"You Want To Create An Environment Where People Can Focus And Do Their Best Work"

Tapaswee Chandele, senior vice president of global talent, development and HR systems partnerships at The Coca-Cola Company, shared timely insights with me and my colleague Adam Bryant, senior managing director at The ExCo Group.

Reimer: What are the top two or three things that have shifted or changed in the broader world of talent and leadership? And what has remained constant??

Chandele:?I'll start with what has changed. The pandemic definitely changed a lot of expectations we have about how leaders show up. One of the silver linings of the pandemic is that empathy, care, and human-centricity are here to stay. We always talked about them as concepts before, but they got tested in a very different way during the pandemic.?

The other thing that changed exponentially is the amount of resilience that is needed. You expect leaders to be able to separate the signal from the noise and to be the buffer between the strain and the organization. You want to create an environment where people can focus and do their best work. Because if everyone is equally stressed, it doesn't help organizational progress.?

The third thing that has changed—and I don't think it has fully hit people—is the impact of technology and AI. There is a kind of lag, in the sense that even though the technology is evolving quickly, it can also feel slow as we’re absorbing it. It will have profound impacts on supply chains, marketing, production, business models, and how we frame and structure work in organizations.??

Bryant: In addition to resilience, what are the X-factors that separate the very best leaders these days??

Chandele:?An important one is their ability to differentiate between good and not good, and to have the courage to give people feedback so that it resonates. A lot of people don't have the courage to give people honest feedback, and so they end up blindsiding them. Giving people meaningful feedback requires a degree of resilience and confidence in yourself so that you don't get tripped up in those conversations. The way I think about it is, if you truly cared about a person and are invested in their success, wouldn't you tell them where they stand????

Another big differentiator is people who understand how to balance checking in with their team without either micromanaging them or empowering them so much that they disengage and distance themselves from the work. They need to be doing something with their own two hands. That includes removing roadblocks for their team and the organization or allocating resources in a different way. Because those are the kind of problems that your team can't solve.??

People can get so focused on titles that they forget what the day-to-day expectations of the jobs are. Ultimately, what differentiates leaders is that people respect them because they know that their careers will be more successful,?because they worked for him or her.?

Another thing that differentiates leaders is that they know how to behave when a mistake happens. Yes, people often talk about the importance of being comfortable with failure. But how they respond in the moment when a mistake occurs can have a huge impact on culture.??

The best leaders understand that the goal is helping someone learn so they keep the mistake from happening again. It’s not about making the person who made the mistake feel worse than they already do. It’s the leader’s job to own that the mistake happened and then use the moment to help their team recalibrate and get back to doing their job.

Reimer: Where do you get your drive and ambition from?

Chandele:?I come from an extremely poor background, and my father was part of the military, so we moved every two years. I grew up with a lot of constraints. I had no idea where my life was headed. I had no counseling or guidance about what I should do. It wasn’t until some friends of mine went and got MBAs and joined companies in the HR function that I discovered that there was something called HR. So, I took a step back, went back to get my MBA and The Coca-Cola Company hired me right after. That was 25 years ago, and for the first time in my life, I was able to visualize a life that was different. And now I lead talent & development globally for The Coca-Cola Company.?

I tell you this because I am so grateful and still so surprised that I'm here. I have nothing to lose. And I lean into anxiety. If I don’t know how to do something, I don’t worry about it. Because the worst thing that will happen is that I will fail. I never thought I'd be this successful, and the positives outnumber the negatives by a lot already. Because of my work with The Coca-Cola Company, I have traveled to 55 countries and I've lived on four continents. I have run toward the flame every time and 99 percent of the time things have worked out. You can call it confidence, but that’s my fuel.?

Bryant: Are there HR approaches and frameworks that you think are past their prime and no longer useful??

Chandele:?Let’s take the example of identifying high potential talent; we need to evolve the way we identify and develop them – which is grounded in data. Another example is ratings for employees. Should you have them or not? You could make arguments on both sides. If you take away ratings, for example, you take away transparency. But underneath the question is whether you are creating a culture with the right goals and objectives, and them measuring them effectively.?

You also have to be careful with benchmarks. One benefit of them is that if someone else has done something, then you don't have to spend the same time learning about it or making the same mistake. But what worked in one company doesn't necessarily work in another.??

The broader point is that we have to really identify the barnacles in your organization—the ideas or processes that nobody ever questions and they become part of your fabric, because people have used them forever and they are just accepted. You have to identify them and get rid of them, because nobody respects them anymore.

Reimer: Since the start of the pandemic, employees have had greater expectations of their employers. What’s your take on that phenomenon?

Chandele:?It starts with making sure there is not a gap in your organization between what leaders say and what they do, regarding any topic. There should be respect and trust in leaders, and respect and trust come with consistency. Even if you're conveying a difficult message that people don't like, they will respect it if it's grounded in real business context as to why this is the right thing for the organization.

If people find they are having trouble bringing people along on topics, then maybe the leadership team needs to step back and ask, “how are we coming across to the teams?” Because it’s the role of the leadership team to create confidence and trust. Another way to do that is to give people a full explanation of the context and thinking behind a decision, rather than just issuing a decision. Everyone wants to be treated like an adult.

Bryant: How do you hire? What questions do you ask in job interviews??

Chandele:?I lean a lot into asking about the mistakes that people have made and what they have learned from them. I value the humility that comes from going through a journey like that and reflecting on it because I want to create a culture of continuous learning on my team.

The second thing I look for is whether the person has built resilience in the organization—whether it's about process, technology, capability, or in the team. I want to avoid people who may have delivered results in the moment, but they left the organization worse off when they moved on. I’m really wary of people who see themselves as heroes.?

Reimer: What was the most useful lesson you learned from a bad manager??

Chandele:?It ties back to what I was saying earlier about mistakes. About seven years into my career, I was working in compensation, and I made a huge mistake in calculating the annual incentive of a very senior leader. I was mortified. I went to the bathroom, shut the door and cried. It haunts me to this day.

I could not have made myself feel worse than I was already feeling, but my manager at the time made me feel like scum. He took me down lower than I already felt. I learned a lesson from the above, but perhaps not the right one in the first instance. For a while, I became a perfectionist. My motto for our team became the idea that we are never going to get anything wrong. We rallied behind the notion of zero errors. So that chapter resulted in a lot of excellence, but also a lot of stress and pressure.??

With time, I still set a high bar for excellence on my team, but I also know that we are all human. Mistakes are inevitable. You have to be realistic and reasonable and create an environment where people can do really good work. Nobody can do that if they're always worried that they might get something wrong. That's a very big lesson that I've always held close to my heart.?

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