Interview with Mark T Fernandes, SVPHR, Head – Organization Capability and Development, and DE&I specialist

Meet Mark T Fernandes, a Senior Vice President, Human Resources & Head – Organization Capability and Development, and DE&I specialist at Kotak Life We discussed the key challenges, L&D strategies, and trends — more on that below.

I believe L&OD is about providing a platform for experience, education, and exposure because, in the end, these three actions help people perform better at what they are already doing and develop them for roles they would like to pick up in the future for win-win outcomes between the organization and themselves.

• Exposure. When you provide people with exposure, you are making them take up roles, learn new paradigms, and open the world to them in ways they don’t know existed yet. So, exposure experience is about the learnings that you provide for them. These could be secondments, cross-functional/ cross-geography projects, projects in a different subunit, a different function, or another part of the organization.
• Experience. Experience is about being able to leverage learnings through application in real time. On-The-Job execution through role expansions and horizontal, vertical, or zigzag career moves is a key example. The other is interventions that involve going beyond the role and giving back to society, like a corporate social responsibility kind of role, wherein if you work for an insurance organization like ours, the experience will mean how you take that knowledge to educate people outside who know nothing about insurance. You learn to appreciate another person’s viewpoint and perspective from a space you don’t occupy. So that is about the experience.
• Education. So we finished exposure, we finished experience, then we came to education. It’s about the formal and informal ways people are made aware of ideologies, concepts, frameworks, methodologies, and approaches to work. So that it gives them the license, the standing, and the cognition to approach their body of work through multiple lenses for deeper value-addition and business/societal impact.

If L&OD does that – education, exposure, and experience – effectively, I believe they’re truly enabling the workforce to do their current roles a lot better and preparing them for the evolving world of tomorrow.

Many people say it’s challenging to quantify interventions in L&D because, unlike other aspects of business, you can’t really put a number. I tend to take a different opinion because I believe L&D can be quantified. It all depends on how you want to quantify it. That is where I would borrow an analogy from the balanced scorecard approach (BSA). It’s a framework wherein we look at lead (predictive measures of performance) and lag (past measures of performance) measures. Lead measures what has a direct output basis.

For example:
If I talk about feedback on a five-point scale on a training program, and I have an overwhelming population, say 80% of them giving me a four or five, that tells me how I have defined my outcomes. Whether it is quality of facilitation, content, ability to apply it to the role, and so forth, I have an average of 4.5. So that is also an ROI. The result tells me that people have returned with a tangible quantification of the training. That becomes a lag measure.

However, a lag measure often isn’t enough. Because L&D is something like an intervention with deferred returns, what you do today will not necessarily germinate into an outcome. There might be a lag period from inputs to output.

For example:
I will put people through a leadership journey for leadership development, not when I want a leader for tomorrow’s role. So if I need to grow leaders for tomorrow, I need to start yesterday so that by tomorrow I will have a ready pool of people. And it’s along that journey that I built milestones of return on investment. And that is where the lead effects come into action because of the training or the developmental interventions.

• Are my people raising their hand and saying yes, I want to take up new opportunities? That becomes a return on investment.
• Are people engaging better in their roles and innovating better because of that? That becomes a return on investment.
• Are people choosing to stay in the organization longer? That’s retention, which becomes a lag measure.
• Do people feel more confident adding value by managing more difficult stakeholders, taking up more complex bodies of work, and managing teams a lot? All of that becomes an ROI.

And if I managed it, then it would speak to retention, productivity, engagement, and a sense of belonging and happiness in the organization.

I think the role of L&OD has already changed. If you look at it from pre-COVID and post-COVID time, the workforce has come back into the workplace and has very different means, right? In terms of how they want to work, where they want to work, whom they want to work with, and what kind of work they want to do. And to compound that, we also have a huge uptake in the number of Gen Z entering the workplace.

Many just began their careers around that time, so they never saw the pre-COVID world. And they were used to working hybrid, remotely, with no structures, basically project-to-project, “need-to-know” basis. And while that is about Gen Z, we also simultaneously have the Millenials, Gen X and Boomers already midway and beyond their work lifespans. And each of them has their work ethic and ways of working. Never before have we ever seen 4 generations at the workplace more than we are now. And that itself presents a unique challenge for organizations. It’s a unique and challenging experience for leaders in organizations because they have never handled a beast of this kind, if I may. And that is a vital space for L&OD to occupy and enable the organization to deliver through capability building, DEI, Succession Planning, Career Pathing, Coaching, Performance mentoring, reverse mentoring, and what have you!

I see L&D partnering with the CEO and developing a deep understanding of how to further business strategy because business as we know it is evolving at a pace like never before due to technological changes…and that calls for identifying and developing capabilities and creating leaders who’ll lead the organization sustainably onward.

The world is changing; we are already talking about moving away from the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) to the BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear and Incomprehensible) world, and CEOs are struggling, saying, “I don’t know whether the strategy that I choose to focus on today will be relevant so much as even one year down the line because there is so much of change happening all the time and technology is constantly evolving” And while they manage that on the horizon, CEOs are also expected to report to their shareholders. They need to manage profitability, scale, customer satisfaction, and employee experience. And who enables all of that for the organization? It’s the employees. And how do you ensure employees effectively and efficiently play that part? That’s where we’re talking L&OD!

The role of L&OD today is not just about partnering with the organization to train and develop leaders for the future. Still, it’s also about helping the CEO access awareness, and real-time information about where the skills are changing, what capabilities need to be developed, who will be developed, and, how and finally, how may all of this be done with a focus on near-medium and long term profitability and growth. So, on the one hand, you’re working for the present and the near future. On the other hand, you’re also working, keeping in mind that things are continuously changing using systems and design thinking. In addition to leadership and technical skills, you must figure out how to continuously equate the workforce to change with the moving post. Because what was relevant today is irrelevant to the future, you cannot always say that I need to know yesterday if I have to prepare leaders for tomorrow; it worked pre-COVID, but today I need leaders as of right now.

I will use another OD model here, calling it the three-C approach: content, context, and character.

Content is all about a diagnosis. The quality of your diagnosis becomes very important. Who are you delivering the intervention for, and with what end in mind, involving stakeholders as part of the design making and diagnosis because we often need to figure out why and what we are doing? If someone out there wants a program done, we go into it.

• What problem is that program solving?
• Why is there a need for that program in the absence of that program?
• What is it that shouldn’t be happening, or what is it that is not happening that should happen?
• Who is this program going to impact, and how and by when?

These are fundamental questions. What are the interlinkages of this program with business outcomes? So a thorough OD diagnosis is the only way to diagnose it. So you diagnose the stakeholder, situation, and design, and all of that becomes your content.

And how do you do that by involving the people you solve the problem for? Because very often, L&D sits in an ivory tower believing they know it all, designing interventions left and right and center for execution by the business, or believing they know it all and executing it. However, the end user might say, “Hey, I don’t relate to this. It doesn’t speak to me.”

And it happens because you still need to take the pains to go there on the shop flow and understand where the pain points are and why they are there. So the content becomes very important, so collaborating on and working on content through a thorough diagnosis becomes very important. That’s content context. Very often, organizations use Cut, Copy & Paste models. However, it’s a not an universal solution.

Each organization has its context. Contextualizing it to the role, business, and individual approach, how the facilitator wants to tell the story becomes very important without making people realize why they need to do it in the first place. So context also becomes very important. And the context has to appeal. At a business level, your department level, and individual level.

Character is about the energy and skin in the game (of the facilitator, audience, and business). If you have to tell a wholesome story that creates an impact and triggers the drive for change, then it has to be experiential and relatable…it has to have elements of hope, fear, angst, vulnerability, triumph. if you have to create an experience, the characterisation through deep facilitation becomes very essential.

And for that, you’ve got to get the people to come together and feel comfortable disagreeing, debating, and discussing. But without psychological safety, you will have nobody who challenges you, talk about their fears, share their success stories, open up to their vulnerabilities etc etc. And that is why organizations today struggle with innovation because we all like to say yes and are scared to say no. That’s where the character aspect becomes crucial.