From Just Rolling Out Salaries To A Key Decision Maker

A few decades back, when we were more of an industrialised world, the role of HR was really to ensure that the wheels keep running, which meant ensuring things such as - how do I get the factory workers in on time? How do we ensure salaries are processed on time? And when people get bored, how do we make them feel more engaged through fun activities. The context today is completely different. Today, we live in a world where everything is a lot much more transient, and the pace of change has increased dramatically.

A die-hard admirer of Bill Campbell, Jagannathan aspires to do something extraordinary for the startup ecosystem in India. “Hence, what I try and do as part of my role is to figure out whether I can unblock leaders and any others who work with me. Sometimes, it's about managing upwards - figuring out how to manage certain situations with founders and sometimes it's about managing with their teams.”

Having spent the most part of his career in the start-up ecosystem post the brief stints at large corporates such as Mahindra and Reliance, from last six years in the Start-Up world, Jagannathan seems to have explored and built multiple business functions - spanning Category, Sales and HR. 

“When I began my stint at Design Café as VP, People and Culture the function was focused mainly on processing salary and rolling out offer letters. But over the past 1.5 years, I’d like to believe that we have become a business-enabling function and are playing an influential role in the organisation's growth story.” 

The thinking of people here is pretty strategic and is about how to help the business grow sustainably. To give a couple of examples - we have done very early investments in org development compared to most startups, which is truly going to place the company in good stead. Further, the management has really thought through how the company wants to run performance in the organisation. 

Jagannath is an ardent believer of the fact that doing a role in HR, puts you in situations where you need to build influence with stakeholders. That is a key trait of a leader. If you are playing the role of head of HR, it allows you to understand how other functions work, it helps you build a much broader perspective, and helps you understand how to shape the heart of an organisation. 

 “And let's face it, an organisation is about three things -  a good quality product or service, making the financials work and making its people tick. So if you're a person who wants to be a CEO, I really think doing this role is a very, very important pitstop.”