspective, is going to help float the organization, or create a hole to sink it.

So their contributions define their access to information, to data, to governance, and to the ways of working for the future. Number two, the way they've developed themselves over time, we've seen a lot of roles that have pretty much been individual contributor roles throughout the last ten, fifteen years. For example, a people partner, if you look at a people partner, how many of them have a team, per se? They don't. They're pretty much put into a regional VP or director role and take care of their business unit. Most of the time, you'll find at most one FTE support coming in from somewhere, or maybe a contractor supporting them. Most people partners are individual contributors, and the decisions they take have already been decentralized from day one, because the competencies you consider when hiring a people partner aren't the same as when you hire somebody in operations, it's much deeper, much more holistic, from an umbrella perspective, because they're looking at organizational objectives, at ground-level objectives from a team-specific intervention, and they're also looking at performance from a business-unit-specific, team-specific, and individual-specific angle. So they already come with that kind of attribute expected of them, they've performed it, and they continue to gather more insight and control over time. So decision-making at an individual contributor level was always there at a very high level, and I think it has only progressed to much stronger control over time, especially in the last two to three years. We've seen that evolve a lot, to their benefit.

Sanjeevani Saikia: Yeah, so, Siddharth, we've arrived at the end of today's episode. But before letting you go, this is something that I, and now our listeners, need to know as well. We can't wrap up this episode without hearing some crucial strategies from you. I'm curious to know: how do companies strike the right balance between giving teams the freedom to make decisions on their own, and still keeping some central oversight in place, to make sure everything stays on track in the long run? You've been mentioning some strategies in each and every question, but if there's one central set of strategies you have in place right now, what would you say?

Siddhartha Das: I don't think I have the one right answer to this, but I'll tell you something very honestly: we've all made mistakes in our career journeys, to be very honest, and not just once or twice, multiple times. I've made numerous mistakes myself, and it hasn't been a very easy walkthrough. Decisions were multiple times taken in hindsight, or incorrectly, without taking others into consideration, and that's how I've gathered my lessons learned and tried to understand that I need to change my approach. As leaders, it's very important to own up when you make a mistake, to accept your flaws and be bold enough to say, "No, I messed it up." That's the first thing I'll say, that's the first strategy. Because when you bring in change, when you decentralize anything, you're bound to make mistakes, but many times people haven't owned up and have found an easy way out. The leaders who've actually stood the test of time are the ones who raise their hands and say, "I own it." They've been able to make a real difference in the long run because they were able to bring the people who worked with them previously back together and create a flawless environment of trust and confidence between each other. The moment you say, "That was a mistake, we need to work together again," people realize that if their own leader can be so transparent about their own mistake, why should they hide theirs? That's exactly where you fix half the gap, because people are scared to openly talk about the mess they created in their own areas.

The second thing: it all starts from the top, setting the right example and displaying the right servant leadership. You cannot command respect, no, you cannot. Even if you think you're commanding respect and people are respecting it, you're living in a fake world, and they're doing it just to please you, deep inside they're not respecting you. I think in today's environment, competition has taken a different trajectory, and servant leadership has taken centerfold. It's very important to seek input, again and again, whenever something has already been implemented, and do a pulse check from a systems, people, and process perspective. If you're doing that pulse check, you're saving yourself a lot of pitfalls down the line. Don't just ask somebody to do a particular task and move on, that's not exactly what people like to hear, especially Gen Z, if you ask me. Any performance should be followed by validation from someone at every level.

So I think it's important to introduce a task force at the project level, to analyze the work we're doing on a day-to-day basis, or the work we're doing after a change has been brought into place, so that someone is always there to guide people again. This helps prevent a lot of pitfalls, and you don't have to wait until the end of the year to analyze the behavior of the project. I think this is one of the ways you can continue to measure whether the decisions you took, by decentralizing them in the first place, were really worth it. If not, you go back to square one and start looking at it differently again. It's important to have a bottom-up approach, just as it's important to have a top-down approach. If you really want people to be more inclusive, intelligent in what they do, and to open that box of inquisitiveness, you have to buy into their part, whether they're okay at what they're doing. Otherwise, they're just doing it until they get their next job, and you don't want that. Like I said, you always want to retain your top talent. That would be my answer.

Sanjeevani Saikia: Yeah, again, great, Siddharth. We've covered a very important topic today. As we wrap up, do you have any final thoughts or a message for our listeners? I'm sure they'd love to hear it from you. And for those who want to stay connected with you after this podcast, can you let them know the best way to reach out?

Siddhartha Das: Okay, I think we had a great time talking about so many things today. Thank you so much for making me a part of this conversation. It's a critical topic, and in an evolving GCC model, as of today, we've seen decision-making become more and more decentralized. One thing I really want everybody to consider is: please work closely with the people you work with on a daily basis. Hear them out, understand their state of mind, whether they're happy or not. It's important to have that dialogue going on continuously, because your production folks, the people actually getting the work done, or even people who aren't in production, whoever people report to, and you yourself sit at a higher level up the pyramid, it's very important to do continuous pulse checks, not just to get your own objectives done, because that's going to get done no matter what. But along the way, it's important to gain respect, work visibly, and be mindful that everybody has limitations and challenges, and that needs a good amount of hearing, a good amount of listening. Otherwise, as leaders, we fail to do our job the right way. We might not have answers immediately, but we must keep that conversation and dialogue going.

To the other point, how to reach out to me: I'm extremely available, very active on LinkedIn, I've used the platform to the best of my capabilities. I might not be able to assist you immediately with any question or help you might need, but I'm always there to listen, and always there to connect you with somebody who might be able to help. So I'm up there on LinkedIn, send me a request, and we can take it forward.

Sanjeevani Saikia: Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us today, Siddharth. Your insights were really interesting, and I really appreciate it, and our listeners surely will too. So thank you so much once again.

Siddhartha Das: Thanks a lot, Sanjeevani. It was a pleasure joining you on this podcast. I look forward to connecting with you again.

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