2023 Year End Reflection

As we approach the end of another year, it’s an opportune time to reflect on the challenges and triumphs of leading in organizations at this unique time. As my mentor Arun Hubballi says, don't stress yourself on building an empire, work on building lean & value driven inclusive organizations. Also don’t take effort on building followers, create more leaders in your organizations which will help you to build more accountability, competitive ecosystems with right values.? This is something I always practice and hardcoded in my leadership ecosystem and values.

This was truly an exciting year for me in terms of professional life. I transitioned into a new role to lead Global Information security engineering organization. After leading cloud transformation for long time, I wanted to do something different and glad that I got this opportunity.? I also represented PepsiCo into multiple ETCISO forums where I spoke on building cutting edge cybersecurity engineering organizations, building threat landscape & resilience.

In 2023 I have prioritized improving my leadership practice by being radically inclusive and below are a few of my TOP learnings to practice and nurture inclusiveness in the organization. ?

1. Learn to speak inclusively: most of the time the team observe how their leaders are talking OR their decision-making process in key scenarios. As leaders we need to learn and practice to speak inclusively. Small, but deliberate improvements in the way we speak to each other can go a long way in creating feelings of inclusion at work and help create an atmosphere where everyone can feel welcome.
2. Focus on everyday experience: Make deliberate efforts to implement inclusive workplace practices. When inclusion is treated intentionally that becomes part of culture.
3. Enabling your leaders to practice inclusion: To create a safe, inclusive environment, leaders should promote inclusivity by practicing what they preach. When leaders understand the importance of modelling inclusion, teams stand a much better chance of finding success as well.
4. Build inclusive recognition and strategy practice: Work with a team to define your long-term strategy through inclusive workshops. When you build strategy together with a team, your team owns the strategy than as leader you are enforcing it. Also, an unbiased inclusive recognition system adds up fuel in order to nurture inclusive organization.

Along with disruption of technology also prioritized building highly skilled engineering organizations and below are a few TOP practices which helped me to understand where we are and what we need to achieve multi-year ambition to be best in class cybersecurity engineering organization.

1. Understanding the skill benchmark: Once you define a long-term technology strategy, take time to go deep dive on what skills you have vs what skills you need to achieve your long-term strategy.
2. Being transparent with the team: Discuss these outcomes with the team and enable your leaders & team to learn new skills with micro and macro learning techniques.
3. Skill gap analysis: Understand & accept skill gaps and build talent acquisition strategy, work with your senior leaders, and build long term/short-term hiring plans.
4. Critical conversations: Don’t sit on performance issues and don’t shy away from having critical conversations to improve performance of each team member. Build a culture where the complete team will be hungry for horizontal and vertical growth.
5. Empower your talent: Create org structure which will help your team get more clarity, take more accountabilities and be innovative. Create a culture of celebrating failures and give the ownership to the team to learn from the failures and put governance around it.

As we move into the new year, the focus will remain on building a highly collaborative & inclusive organization. I am excited for 2024 to continue to build the best Global cybersecurity engineering organization.??