Hi, 

I'm Siddharth, a Strategic Human Capital expert and professional from Bengaluru, India.

I am passionate about making business impact through Human Capital design based on business reality, deep insights from behavioural sciences, while using a strategic approach. This is super important when companies start expansion!

I work a full time job, and am always open to networking, helping entrepreneurs who want to build great startups, or HR professionals who would like to collaborate and solve problems.

This is my website where you could find out areas that we could collaborate on and make a positive difference.

Happy performance and designing for it

Every business is striving for atleast doubling their market cap. The route to that is super normal performance. And performance is delivered by people.

Getting people to perform isn't complicated. 

However, helping people perform happily (want to perform vs. have to perform) is what can be complicated! This doesn't mean burning money and resources against vague goals of keeping people happy (read the section on Discretionary effort).

 "Wanting to perform" (vs. having to perform), is what creates businesses that are endearing and enduring.

That, takes expertise and design. There are atleast four factors required to make this possible.

Designing interventions for business impact

Working in businesses that encompassed group companies in commercial aviation, technology services, technology product, business consulting, healthcare, retail, real estate, startups (EdTech, hospitality, ecommerce and convenience) has given me broad experience, as well as, deep expertise in helping businesses strategise and execute.

How do I achieve this?

I synthesise the business ask with focussed research in psychology, organisation behaviour and human capital to create solutions that provide a significant competitive advantage to businesses to make a positive impact. These solutions are unique, first principles anchored and non-replicable by competition. 

Real examples

A healthcare brand was facing a challenge on NPS and employee retention. Post a focussed intervention, their attrition had fallen to one third of the original levels and NPS reached the 70s.

A retail chain with a sales challenge and attrition of almost 10% monthly achieved 100%+ of their AOPs for two straight years, and an employee attrition of 1% monthly.

A real estate group at INR 15 cr MRR went to INR125 cr MRR in 12 months and sustained those levels for the second year.

A billion dollar revenue IT services company democratised career management using technology, while creating an internal ecosystem to nurture individual career goals and timebound career shifts. Significant positive impact on reducing attrition and increasing billability to clients.

An airline created possibilities for junior pilots to achieve definite career growth, and become commanders, instructors and examiners. This reduced loss of talent pool, and hence achieve more predictable business outcomes (when pilots don't leave the company, flights don't get cancelled. When more young pilots join the company, the company can fly more routes and aircraft spend lesser time on the ground).

Making project managers more adept at consultative selling helped an IT services company achieve billion dollar revenues in an accelerated timeframe.

Nurse leaders were trained for and got adept at managing Gen Y employees in a hospital. Resulted in lower attrition, better performance management and ultimately better customer experience leading to a higher NPS. Higher NPS had a direct correlation to a larger number of customers choosing that hospital.

All these are real examples of how focussed Strategic Human Capital design can positively impact business outcomes, and hence market capitalisation.

Discretionary effort. The real deal.

My doctoral thesis was on the topic of discretionary effort at work. Discretionary effort is the willing performance of employees beyond normal levels of performance. It's the stuff that creates 5 rater performance. 

Why Discretionary effort? 

Companies regularly study and benchmark variables like satisfaction, engagement, e-NPS, happiness and whether the workplace is perceived as a highly favourable place by employees to stay and perform better than normal levels. The crux of the effort is to find out which factors need to be created or fixed to facilitate employees to perform better and deliver more. In short, companies spend significant levels of time, money and resources studying variables that 'hopefully' lead to discretionary effort.

Instead of working on factors that are believed to cause discretionary effort, I focus on directly creating discretionary effort through intended design. Hence, the causation of high performance becomes predictable and not accidental or incidental.

Executive Leader Coaching

Executive Leaders don't have it easy. 

They are human beings just like you and I, playing challenging roles and being answerable for performance to the board, investors, shareholders, employees, customers, vendors, partners and other stakeholders. To be able to do this, they need to be on top of their game all the time. 

And it's a mental game!

Executive Leader Coaching is never about teaching Leaders. It's about helping them learn. Both are extremely different. A coach holds the space for the leader to reflect, organise their own thinking, tap their own creativity for ideas and wisdom for decision making. 

Think of it as an exercise in mental reorganisation by the person themselves, so that they can accelerate their performance rapidly and be absolutely original about it. In that way, its all about unlocking any blocked creativity in the individual.

How long have I been doing this?

I have been helping Executive Leaders as an Executive Leader Coach from 2007. 

How do I help Executive Leaders succeed?

I help them in multiple ways 

- by facilitating individual reflection and thinking, 

- by working with their teams for specific awareness building leading to specific performance shifts,

- by designing interventions to help achieve specific outcomes,

- by creating strategies for achieving painless implementation and impact.

What does it take to do this well?

Well, it takes training, lots of learning, patience and practice. I am globally accredited MGSCCC and hold a PCC credential from ICF. Both are the gold standards in the field of Executive coaching.

Psychometrics

Psychometrics is an area that I absolutely love, for the precision and utility they bring to people's lives, when used appropriately. I had one awesome opportunity to work directly with Late Dr. Udai Pareek (Father of HRD in India)  on the Flagship book of Psychometrics. The book consists of atleast 80+ instruments and I helped automate them for easy use.  One of the instruments I had created also got included in that book. His daughter Dr. Surabhi Purohit and a couple of us ran a Youtube series on psychometrics a couple of years ago. You would find most of those videos at this link.

When used appropriately, psychometric instruments help individuals and organisations measure and appreciate their own strengths, forgotten areas of potential and even very very subtle areas like how motives of individuals in a collective impact the work climate. Ping me if you want to check it out.

I run an initiative to custom identify psychometric instruments for specific situations. Do visit www.Measure.Plus 

A bunch of world-class practices

I had an opportunity to collaborate with Dr. Marshall Goldsmith ,who is the world's pre-eminent leadership coach, to develop three global tools for HR impact.

These are largely meant for the HR function to help HR professionals, though anyone curious and willing to learn, could use them. More details can be found at www.SiGoTalent.org  (SiGo standing for Siddharth-Goldsmith).

Functional expertise

Areas of functional expertise that I bring to any engagement (in addition to the above)

Human Capital Life cycle processes - setup and management (hire to retire)

Change management - the best change is one that isn't felt as a change by people. I help make that real.

Mergers and Acquisitions - a lot of capital gets eroded when people leave after a M&A, doing this seamlessly is something I bring to the table. In addition, the entire process needs detailing, mapping and integration.

Performance management and OKRs - putting the human element back in them and drive "pull" adoption

Competency based systems - align all other systems to get focussed on that "difference that makes a difference"

Assessment and Development Centres - designing assessment tools and running them to develop people

Succession planning - future proofing companies and their talent pools

Career pathing - creating a free marketplace in an organisation where talent knows what to do to get wherever they want to

Top talent management - almost like a key account and relationship management setup for top talent

Total rewards - making rewards work for organisation objectives

Organisation design - Organising teams and what happens between them, for impact

Organisation effectiveness - more bang for the buck at every decision making instance

Innovation practice - creating organic and self generated momentum for institutionalising innovation

Group facilitation - achieving aligned outcomes through human process and group process facilitation

Large scale Interactive processes - working with large teams (100+ to 1000+) to solve problems and arrive at actions

Values and culture - arriving at values that resonate and a culture that feels organic and human, thus hyper accelerating performance

Leader development - design experiences for leaders to achieve pre-decided development goals

Outbound learning - using outbound contexts and exercising to improve individual and collective awareness, leading to definitive changed behaviours at the workplace

Human process labs - clearing away vestiges of past experiences and helping individuals unblock their own fountain of spontaneity and authenticity.

Teaching!

Some of the courses I have taught are on

Behaviour event interviewing, competency based management, psychometrics, personal effectiveness, HR analytics, performance management, strategic HR, real life cases in strategic HR and so on.

For more about where I have taught/teach please click on this link.

My books

I like to write stuff that helps people learn and succeed. To do this, I have been writing a bit over the years.

My first book was one of the earliest ones on HR Analytics in India. It outlined a simple process that anybody can use to help businesses and people succeed using HR analytics. If you would like to read it, drop me a mail at nagadirect@gmail.com or buy a hard copy here.

The second book was co-authored by me on Principles of Compensation Design, and explored the various ways in which intricate design of compensation could lead to specific desired outcomes for employees and employers.

The third book was a short one, that simplified my first book into ten Tweets (yes, a really short read). 

My fourth book was with a co-author and used the principle of checklists (like those used by pilots), to simplify people management for managers. This attacked the widely practised, but a resource burn heavy practice of leaders attending long leadership learning programs, and instead gave them simple checklists, that they could use in different work contexts, like, during interviews, while giving meaningful inputs to their team members, and so on.

My latest book, www.AwesomePeopleLeader.com is to help leaders be their authentic selves, and playfully try out a few ideas that would give them a significant orbital shift.

Research papers

Research is a good way of learning using a systematic method. I have been fortunate to have been able to work with colleagues and professors and publish action research. Action research is when one tries out something at the workplace and shares the learnings in the form of an article or paper. Some of my publications are listed below.

Siddharth, S.N., & Acharya, V. (2008). A Business-HR intervention using the concept of Organisational Roles. Kausthubam – Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

Bandyopadhyay, P. & Siddharth, S.N. (Jan 2009). Mentoring for Learning through Organizational Socialization of High-Potential Business Graduates. NHRD Network Journal. 70-78.

Siddharth, S.N., and Agarwal, R. (2014). Exploring Role Efficacy as correlate to Organizational Citizenship Behavior among Female Nurses in a Maternal and Childcare Facility. Ushus-Journal of Business Management, 13(2), 53-70.

Siddharth, S.N., &Sharma, Y. (2014). Exploratory longitudinal study of correlation between workload,‘Flow’ and other states among nurses at a perinatal hospital in India. SDMIMD - Managing Human Resources at the Workplace.

Siddharth, S.N. (Apr 2015). “Therapeutic HR – It’s Business Impact. NHRD Network Journal. 86-92.

Siddharth, S.N. (Apr 2017). Manasa, Vaacha, Karmana – HR in the Experience Economy Businesses in India. NHRD Network Journal.10(2):53-64

Siddharth, S.N. (Mar 2019). Learnings from a Practitioner’s Executive Education Experiences in India. SAGE - NHRD Network Journal.

Siddharth, S.N. and Chand, P.K. (June 2021). Effects of Autonomy in Eliciting Retail Store Managers’ Role Efficacy. The Journal of Oriental Research Madras. 

Siddharth, S.N. and Chand, P.K. (2021). Influence of Autonomy, Skills and Knowledge, Role Efficacy on Discretionary Effort of Indian Retail Managers.

Blogs and other writing

There have been a few blogs over the years where I have written about either disruptive or counter intuitive ideas. 

 https://usecaseleadership.blogspot.com/

https://nagasiddharth.blogspot.com/ 

http://vphr.blogspot.com/ (really old blog)

The National HRD Network

The NHRDN is a highly respected network of HR professionals in India, with global tie-ups and linkages. I have benefitted immensely from the network starting from my student days. Was a part of their Executive committee for 8 years and then Secretary of the Bangalore Chapter. I was also on their National Youth Board. 

I led the efforts to launch a series of low cost - high impact programs on careers, psychometrics, change management, instructional design, etc. Later these were combined into a program for young HR professionals called PHPD. There was also a program called TRIADS that brought together industry, academia and students to recognise excellence in summer projects.

Presently, I do not play an executive role there, but am empanelled as one of their three instructors in the area of Strategic HR and one of their two instructors in the area of HR Analytics.

More info at https://www.nationalhrd.org/

Other stuff that I get to do

A few of us have gotten together to run a couple of initiatives. 

www.SoundingBoard.cafe is an aggregation of senior HR leaders who make themselves available (zero cost) as sounding board to anyone who seeks the help.

Similarly, www.CaliberWorld.org is an initiative to bring together HR professionals for greater good and facilitates capability development.

Mastering the HRBP role - Mr. R. Anand

Working abroad - with Mr. Tibine Mathew

A long chat with Mr. Raj Raghavan, CHRO Indigo

My mission is to make a positive difference in the lives of people around me and my profession gives me an opportunity to do that!


My occupational philosophy is, "Business success through People success"

(c) Naga Siddharth 2022

Feel free to get in touch with me at nagadirect@gmail.com