"Crafting a high-performance team demands more than talent—it's about strategic hiring, cultivating the right culture, and, above all, fostering skilled leadership. Leadership, a constantly evolving skill, eclipses talent's role, contributing 75-80% to the symphony of success."
In this episode of The Shape of Work podcast, we are honored to welcome Hakim Badshah, the Managing Director, Talent at Deloitte. With a distinguished career spanning Accenture, Sify Limited, and Jasubhai Digital Media, Hakim brings extensive experience. Holding a Post Graduation in International Trade and Finance from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade and an Advanced Strategic Management Programme from the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode, Hakim's insights at the intersection of talent management, international business, and strategic leadership promise a thought-provoking discussion for our audience.
Hakim Badshah, Deputy Talent Service Leader at Deloitte, offers practical insights on leadership, adaptability, and aligning team performance with organizational goals in this podcast. Exploring evolving talent trends, the episode emphasizes prompt engineering and staying informed about technological advancements. Hakim's LinkedIn invitation reflects his commitment to ongoing professional growth, making this a valuable resource for leaders and HR professionals aiming to build resilient, high-performing teams.
Episode Highlight
Follow Hakim Badshah on Linkedin
Produced by: Priya Bhatt
Podcast Host: Riddhi Agarwal
About Springworks:
Springworks is a fully-distributed HR technology organisation building tools and products to simplify recruitment, onboarding, employee engagement, and retention. The product stack from Springworks includes:
SpringVerify— B2B verification platform
EngageWith— employee recognition and rewards platform that enriches company culture
Trivia — a suite of real-time, fun, and interactive games platforms for remote/hybrid team-building
SpringRole — verified professional-profile platform backed by blockchain, and
SpringRecruit — a forever-free applicant tracking system.
Springworks pride&l
"Crafting a high-performance team demands more than talent—it's about strategic hiring, cultivating the right culture, and, above all, fostering skilled leadership. Leadership, a constantly evolving skill, eclipses talent's role, contributing 75-80% to the symphony of success."
In this episode of The Shape of Work podcast, we are honored to welcome Hakim Badshah, the Managing Director, Talent at Deloitte. With a distinguished career spanning Accenture, Sify Limited, and Jasubhai Digital Media, Hakim brings extensive experience. Holding a Post Graduation in International Trade and Finance from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade and an Advanced Strategic Management Programme from the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode, Hakim's insights at the intersection of talent management, international business, and strategic leadership promise a thought-provoking discussion for our audience.
Hakim Badshah, Deputy Talent Service Leader at Deloitte, offers practical insights on leadership, adaptability, and aligning team performance with organizational goals in this podcast. Exploring evolving talent trends, the episode emphasizes prompt engineering and staying informed about technological advancements. Hakim's LinkedIn invitation reflects his commitment to ongoing professional growth, making this a valuable resource for leaders and HR professionals aiming to build resilient, high-performing teams.
Episode Highlight
Follow Hakim Badshah on Linkedin
Produced by: Priya Bhatt
Podcast Host: Riddhi Agarwal
About Springworks:
Springworks is a fully-distributed HR technology organisation building tools and products to simplify recruitment, onboarding, employee engagement, and retention. The product stack from Springworks includes:
SpringVerify— B2B verification platform
EngageWith— employee recognition and rewards platform that enriches company culture
Trivia — a suite of real-time, fun, and interactive games platforms for remote/hybrid team-building
SpringRole — verified professional-profile platform backed by blockchain, and
SpringRecruit — a forever-free applicant tracking system.
Springworks pride&l
Hello and welcome to the Shape of Work, a podcast series by Springworks. My name is Anoop and I am your host. Each week, we'll be talking to top people managers across the world on the future of work and how it's shaping our workplace. So sit back and get ready to find out more from these movers and shakers, as we have a no-holes bar. Anything goes. Conversation with them about their journey, their insights, their thoughts, most importantly, their ideas and vision for the workplace of the future. Join in on the conversation, leave a comment and don't forget to hit that subscribe button.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to another episode of the Shape of Work podcast. Today, I am delighted to welcome Hakim Bhatsha, who is Deputy Talent Service Leader at Deloitte. Welcome to the podcast, hakim. Thank you for coming and joining us today. How are you? Thanks, thank you, Adi.
Speaker 3:I am doing very well and thanks for this invitation to your podcast.
Speaker 2:It's pleasure having you here, Hakim. So just to set some context about you and what you do, can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your career journey till now?
Speaker 3:Sure. So in Deloitte I basically am the Talent Shared Services Leader, which means I run the Shared Services part of the talent organization for the US member form of Deloitte, which means around 100,000 employees, and I take care of the Shared Services part of our operations. From India, I am based out of Hyderabad. Prior to joining Deloitte, for the first 17 years of my work experience, I was doing consulting work with firms like Accenture and Sufi.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's great to know. You have a lot of experience and definitely you will get a plethora of content from our conversation today.
Speaker 1:I hope, so I hope so Definitely.
Speaker 2:So, as you said, you are a talent leader and as a leader in talent management, I just wanted to ask you what strategies have you found most effective in building and leading high performance team? Definitely, you will be managing a lot of huge number of member in a one team, so what is the most effective do you think? And especially in the context of global services industry? So what is your?
Speaker 3:strategy. Yeah, I think the first component of building a high performance team is talent plays a part of the role and not everything depends upon talent. To build a high performing team, it is important that we hire right. It is important that we set the culture right. It's important that development strategies which you put in place is right. If you don't hire people and then you can have as much development as you like and as much training in, it's not going to work out and it's not going to be high performing and team in.
Speaker 3:I personally believe the single biggest contributor to a high performing team is getting the right leadership in place, getting the right leadership training in place. It's the belief that leadership is a skill, hence it can be acquired. It's not your bond with right, and if it's a skill, it constantly needs sharpening in. So it's not that just because you lead a team of two people or 200 people, you are a great leader, or you have experience of 10 years of leading 200 people and therefore you're great. It requires constant sharpening, constant self assessment, and I do believe that that's the most critical component get your leadership right and then the rest of the things will follow in. Talent plays an important role in terms of hiring and in terms of development, in terms of setting the culture part of it. But that's that. I would say that it is basically 20-25% is what depends on talent. High performance means you need to understand the business aspect of the whole organization and start delivering from there.
Speaker 2:Definitely. I couldn't agree more with the points you just mentioned. We must understand the business point, what the current trend is going on, what we are seeing today. So, if we will talk about the current trend, we see the technologies and the employees are more focused on their personal development plans. So, over the career, how have you seen the landscape of talent development evolve and what trends or shifts have you observed?
Speaker 3:10,000 years ago somebody found a chalk and a tree and started writing it and that became the instructor led design and we start saying that instructor led training started from there. After that we started innovating in some pieces. We got a blackboard and then we said, okay, get a pencil chalk as such. Then we said, okay, let's get a projector, let's get a PowerPoint, and that's how training started. We are using exactly the same version of it today. There are innovations in certain parts of this life cycle.
Speaker 3:When computers came in, e-learning started. So basically started with a projector and you could make a slide in and you could project it through a glass projector and that slide would get reflected in. And that's how we call PowerPoint slide Right, because earlier it was virtually a slide, it was a physical slide which would put in to a projector. From there we have seen development in, from e-learning to use various labestages where we basically started integrating with LMSs because there is more accountability over there. And then from there you shifted towards soft skills, saying, okay, those are not soft, they are really, really hard. The human skills with somebody brings it into the team are hard skills and it's not. They are called soft skills in but they are hard to acquire, especially if you're not oriented towards that. So I think somewhere along 2000, we shifted drastically towards those pieces in from technology, earlier training, saying let's train you know Rackle or PeopleSoft or something like that, and that was early 1990s to close to 2010s.
Speaker 3:Then, in 2010, I think, there was a shift in where we said, okay, let's do continuous learning, right, figure out on what needs to be, what makes a person what do we call the great learner. Then we said, okay, how do we personalize it? Mobile came in and said let's do mobile learning. Gamification came in and this was formed to post 2010. All of this existed before also, but then it obviously picked up significantly.
Speaker 3:We need to personalize training. We don't want to generalize training and it needs to be tailored towards you. And I think now, post COVID, people are trying to figure out you know, how do you deliver this training remotely? Now, that does not mean an IELT or do it via eLearning or Zoom. The training which needs to be engaged for right People need to still understand it. It's not some compliance training that somebody does in a box, somewhere with no engagement, and the whole purpose is let's answer those five, seven questions at the end to pass out. So I think now the phase is how do you make it much, much more interactive and get engagement and it's not about clicking multiple strikes questions in and I think that's where the world is going in the talent development area of how do you make it more skills focused and how do you deliver more ROI at the end of the day to the firm.
Speaker 2:Fantastic observation, hakeem, I must say definitely the shift towards technology driven solution, the points you have bought and the personalized development plans, because every employee and everyone else focusing on upskilling themselves. So these are lining with the changing dynamics of our globalized workforce. So that's great. So, moving on to the next question, so with the rapid evolution of the skills required in today's workforce as we see, how do you identify and develop the capabilities that organization need to stay competitive, like are there any specific skills that you see becoming increasingly crucial?
Speaker 3:Okay, so it's a very interesting question, right it's. My point is organizational capability development has remained same since 1950s. You don't change it, right? Like human body does not change that fast, and so the heart remains a heart. We just understand a little bit more about the heart and we understood that there are you know whatever four ventricles as such, and then we figure out what are the muscles of each ventricle.
Speaker 3:It's pretty simple and you know, you conduct a skills assessment and you do a workforce planning and you stay informed of where industry is going. You use data and analytics and you combine all of this particular bit and that's how organization capabilities get developed in. We do it in different ways. Earlier times, skills assessment was me asking you, hey, what do you know? Oh, I know Java, and you assume that you know Java. You would give some test in and if I did well, you would assume that you know Java. Right, and nowadays it's all online and it will give you a mark and say what is your proficiency in this particular bit and do this particular course so that your proficiency increases, and that's a skill assessment.
Speaker 3:And yeah the leadership of the firm, start doing strategic workforce planning and do you need to hire a FTEs for this particular bit? In what roles, what levels? In can we have a gig worker and can we have, you know, temporary workers for particular skill sets in you do stay in industry trend right when we are going in. So we in pendulum swung towards work from home in COVID times and now it's going the other way, saying everybody needs to come to office Right. And why is that? Why is everybody needs to come into office? Because then individual on the ground thinks work used to have it in COVID times also. It's not like work is not happening. Why should I come to office Right? And organizations are all trying to figure out why the why piece of you know you come to office or per se. That's how we keep informed towards the industry trends and then finally you figure out between data analytics where the gaps are, where the industry is, where do you require workforce performance in, and it start plugging those gaps in to basically answer your crucial skills in.
Speaker 3:Like I wouldn't say AI is a big deal in right now, right From a skills perspective, it has to be acquired. I've seen certain job roles with six, 10 years AI experience in I mean, it's literally four or five years old field. Where will you find tenure folks in? But I think what crucial skills are, you know? Do you have learnability? Do you have ability to learn new skills? Right, do you have collaboration skills? And because if you are remote, you are investing a lot collaborating right, if you are in person, it becomes just much, much easier per se, right.
Speaker 3:Are you self productive? Right, are you okay with dealing with ambiguous information? And because not everything is very clear to everybody all the time, right, there is a general skill set of curiosity, right. Are you curious by nature? So if you are dealing with an ambiguous part, you will try to find out the what, how, where part of it by doing it. Or you're very satisfied and saying I know this and I will become perfect in this.
Speaker 3:So there are certain crucial skill sets which I would believe, like collaboration skills, you know how to be productive in the uncertainty times. Ai proficiency, of course, is going to be very, very important and it's going to be like MS Excel skills. Everybody will need to have it. Curiosity, I would assume that these are the crucial skills which everybody needs to develop and a skill set for leaders to figure out. How do you get all of these skill sets out in a candidate via an interview process or via an engagement process in so that you know and you can place people right. And so, yeah, that's that's my sort of a short, big answer to your very, very interesting questions regarding crucial skills and how do you develop operations capability in an organization.
Speaker 2:Definitely. That was some great points. What are you working? I must say and it's it's evident that staying ahead requires a lot of proactive approach and to identifying and nurturing the skills that will drive success in the future, definitely so. This all almost brings us to the end of our podcast, but I just wanted to ask you, before we end up our conversation, that for those aspiring to a career in talent development, what advice would you offer based on your extensive experience, as we can see from the whole conversation right now? So, are there any key principles or lessons that have been instrumental in your success? If you could share those experience, yeah, yeah, in talent development, right it's.
Speaker 3:it's like asking how do I become a great brain surgeon without becoming a doctor, right? So I would say the first thing you need to do is become a great talent professional right, understand the whole HR philosophy and before diving into talent development, and once you enter talent development, then there are certain skill sets which you will need to acquire right. Instruction, design, project management, communication, data analytics, technology orientations that's how to get familiarized with LMS's standards, scom, all of those particular pieces. Again, you don't need to be an expert on this, but you should know what it is so that you can have the right conversation. As such, make sure that you have networking capability, and this field is very, very new. It basically started in 1980. So it's 20, 30 years old, right? This is not like accounting, which is 10,000 years old. Accounting is 10,000 years old because humans started keeping numbers of how many sheeps you have, and that's how it has been developed. But this particular skill set is fairly new.
Speaker 3:I would say seek mentorship and you're it's really, really important. And that people confuse between a coach, mentor and a sponsor. Right, the coach is somebody who teaches you a game, a mentor who, basically, you can run towards for advice and there is no to and fro involved, whereas a sponsor is somebody who will get you promoted in the organization. People confuse all of this with the team leader. These roles are different. They may be in same person, they may not be in the same person, but it's this thing, and I think most crucially, stay informed, because the whole generative AI will impact this field significantly more than any other areas, because it's content right. If the content becomes automated, then it will have a significant impact of you know what we do and how we do. It's like when Google came in, the ability to ask questions became significantly more important than knowing the answers, because answers were everywhere right. What questions you ask becomes important, but generative AI I do believe that staying cutting edge will become really, really important.
Speaker 2:Definitely, very well said. Of course, prompt engineering are now a day's buzzword and everyone is focusing on that. So a wise word, hakeem, that definitely emphasize whatever he said on the industry, knowledge and interpersonal skills. That will undoubtedly resonate with our aspiring talent developers and the great points brought up by you. Definitely your journey and your advice serves as a valuable guide for those looking to make the impact on this field.
Speaker 3:Thank, you, Hakeem. Thank you for your kind words.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, and I'm sure there's a lot of take away from the content you have shared today. Thank you for sharing this, hakeem. So this brings us to the end of our conversation, but before we leave, can you tell our listeners where they can reach out to you?
Speaker 3:You can reach out to me on LinkedIn, or there are very few bachas available on LinkedIn, so you can just search me and then search Deloitte, and you will find me over there.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you, hakeem, it was really lovely hosting you today.
Speaker 3:Thank you, thank you, thank you very much.