Keynote by Rajeev Dubey, group president HR and corporate services at The Mahindra Group on how they create shared value at the company, at the Shared Value Summit held recently in Gurgaon.
“There are three views of the world that we think will bring our core purpose to life. These are to accept no limits, apply alternative thinking, and drive positive change.”
“We want people to create trust and trust is created by authenticity where what you think is what you say and what you say is what you do.”
At Mahindra, our business strategy, implementation and the culture, which ensures the strategy implementation, flows from our core purpose. Our core purpose is essentially to drive positive change in the lives of our stakeholders and the communities across the world to enable them to rise, and we want to do that through businesses that are competitive.
There are three views of the world that we think will bring our core purpose to life. These are to accept no limits, apply alternative thinking, and drive positive change. We call them the rise pillars and the question that we are struggling with or the hypothesis that we believe in is that we can use these three views of the world to create very powerful businesses. We bring these pillars to life through the HR levers and we have spent a couple of years aligning all the HR levers with these three rise principles. The key HR levers in play here include, communication, recruitment process, onboarding process, reward and recognition process, learning process, talent management and succession and the performance management system.
In all, there are institutional processes, systems and metrics that are geared to the three rise principles so that in any business situation these three pillars drive the behavior of people. In addition to the alignment of the HR levers, behavior of people is important. So we have to create and define those behaviors that will bring the rise pillars to life and create shared value. We have come up with five behaviors and these five behaviors in addition to the three pillars forms the core of how we create shared value and these we use in the talent management, reward and recognition and the performance management system.
The Five Behaviours
The first one says we want people to use the whole mind in any situation and the whole mind means combining masculine and feminine part. But the terminology we use is combining the left brain and the right brain—intellect and rationality with intuition, empathy and connection. The second one says we want people to be multipliers of energy, passion, engagement and this means not being the command and control type, but to focus on asking the questions and co-creating the answers. The third behavior has to do with experimentation and innovation because innovation is the core of our approach to creating shared value, and this says we want people to mange fear and leverage failure. The fourth one says we want people to be capable of mindfulness and by mindfulness we mean the ability to be open to all possibilities. It implies having the ability of presence of being here. The fifth one and the most important is we want people to create trust and trust is created by authenticity where what you think is what you say and what you say is what you do.
We use the 3+5 framework to create shared value and successful businesses and to reiterate, the three are accept no limits, apply alternative thinking, and drive positive change and the five are use the whole mind, be a multiplier, know how to manage fear and leverage failure, be mindful, and create trust. We are very confident that we will produce outperforming businesses and do it in a way, which drives positive change in the lives of our stakeholders and communities and enables them to rise, even as we get our return on capital employed.
