Navigating Corporate Trajectory: My Journey From Telecom To Real Estate

My journey has led me onto the path towards transformation, a kaleidoscope that gave me ample opportunities to work with the most important stakeholder of any organisation, 'its people'. In this process, I have worked across different industry types understanding the finer intricacies of organizational behaviour, social and team dynamics and individual behaviour. 

The Constant Learning And Unlearning 

My professional journey has traversed through a complex labyrinth of challenges and learning, which has truly been a unique one-of-a-kind erudition in the realm of HR leadership. Starting from the telecom services space, which is progressive, flexible and adaptable. These were the formative years that helped me synergise the organisation’s goals with individual goals, institutionalizing values, adopting ever-evolving technology into HR, and keeping in mind growth and employee wellbeing. This also opened newer vistas of cross-functional strategy formulation with departments like finance, operations, etc. 

The next major milestone in my professional journey led me to the manufacturing domain, heading the human resource function, for one of the leading cement and sugar manufacturing companies. The group is an iconic heritage brand that has been at the forefront associated with India's developmental story, with a legacy of over 80 years. The manufacturing industry had its own set of challenges like managing a wide and diverse spectrum of white-collared and blue-collared workforces. Looking after the well-being of all stakeholders both internal and external to the group.

My primary focus was to achieve new pinnacles of growth through both organic and inorganic expansion strategies. During my tenure, we as a team were instrumental in curating a robust HR system to actively drive and support the group's growth initiatives. The manufacturing industry is complex and replete with distinguishable challenges like bonus settlements, industrial arbitrations, and managing people who were not just mere employees but an extension of the larger organisational family. The interdependence of the family members for health, education, and economic well-being is a responsibility and an important duty to be fulfilled, with utmost diligence and the highest level of integrity. 

Leading the HR function, we got the opportunity to work toward women's diversity and inclusion, thus empowering the woman workforce and laying the foundation for the implementation of progressive policy reforms.  We got to develop talent strategies that were in sync with the sacrosanct objectives of the organisation's overall vision, ethically supporting its implementation. This stage of my professional journey helped me work with a cross-functional team, where both the volume and depth of functionality are very high, and one gets to deal with a very diverse strata of people from different backgrounds. 

The final transition to the real estate realm is like a well-orchestrated script of a roller-coaster professional journey and in all probability, a natural progression towards an industry that is equally challenging. Heading the HR function, we have created an ethical, transparent, and process-oriented organizational environment. Conventionally, the real estate realm is complex with many stakeholders being involved in the day-to-day management of business operations and overall organizational growth. The real estate industry is predominantly people-centric, where people are the engine of growth and at the core of everything. 

For me, the ascent towards the higher realms of growth and transformation has been possible through constant learning and un-learning. I am glad my strong ethical perspective coalesced with a values-based management style has helped me as a leader, who values both outcomes and ethical means of achieving them.    

Authored by Madhuri Mehta, CHRO, Emaar India