Alind Sharma joins Pfizer as head-HR

A chemical engineer and IIM Ahmedabad alumnus, Sharma was earlier director-HR at Monsanto.

Alind Sharma has joined Pfizer as senior director, human resources. He moves in from Monsanto, where he was director-HR for more than three years. His updated LinkedIn profile confirms this development.

Sharma has primarily been a pharma person who started his career with Ranbaxy Labs. He spent more than six years with the company before moving to Glenmark Pharmaceuticals. He rose from the ranks and became senior vice-president, HR in the eight years that he spent there. He also worked for a year at Tata International as head-HR.

A chemical engineer and IIM Ahmedabad alumnus, Sharma’s experience spans close to two decades.

Human resource is an integral part of a pharmaceutical company, where brand building and selling happens primarily through people.

This year has seen two of the largest pharmaceutical companies getting a bigwig as the HR head.

First, it was Yashwant Mahadik who joined Sun Pharma from Philips, as executive vice president and global CHRO. At Philips, Mahadik was global head of HR business transformation, IT & operations.

Then, Prabir Jha, group CHRO, Reliance Industries joined Cipla as global CHRO.

This is yet another senior-level movement in the HR function of the pharma sector.

© 2015 HR Katha

Credit: http://hrkatha.com/news/530-alind-sharma-joins-pfizer-as-head-hr

Debbie McGrath

Posted on 03/07/2016, by:

Debbie McGrath
HR.com

If you need to perfect at something, practice is mandatory. Leadership is no different. Only if you continuously hone your skills as a leader, you can become a master. We have a great article that talks about vital leadership practices in this issue of Leadership Excellence. 

Bob Anderson and Bill Adams’ article Six Leadership Practices, talks about six essential leadership practices that, if approached as ongoing disciplines, reliably mature the inner game and develop outer-game capabilities. According to them, these practices, taken together, are a spiritual boot camp for leaders. They are spiritual because they call forth the highest and best in us. They are a boot camp because they change and restructure us. They reliably transform Reactive leadership into Creative leadership and beyond. To know more, read the article.

As a leader (or a potential leader) you are constantly being evaluated on how well you display confidence, composure, credibility, connection, and charisma. Carol Kinsey Goman in her article Leadership Presence puts forth five simple strategies that can influence people’s impression of you and instantly increase your leadership presence. According to her, leadership presence needs to be rooted in your basic values – and the “homework” of knowing your strengths, weaknesses, talents and biases is crucial to aligning people’s impression of you with your best authentic self. Read this interesting piece to know more.

“In my work with thousands of leaders I consistently see three delegation mistakes that lead to countless hours of lost time, frazzled nerves, and frustrated leaders,” says author David Dye in his article Delegation, A Powerful Tool. The good news is that when you address these mistakes, your people grow, your team gets more done, and you have more time for the work only you can do. So find out the 3 delegation mistakes to avoid and get going.

Market forecasts. Stock prices. News headlines. Reports from your team. As a leader, you’re bombarded with data from the moment you wake up, your smartphone buzzing with emails and alerts. Can you ignore it? No way, as your job as a leader is to take all of this incoming data and use it to make smarter decisions. Authors John H. Johnson and Mike Gluck in their article, Don’t Be Misled By Data, talks about 4 ways you may be undermining your career or your company by misinterpreting data—and how you can start using data to your advantage as a leader.

Diversity and inclusion have definitely grown up over the past 20 years. Studies have shown that diversity management tops the list of priorities that businesses will have in the coming years. And, within the last 10 years, there has been an explosion of senior-level diversity officer roles in corporations, higher education, and law firms. With all of these resources being put toward increasing diversity, why have most organizations not achieved the change they seek? Read Natalie Holder's article Uncovering Unconscious Bias In The Workplace to know more.

Hope you got a sneak peek into this month’s edition of Leadership Excellence Essentials. I haven’t talked about the rest of the articles, so that you get a chance to explore and find out what’s in store for you. I am sure, you will like it as always. Happy Reading!! 

Credit: http://www.hr.com/en/magazines/leadership_excellence_essentials/march_2016_leadership/editors-note_ilhsn1oq.html
  

160 plus firms make over 450 offers across 200 plus job profiles at IIM Bangalore

The Final Placement season for the PGP Class of 2014-16 of the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB) witnessed the participation of the top recruiters across all sectors.

This year the placement process at IIM Bangalore witnessed the participation of 409 eligible students. Five students opted out of the Placement Process. As many as 160+ companies participated and made more than 450 offers across 200+ job profiles. There were as many as 139 Pre Placement Offers extended to the students before the start of the Final Placements based on their performance during the Summer Internship. The Lateral Placement season for candidates with more than 22 months of work experience saw a total of 136 offers being made by firms in varied domains like Consulting, Business Leadership, Product Management, Operations, Category Management, and General Management. About 18 students were offered international placements from various firms for global locations. Two students had foregone their Pre Placement Offers, which included an offer from a leading multinational financial services corporation, to continue on their entrepreneurial venture.

IIMB played host to most big international banks such as Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Citibank on the first day of the Final Placements with Goldman Sachs making 14 offers. The process also saw the participation of Avendus Capital and American Express. Private Equity/Venture Capital roles by India Value Funds were offered to the students. A host of Indian banks and financial institutions such as Kotak Investment Bank, ICICI Securities, ICICI Prudential, Yes Bank, Axis Bank made offers during the Placement process, with ICICI leading the pack with 11 offers.

In the Consulting domain, Bain & Company (17 offers), Accenture Strategy (16), Deloitte (14), The Boston Consulting Group (13), A T Kearney (11) and McKinsey & Co (8) were the top recruiters this year. More than 30% of the entire batch received offers in the consulting sector, which also included reputed names like Strategy&, Roland Berger, Alvarez & Marsal and GEP Consulting also hired from IIM Bangalore this time. Other prominent recruiters in this space were ZS, EXL, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Conglomerates such as Aditya Birla Group (11), Tata Administrative Services (TAS), Reliance Industries Ltd, Mahindra Group, CK Birla, Larsen & Toubro, Future Group, Siemens and General Electric recruited in significant numbers for leadership and general management roles.

Many students also chose to go to Sales and Marketing functions, and were extended offers by major consumer goods and services firms. The major recruiter in this category was P&G with 7 offers and the other recruiters included Hindustan Unilever, ITC, Mondelez International, Coca Cola, PepsiCo, Johnson & Johnson, Marico and Asian Paints. Telecom majors Vodafone and Bharti Airtel also made a number of offers in this domain. The major retail firm from Middle East – Alshaya recruited 9 students this year.

Prominent recruiters in the technology space included Microsoft, Samsung and Infosys. In the IT consulting domain, all prominent recruiters like IBM and Capgemini recruited from the campus. The E-Commerce space saw heightened interest with Amazon and Flipkart making 16 and 11 offers respectively. Other prominent E-Commerce recruiters included Uber, Ola Cabs, Paytm, Urban Ladder, AskmeBazaar, Hopscotch, and CarTrade.

Commenting on the occasion, Professor Ganesh N Prabhu, Chairperson, Career Development Services, IIM Bangalore, said: “Even though there was a slight dip in e-commerce hiring, the consulting firms hired in larger numbers and helped accelerate the placements.”

Krishna M, Placement Representative, said: “In addition to the continued interest shown by traditional recruiters, we also saw close to 25% first time recruiters who hired in good numbers. Further, the increased efforts put in by students resulted in them getting their preferred jobs.”

The HR Profession

HR profession had a distinct reputation in the recent past. It was more looked at as a transactional function than “value adding”.  However, due to its continuous evolvement over a period of time, it has come up to a state where it should be playing its actual role.

This transition happened more due to  change in environment, IT boom and various Sun Rise industries boom where hiring and firing had become a “new normal” norm.  Many new ways were identified to address this challenge and HR professionals pioneered some of the solutions be it “outsourcing”, “third party hire’, “contractual hire” so on and so forth.  The New Normal norm piggy backed on various new type of challenges which business professional did not equate well with as they neither had a competence nor the time to address them. There comes a role of HR – a covet HR function.

The time changed and there was a need to have “strategic HR” which would not only spearhead addressing these challenges but also find newer ways to help business people to perform their function more effectively.  Talent dynamics, capability gaps and many more emotional side of problems were required to be addressed – all this helped in giving different perspective to HR professionals.  They are now more business savvy as they have realized that if they are not aligned with business needs – no one would want them solely for emotional needs.  Also, alignment between business and people is need of the hour.  In order to make situations more relevant to current times, a constant review mechanism of “capability mapping” is required and that is best managed by HR.

There are a few mandates any “effective” HR professional must focus at:

1. Understand the “Core Purpose” of the business they are in through various ways
2. Understand the “capability desire” of the business
3. Identify the gaps
4. Bridge the gaps
5. Ensure “talent pipeline” is healthy all the time
6. Developing, motivating and retaining talent
7. Moreover, creating value in the “talent chain”
8. Custodian of the organization culture

Talent Strategy can be shaped once the business strategy is well understood.  Business strategy not just includes the business model but also identifying the “value” which any brand wants to create over a period of time. Understanding that “value” is the core for any HR Strategy which only seasoned and professional HR can understand.  It is not so easy and simple, it requires much of perseverance, attitude and aptitude. Before we get onto the results on understanding “how great the brand has become” it is more important to understand “how the brand has become great”.

An Article by :

Ms. Seema Bangia

Head – HR

Mahindra Defence Systems Ltd

Credit: http://iimtstudies.edu.in/beta/the-hr-profession