Malvika Jhangiani

▶0:00IntroWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce.

▶0:39HostI'm excited to welcome Malvika to the Built by People podcast. Malvika, thank you so much for joining us today. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:50GuestDave, thanks so much for having me on this podcast. I started my career in consulting with Andersen and Ernst Young. Then moved in a variety of specialist as well as generalist roles in HR. I've done HR on the PE side of the business with large publicly listed companies such as Cadbury Schweppes, Monsanto, and I'm currently CHRO for FARO Technologies, which is a publicly listed technology company in the 3D imaging and scanning space. I've worked in 3 different countries, so Oman, India, and the US, and it's been great having this global experience and working with people and unlocking their potential.

▶1:36HostOkay, can you share the story of your experience working across cultures early in your career, including the cultural challenges you faced and how you navigated them while maintaining professional

▶1:49Guestboundaries? Early in my career, So when I was in consulting, one of the key projects I led was working in Oman, in Muscat, in the HR practice of Ernst Young. And we were working with this power major, trying to privatize them and get them more efficient. When I went on board on site, I realized that the client had really never worked with women, right? There weren't too many women in the workforce. So you had all the general stereotypes. It didn't help that I was so young and in a consultant capacity. I had to provide them advice. So constantly I had to ensure that the client was being super professional. I was leading this team of auditors who didn't know the H of HR and trying to implement whereby I was giving them advice. And quickly I learned how some of my best growth happened when I was put outside my comfort zone, right? So I have to assert my power, set boundaries with the client, still get additional business from them, but also ensure we were on point and we stayed focused and continued to grow while navigating a multicultural team comprising of people from the Middle East, from other countries, and really be the leader on that project and bring people together. Learn that you have to sometimes be that glue and mirror and understand different cultures to be able to get the best out of talent from

▶3:32Hostthose cultures. Nalika, what was your experience partnering with—

▶3:35GuestOne of the most pivotal parts of my career has been working with Monsanto, a really progressive organization leading their U.S. commercial business. We had grown rapidly through a series of acquisitions, 17, 18 acquisitions over a really short period of time, and we hadn't really integrated the acquisitions. So when I went in, one of my key tasks was to integrate these businesses, restructure them, and ensure that we were getting the most value from these businesses? And more importantly, for customers, how are we creating a seamless customer experience? As we analyze the business, we realized 65% of our business went through 6 strategic accounts, and that was the holy cow, right? We'd never touched that portion of the business. And so I worked with the business to analyze how— what was our go-to-market with these strategic accounts? Starting with the structure and the strategy, how did these accounts want to partner with us? Thus came what we called Project Panther. So we had to do this project with stealth because you didn't want the market to know what you were working on. But we worked on what was the best structure for these accounts, what's our best approach to truly treat them like partners, how do we create a pull for our business? What roles do we want in these accounts and who's the best talent to be in this mega account role? So before we had 7 different people selling different things to these customers. So think of it as a car. One person sells you your wipers, one person sells you your tires, one person sells you your engine. And really the account was telling us, I want one super account manager who handles my entire business. And so through this project, we worked on changing the entire structure so that our go-to-market was seamless. And I'm really proud because it required a lot of influence and buy-in with the business to say, let's pull in the right people, but let's do this covert operation to get the right structure. And then we actually grew business in a year where we restructured the business. Sometimes when you restructure the business, you actually lose focus, so you lose the sale. Here we actually grew sales, and we communicated not just internally with our employees as we went through this massive transformation, but externally with customers too.

▶6:18HostWhat was your experience transitioning from a large corporate environment to leading HR at a PE-backed organization during COVID How did you adapt your leadership style to drive growth during that challenging period?

▶6:34GuestGreat question. So I moved from a large corporate organization, 100 years of history, very process-oriented, to a PE firm as the CHRO for one of their portfolio companies. I call it my journey of moving from red tape to duct tape overnight. Let's rip the Band-Aid and let's move. My mandate with the PE firm was to grow the business fivefold, establish a strong leadership team, build robust practices, really go through this period of hypergrowth. And while doing that, oh, by the way, this little thing called COVID happened. So overnight we couldn't meet customers. You were hiring online, you were building out a data sciences firm. Organization with limited constraint. Moving from a large organization where you have a lot of resources to really getting scrappy on the PE side, and that's when I realized scrappy into strategy really leads to success. So my learning was sometimes you delve deep and you've got to learn how to toggle up and down in an organization to truly deliver value. I'll give you an example. As we were hiring talent, they said, develop a 401(k) plan. And I implemented a 401(k) plan, but I'd never really designed one from scratch. So you realize, had people on my phone, a friend line. I called people who'd done it before on the benefits side. I roped in my CFO and my CEO, and I said, hey, together we're gonna design this thing and ensure we give our employees the best value. So you quickly realize that you've got to have people on your phone-a-friend line on the PE side, and you've got to stay agile. And scrappy is sometimes your superpower, right? That is one thing that I have taken away from that PE stint, which is you scale up, but you also scale down. And the beauty of a pilot who can fly 10,000 feet above the ground, but also who can fly 100 feet above the ground when the need comes.

▶8:45HostCould you walk us through how you have driven this in

▶8:50Guestyour career? I'll take an example of when I was with Monsanto. I partnered with a very progressive CIO, and one of our mandates was just as you consume all your books through Amazon Kindle and all your content through Netflix online, we'd made a big, bold statement that agriculture would go digital, and the first mover would have the advantage in the marketplace. The way we were gonna do that was to embed digital fluency across the organization. And so we did that through 3 strategies, right? You master it, you model it, and you multiply it. We mastered it by identifying where data sat across Monsanto and creating a data scientist community which collaborated together. So we said no one owns data, no one owns insights, It is owned by us as an enterprise. We got them connected together in a community so they were sharing insights together. The second aspect was actually modeling it, and we started doing that by programs like Seed Start— our Seed Starter programs. We had people say, provide an idea, right? And we will fund it. We will actually fund this idea. And if it's successful, then we will showcase it as a success. And the third thing was multiplying it. And so what we did was we actually created a Digital Fluency Academy. We explained what our definition of digital was, and then we invited people across functions to come in and bring their ideas, like a Shark Tank approach, right? Bring an idea in finance and talk about how you can go digital with the business. We'll fund it, we'll implement it, we'll pair you up with a technology person who can actually bring this idea to life so that we can prove to the business that sometimes you experiment and it leads to beautiful things. It was really neat. We had our young professionals network mentor our senior executives and teach them how to TikTok and how to get more digital. Most organizations have senior leaders mentoring young talent. We flipped it and we were like, hey, there's an opportunity for our senior executives to go through this reverse mentoring experience and learn from them. It was a really

▶11:21Hostneat experience. Malvika, what parting advice would you like to share with

▶11:26Guestour community? I live by the philosophy, Dave, of the 3 Bs, right? First, big bets. Place a big bet on yourself. Take that risk in your career, but also place a big bet on others. So pay it forward. And we all got where we are through the help and the big bet of someone. So say thank you to the person who brought you here and then pull someone else along. Secondly, get bilingual. One of the leaders I supported early in my career gave me a great piece of advice. He said, Malvika, you need to be a student of the business. And so everyone, every HR professional obviously needs to know their domain, but also get bilingual. Learn technology, learn the business, and you will be a much richer professional if you are bilingual. And last but certainly not the least, probably the most important, Breathe. In today's dynamic world where we're powering through change in the geopolitical environment, tariffs and whatnot, as we move from one crisis to the next, take a moment to pause, take that deep yoga breath, and you'll be a calmer, clearer leader. As my exercise instructor says, when you're lifting weights, don't forget to breathe. So that's my piece of advice. Big bets, bilingual, and

▶13:04Hostjust breathe. Navika, thanks so much for joining us today on the Built by People podcast.

▶13:07GuestThank you, Dave.