Hybrid working and Impact on Teamwork Leadership

The hybrid workplace is normally intensely flexible and extremely nuanced. No hard and fast loop in such environments are expected to ensure optimal productivity at times. The leader may have to help them to find even a workplace from where they can work better or best. How to interact the teams in such satellite locations is a problem. A good leader in such environment is required to drive and adopt aquaries by assessing the flow of energy at various level. He cannot just go on opting and asking certain expecting certain assessments or certain expectations which probably may not be possible to be provided from the inflow of the lead of the employees out.

Thus the team leader has to be very clear about his expectations and about the deliverables he expects from his juniors. He has to be a compassionate leader, as I said in the beginning, who should realize the fear, who should realize the apprehensions of his employees working from different places. It can be concluded by me by these words that hybrid leader should focus more on inclusion. He should help and facilitate optimal productivity by building trust in his team. That is a requirement. And with these concluding remarks on the opening of the subject, I'll pass on the session to General Deepak Ma to please carry on and moderate the session. Thank you very much.

Thank you sir. Firstly, good day to everyone because it's the evening in Asia, an early morning in US, and we have people attending from both these places. A few words for Mr. S. Pal Singh who is the president of NISSMAT. Mr. Pal Singh was from the Indian police service and he retired in the rank of inspector general. He has masters in English literature. He served in various states of the country in senior police appointments. He was made responsible to raise an elite force, that's the rapid action force, against the communal violence which was on. Subsequently, he became the head of the rapid action force.

In recognition of his outstanding performance during his service, he's been awarded a number of awards, they being the president's police medal for distinguished service, the Indian police medal for meritorious service, the police special duty medal and bar — that he's got it twice — sena medal and a number of other recommendations. After retirement, he has been conferred with the security personality of the year award by the president of India in the global security conference. Presently he is the adviser to the Asian professional security association Indian chapter. He is honorary director general of the central association of private security industry India and association of the private detectives and investigators India.

As the president has already mentioned, we have two eminent speakers. First is Mr. Karthik Rhina. Mr. Rhina, could I request you to raise your hand please so that everyone sees you. Thanks. Mr. Rhina is an MBA from the Jaman Llal Paj Institute in Mumbai in India. He has specialized in sales and marketing. He has a total work and consulting experience of 46 years. That's a long time. On the domestic front, he has a wide experience. He's worked with the Proctor and Gamble for 14 years, at GSK in the field of healthcare and marketing consignments, culminating at the head of all India sales along the country, responsible also for Bangladesh. Tabour as the general manager sales and marketing, and to increase the professionalism, the ways of working at the company. Having accomplished this, he was made the general manager to launch the new foods division and the CEO for the food business. Here he conceived and launched the real fruit juices, homemade ranges of cooking ingredients.

Internationally, he has worked with Far East Merkantile Company in Nigeria heading the commercial division. He was handling negotiation and purchase, especially he was a stockfish and had a very important aspect in interacting with other countries of the euro. He was executive director of a company in Africa and Nigeria. Ended his international career in Colbo as the managing director of uni labels best food looking after the Sri Lanka and Maldives.

From 2005, he has his own company, that's in training and consulting company called facilitators, focusing learning facilitators, and focusing on sales and channel management and marketing brand strategy and rural marketing. He's involved with the consulting and training assignments in India, Far East, China and Africa. He has managed a very diverse portfolio with the companies, some being Abbott Nutrition, AEL, Hindustan Uni Lever and many more. Karthik has been trained as a consultant and a trainer in the UK with the Guardian Business Services London, the Smith Klein Become Training Academy, Oxford Management Consulting.

He again has a large experience in giving lectures. He has been giving lectures at IIM Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, IF SP Jane Global School of Management in Mumbai, Singapore, Dubai and Sydney, the IMT in Gazibad, Dubai and IBS Hyderabad, MT Business School in NOA, and a guest speaker in large number of schools at the national level. In his free time, I wonder if he has any, heard and also spend some time with his family. Now on to Mr. Karthik Rhina.

You're muted. Yeah, I — do I have control? Natasha, I'd like to bring my presentation on. Sorry. Yes. Yes sir. You can share sir. Okay. So before I do that, thank you very much. It was wonderful looking at this galaxy of people and I get little bit of goosebumps because though I don't belong to an army background but my dad was actually with the air force. So dad spent all this time, he retired as squadron leader, when much before the academy came up at nar he was in charge of hakim pit which was the jet fighter section. So I get goosebumps thinking about those times, but that we missed out, sorry, that we missed out. Well, I thought it was important because, you know, this phenomenal galaxy of people, I really bow my head, and coming from the background of people from the forces, there is an inherent respect for anybody who's put his life on the line, and there are so many of you there. So first of all my naman to all of you, and to everyone else it's a pleasure, an absolute pleasure to be here, particularly Pavan, big thanks to you, because Pavan and I have been associated even professionally some time ago.

So today what I'm going to do essentially is put my thoughts on the subject and I'll try to kind of share with you some of the work that I have been doing both during and post-COVID, both with WFH as well as hybrid working, and to see how it is. So the bias or the focus is going to be pretty much to do with organizations, commercial organizations, and how they have looked at this. Just give me a minute to bring my PT on board. Do let me know if you all can see the screen, just thumbs up from anyone who do. Yeah, one can see it. Great. So thank you very much.

So on the subject, we all know, is hybrid working impact on teamwork leadership. Before I start, I just want to say something, that a lot of the things that have happened during COVID have been accelerations in the commercial world. People were already working. SAP, for example, has been working on hybrid as well as work from home options for maybe 15 years or 16 years. The company I worked for, GSK, I was in charge of nine countries for their training and development of systems, but I was based out of Delhi. So in the commercial world actually the COVID has been more of an acceleration than something new all together, and that's something that we must appreciate.

Now if we take SAP as an example, they have a very nice motto for this entire period of working which they started much before COVID did, and that's called pledge to flex. I think that is a very important key thing, message that we need to understand, because pledge to flex is the leadership promises to be flexible, and that's really the key of managing whether it's hybrid or whether work for home or even the face to face, or F2F as we call it. Simply put, leadership in the age of hybrid work must, must be far more adaptable and far more flexible than in the pre-COVID times.

In fact, I feel hybrid is a challenge than what it was during the layers of pure work from home, because you are making people go through two options. One option is working from home, you know, we laughingly call the shirt and kacha option. And then of course you have the work in the office through the regular face to face. So yes, people are going through these two options. Hybrid is actually a bigger challenge because people have to adjust to both options. Sometimes you're in the middle of a project and it's not the office day, it is the work from home day. The project gets disrupted. So hybrid is definitely a bigger challenge than the COVID times or the lockdown period as we call it.

So what are the challenges that leaders and their teams need to tackle? To me the first challenge is the level of agility, because they now have to respond to both the physical and the virtual moods of people. And I use the word moods very consciously, because one of the biggest thing that we've seen during this period is the way people have behaved, the way their moods have changed, the way they have responded to things that are not necessarily in an interaction but outside of the interaction but influencing the interaction.

So what is this, right? The first key thing we need to understand is change over days. People who work in a hybrid environment, some days they are working from home, other days they are working in the office, and it's not a steady, unlike earlier five days a week or six days a week, whichever type of organization you worked in, one rhythm, in one style, but now you're doing maybe two days of office work and then the others. So we as leaders need to understand that people are going to be more moody. They're going to be different from what they would be had they been continuously.

And even things like work, you know, we all know from our experience that work never ends on a day. There is always something pending. And very often you can, you know, turn over some work that I'll do it tomorrow. But in this dual situation, you may not even have access to the papers or the information in sufficient detail to be able to do that. And some people at their homes may not even have the facility. People are operating out of dining tables and things like that. So moods do change. Changeover days. Something we got to be very careful about.

The other thing to understand is that all employee departments are not the same. For example, salespeople are traditionally used to hybrid work. Many companies — one of my clients called Meckenro, which makes the famous Wild Stone fragrances — none of the sales people have offices. At the most, they would go to the distributor or the CNF agent's office and have a little chair there to sit on. They operate virtually and remotely most of the time. Similarly, field procurements. I used to work for GSK where one of the biggest procurement was milk. We used to procure milk for making colleagues from something like 45,000 farmers across mostly of Punjab around the Naba and Moga areas. So they also, in this, they still had to collect the milk and you going to test the milk, test the fat content. You don't just buy milk as milk, and therefore people were used to this dual kind of an environment. In fact, they were used much more to virtual than strictly hybrid.

But there are some jobs — so obviously some people are better prepared, manage it much better than others. Now we got to be conscious that of a typical accountant who cannot really move without consulting his boss now and then; for him to suddenly go into remote, the changes are much more. So the agility of the leader to recognize who needs what kind of handholding is critical.

The other thing is that people changed, you know, because this COVID lockdown was so long, they have become casual when they were doing work from home. So right, you know, tie in shirts and then pajama, you know, underneath, so that you could look as if you are welldressed, which you want. And I am one of those who firmly believe, and those of you who are from uniform, you would believe that very much, that the way you dress definitely, definitely influences the way you feel and mentally prepare yourself for things. I, when I went on my own, I had the temptation to operate from my dining table. But one of the first things I did — I was lucky, I had a big house, I had a basement — one of the first things I did, I built an office for myself, because somehow that getting up from bed, having my breakfast, coming down and sitting in an office made me much more productive than sitting on my dining table with grandchildren at one end and things like that. So that was something that had happened, and you know, people said bandwidth is not good anymore.

Now hybrid challenges that practice, because some days you got to behave that way, other days you got to reform. So that's something that the leader should know, that some people will adapt to it faster, other people will take a little longer to be able to do that.

And like I said, safety. We actually have found that people were feeling much more unsafe in a hybrid environment than they were in the COVID lockdown, because the COVID lockdown they were locked down at home. They could take care of whatever they wanted to do in terms of sanitization, mask wearing, not wearing, you know, food that they ate. A lot of people during this period, right from Babai's coronal to healthy, had their habits changed and all for feeling better and safer. Now it's a risk because COVID hasn't truly gone. We keep hearing about it, and you know, just last week the government of Delhi said you would start wearing your masks all over again. So when COVID hasn't gone and you're taking me away from the safety that I had in my house, and you're asking me for two days — it's not two days, it's that five minutes in which I may get an infection. So people are much more concerned in hybrid environments, and therefore leaders must do things like, even if they're having a meeting, make sure everybody is wearing a mask, because these are small things. It's not whether the infection is there. It is the psychology at the back of your mind. A lot of people would rush through meetings in hybrid environments, because they said, and God help it, if within the first few minutes of the meeting starting somebody sneezes, then you should see the whole mood change of the people — just want to get out and get over fast. Now as leaders we should appreciate and understand this and make sure that we take the necessary actions.

The second challenge is quick adoption of digital and technological evolution so that we can balance differing levels of acceptance and comfort. Clearly it has been proven beyond doubt that one thing that helped things to move along was digital and technological evolution. India of course is like way out there when you compare with the rest of the world, and I'm talking of the western world too. For example, you must have read Jashankar's statement. He said when he went for dinner with his son to a restaurant, they asked for the COVID certificate, and it was very amusing that his son took out a dogeared piece of paper and showed it, and Jashankar took out his phone and showed the Kogan application. So it's amazing how much we have progressed, and even researchers show that up to 38% of the people feel that this revolution now is only going to become bigger and bigger.

So critical that leaders should work on the right tech solutions coupled with the human touch, and I always tell a leader that find out first how difficult was it for you to understand before you expect the other guy to understand. Things overnight won't happen. Secondly, what has happened during the COVID, different employees have evolved digitally at different speeds and to different extents. You need to bring them to the same level in an F2F environment. And that requires from the side of the leader a lot of maturity, and also very clearly laid out investments in training, so that within a period of three to six months of starting your hybrid working you more or less bring people on to a similar level on the digital and technological side.

Then look at the leader himself. A lot of our leaders are not digitally savvy. Unfortunately, I say this because I have seen this happen. I know many people who have a computer at the back of their, you know, behind themselves, and they don't know how to practically operate. All you see the old days is the Windows logo flowing around, and somebody helps them to operate. The number of people who actually use less than 20% of smartphone features in the 50 plus age group is huge. Less than 20% of the features. So they don't, and you know how many, a lot of, I think as parents very often hand over our phones to the our sons and daughters saying. So it's time that leaders have to show that electricity, have to show that smartness in understanding digital, and they have to make sure that they don't lose their cool, and frankly digital technological people are more intelligent and more evolved than them. So recognize that and work on it.

When I grew up in a generation — 1974 is when I passed out for my MBA. 1994 is when internet came to India. So I worked for 20 years without the internet, with a brother typewriter and a carbon paper throughout my market field trips. I decided to educate myself and I realized that it is now so simple. So today I feel very proud of the fact that I even teach technology to management schools. But you've got to get into that and understand as leaders that that's where the future lies.

Which then brings us to this eternal debate of culture versus strategy. You know, a lot of CEOs and leaders are so focused on strategy that they often forget culture. And Peter Drucker puts it beautifully. He says culture eats strategy for breakfast. So regardless of the kind of strategy, if you have a cultural problem, it's going to hit you much much more than any strategy will. So let not, leaders must think that, let not culture become a consequence of traditional actions and thinking. On the other hand, leaders need to take actions intentionally to shape the new dimensions of culture.

I'll give you two examples here. Proctor and Gamble, post the arrival of COVID, has eliminated the concept of a fixed desk to yourself barring the top three or four people. You come in whenever you like during the day, find out a desk that's empty and you connect. That's how PNG operates today, because they say that why block space. In this way you get used to it. People have actually been doing better work. The amount of paper that people used to pile up on their desks has practically disappeared because they don't have a desk. Yes, they given lockups. They keep things in their locker. The best part of it is that people have now, whenever they come to office, they come early because they want the best seat in the house, so to speak. So that's something that PNG has done with huge amount of success, and I'm talking about PNG India, not talking anywhere else.

Similarly, meeting constructs have changed very very much. Meeting constructs have, sorry, have changed to the extent that far fewer meetings happen. Very short meetings, clear start times and end times have started happening, and that is helping in the process of taking faster decisions because of the entire nature of work having changed.

Strategies themselves need modification as well as the processes. Earlier there was a lot of red tape, and people like to think that the private sector doesn't have red tape, but that's an absolute misnomer. It perhaps has its own form. We can call it a pink tape or something like that, but it does. So strategies themselves need modifications. Processes that govern the formulation of a strategy — companies are changing their rules. They're changing the steps. I know Unilever right now is in the process of reviewing its entire what they call SOPs or standard operating procedures, and are trying to, you know, get rid of many of those, because they don't fit into today's world, you know, particularly in the entire context of what we achieve through data analytics and technology.

And communication style of leaders has to go from communicating to tell to communicating to share, educate and empower, because in a hybrid environment you're physically not next to each other, maybe two or three days in a week. The rest of it you're on your own. So if you're not fully educated, if you're not empowered enough, things don't happen. They will only happen on the day when you're in the office. And even then, maybe the other person who's part of your team is not scheduled that day to be in the office. So there has to be a far more openness. Leaders need to understand that their culture has to change from communicating to tell to communicating to share, educate and empower.

The fourth one is change in ambiguity is continuous. It happens every other day. Like I said, you need one news on the headline of the paper saying that there have been 2,000 cases reported in Delhi today, and you see that day whoever is going for the office work is concerned, really worried about what's happening. So one of the things that we need to as leaders — build trust and confidence by allowing more operational independence, because then teams can decide how they will interact with each other. They can, within the time frames that are necessary, find the best way of operating rather than any fixed processes earlier. Allow employees more flexibility, not only in their internal career but even in their lifelong career. Some of you who read today's newspaper would have heard that HL now says you can leave us, go and work — provided you're going to a startup — go and work four, five years, come back, and we'll take you back in a suitable position, because we can't build an entrepreneurial skill. That simple. Sorry, is somebody asking a question? I think there's somebody's muted. Okay, yeah, okay, fine, thanks.

The other thing is that we need leaders who can learn and listen, especially from the customer, from vendors and tech jobs. In other words, leaders should not think they are the repository of all information. They have to open up and realize that this is the time to learn and listen. And learning and listening doesn't have a location like an office desk. It can happen anywhere. Particularly from customers, vendors and tech jobs. I know a lot of my clients today, for example, in the same company, that Wildstone, the amount of training that is now being done by Jivadong and the other perfume suppliers to the teams has gone up, and the MD himself sits in because he's enlightening himself on understanding the nuances of what is the different quadrant. And over the — so that learn and listen attitude is something that needs to be brought in, because that's one way you cope with change in ambiguity.

Which then brings me to the last part of it, which is people skills take prominence over hard skills. The traditional domain, functional or hard skills as they were known, used to be the preference in the earlier days. Now it's a lot to do with people. So focus of dealings would cover things like emotional intelligence. More and more CEOs — in fact, on the 15th and 16th of September I'm running a program for a company that is a global company, and people are coming from all over, and for two days we are primarily focusing and discussing on this whole area of emotional intelligence, collaboration, what we call as competitive collaboration. You know, you're apparently on different sides. Sales and marketing is a very typical flash point. Finance and sales is a typical flash point. Marketing and finance — there are some flash points in every organizations and they tend to be competitive. How do you move to a more competitive collaboration? So those are becoming important.

Compassion is something I will not, you know, at length get into this, but mainly to tell you that you got to care for people. I think S. Pal ji talked about this when he talked about the fact that, you know, people will need to have empathy and build trust. So that comes out here. And finally, resilience. I think leaders will be challenged on to be much more resilient. There is going to be much more unhappiness. There is going to be much more negation of your traditional way of thoughts. And if you don't have resilience, you're unlikely to make a good job of it, and likely to become a rather unpleasant example to the rest of your team. So that is something that is critical.

So that's all I have to say on what I think are the key challenges and the takes from there. Thank you for your patience, and I don't know at what stage, Deepak ji, you're planning the questions, but be happy for that.

Thank you Karthik for a very illuminating talk that you've given us. Now I request General Praash Man. General Praash Man has all been introduced by the president. For the sake of repetition, I say that General Dr. Praash Man, AVSM, AVSM, VSSM, one of the most highly decorated officers of the Indian Army. He was commissioned in March 1972 in the brigade of the guards. He had a checkered career of close to 40 years, and he has had very extensive operational experience. As a company commander, that is a major, he was in Glacier. He commanded the battalion, the brigade and the division in the counter insurgency area aligned along the line of control, that is in Kashmir. He was the commandant of the national defense college, which is the premier institution at the national level. He was commandant from 2009 to 2010.

He has been awarded the PhD from the Madras University on his thesis, limited war and nuclear deterrence in the Indo-Pak context. He's written a book also on the same. He was appointed by the union cabinet as part of an expert group for the creation of the Indian National Defense University. He was the coordinator for the Naresh Chandra committee that revised the national security system. In 2014, he was a visiting fellow of the Nanyang technical university institute at Singapore. Though retired in 2011, he was taken by the government of India as the military adviser and secretary to the government of India in the national security council secretariat from 2011 to 2014. 2015 to 2017 he was the officer on special duty at the same institute, where he was with the national security secretariat.

Presently he's the director studies and strategy at the Takula Institute in Bangalore. He is the adjunct professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies Bangalore, Professor Emeritus in the transdisciplinary university at Bangalore. He's authored a number of books and also written a large number of articles. In short, my interaction with Praash has been over 50 years. I can say without any reservation that he is a soldier scholar. Praash, on to you sir.

Thank you Deepak, and thank you NISSMAT for this privilege and opportunity. I think what Karthik Rhina has said, let me generally say I agree with him, and I think he has enunciated the issue very well. However, I would look at this and ask you to look at it as a process of change which has been ongoing for quite some time and which is getting more intense, and it is about the interface between technology and human systems. It is the clash between these two that we are talking about, and the challenge it poses to leaders who have to derive and take out the potential of the human capital for whatever might be the technology which we are using. It is finally the human capital which delivers. It is human systems which matter. Technology is an enabler. We should not confuse between the importance of the two. Human capital is the last word.

And if you look at corporate entities, after all, what is the nature of corporate entities, which is based on profit motive. So how does this change going to impact, and how can actually it be leveraged to increase corporate interests, especially its profit bottom lines? How can it ensure the growth of its own human capital? How can it keep the balance between technology and human systems? So these challenges which we are confronted with are actually not new, because as Karthik also explained, it has been ongoing for some time, and as he used the word, it is accelerating. It is gaining momentum. And when that happens, then the leaders who cannot actually deal with the pace of change fall behind and fail to appreciate the changes that are taking place, and therefore are normally found wanting in the tasks that they have.

So let me say three things about the nature of this hybrid concept which we are talking about. Firstly, the interface is between human interface and a virtual interface. And we would all agree that there can be no better way to actually interact with anybody else in terms of the humanity of it, in terms of what he described as a human touch, when people are face to face. But that need not be the only way that we can interface. And that is what technology has given us. That is what the internet has given us.

And actually I have been working with Takila institution. Takila institutions in 2011 have been running courses which are webinar based on Saturdays, meant for working professionals, and they used to have as a hybrid part, they used to have two workshops during the course where they used to physically get the people for three days each, and that was the hybrid part. This has been going on since 2011. When I joined them in 2017, this was already ongoing, and for us therefore it was much easier to switch to a complete virtual mode as soon as the situation presented itself. We don't want to give up what was partially the physicality, the meetings which took place, which was just three days, because we think that that is as important as anything else. It cannot be replaced.

But I think the structure of hybridity would depend upon the context of the function that you're doing, the context of the industry you're in, the context of what your corporate is doing, and so on, because that function will determine what should be, in the prevailing circumstances, the structure of hybridity. And I'm sure identifying that structure is the task of the leadership. What should work best? Should it be everybody still continues to actually come to office whenever they want, there's no structured meeting, but everybody comes whenever they want and go? Or you tell everybody three days a week, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays everybody comes to office, otherwise we do it online? So you can have different combination, but all that will depend upon the function that you are trying to carry out. There cannot be one size fit all here. It has to be shaped and carved out for the requirements of what that purpose of that corporate is, of that entity is. From that purpose you can actually mix and match depending upon what is the task at hand. The point which he made, that there is a lot of room for flexibility here. There's a lot of room for actually changing quickly without creating, because you already organize for it. So when you want, we can use this flexible nature of the structure to actually fulfill the task that you have.

And the next nature part is that in the hybrid part, when you are virtual, the oversight and supervision of the leader is obviously weakened. It's different, and this poses a lot of challenges about how a leader would like to supervise and see oversight. Depends upon the type of team they have, the cultural proclivities of the team itself, the cultural values of the institutions which have embied into your employees. So this again will have to be judged by the leader who got to make this decision — how much of oversight, how much of supervision is feasible. So a prescription will not do. It depends upon what teams you are handling, what objectives you want to reach, and how you want to reach them.

Of course, the differential in the working conditions of your team members are also different when they are working from home. In an office, you have brought them to a common environment. At home, within the team itself there would be differentiated settings depending upon the social ladder. What sort of house that you live in? Do you have a lot of traffic around you? How many people do you have in your house? And the greatest challenge, really speaking, is for the working mothers who have to work from home, whose children are still there, or they go to school and they come back. The atmosphere is very domestic, and you're expected to be cocooned inside without being disturbed, and that is a challenge, and it could be different for different members of the team.

I think there is need — and I'll come to why I say this — to recognize the importance of understanding the differentiated nature of the working environment in the domestic spaces where you expect them to carry out the work, and for leader, understanding that is very different. And of course, depending upon your function, whether you're in marketing or whether you're in design or whether you're in production, education — it is context-driven. You need to design your hybridity according to what you think fits best for the task and the mission at hand.

So the knowledge — and this is a challenge for the leadership. Previously, and I would think in the corporate world, unlike in the armed forces, where the armed forces leaders spend a lot of time in understanding the people who they are dealing with. They not only know their professional part, they are also very much involved in knowing in general what is their domestic situation, because no individual is divorced from either of the two. To understand anybody you have to know, and this involves matters of privacy. It's a question of how do you get the knowledge which is freely given to you, somebody who talks about himself. And there is therefore the need today, if you want to use hybridity well, to first know the people who work with you, much beyond their professional capability, also what is their domestic setting. Because then you will understand how do you handle a person who's got to face a certain amount of disadvantages because he has to work from a setting which is different, and this will be different for different people. And the working mothers, I think we need to give them a special place to understand their problems, which are the deepest and the most difficult to manage.

You know, the prime minister on Tuesday spoke to the labor ministers at the center and the states in Tirupati, and he actually spoke about flexible working hours, flexible working places, and then he made this pitch — if you do that, we can actually induct much more women into the workforce of India itself, because obviously I think nobody can disagree that the more the women we can induct into the workforce in India, the more the country is going to benefit, and the individuals themselves. But considering the culture which prevails in this country, considering the social strata differences in culture, one has to have a good understanding of all those cultural traits which will impinge on working from home for these people, and I think working mothers have got a challenge themselves. So knowing the members of your team becomes now of greater importance than ever before. That's point one.

Point two, I think — and this is not new — every leader has to know himself, because what he knows is also colored by his own prejudices. Unless he understands those prejudices, unless he makes the effort to understand that, he will think that all he has to do is to project himself on his team. But each member is unique. Each member is special. Each member has got its pluses and minuses. And the leader is the one who is able to actually derive the best potential of the person despite the fact that they are all different, and that is good leadership.

So one of the areas which I think we should be very careful about is that, as we move — because as far as the corporates are concerned, and as far as their profits are concerned, if they can function best, have the best profit, by actually increasing the work from home as a model, increasing the space, if they can save a lot of money, and that works for them — there is one danger, and that danger I wish to flag, and that is the danger of the fact that the growth of these individuals, about handling people, about looking people in the eye, about discussions which are face to face, about the human touch, and the fact that you can judge people from their bodily emotions, is important. And if people are allowed to work just from home, spend most of the time looking at a screen, then their growth and their ability to manage other people will also be affected negatively.

And this is a very important point, that if you are talking about taking the best out of them, out of your team, it is about allowing them to grow, giving them the space to grow. And that fundamentally, not only about learning technology, is about understanding people. How can you understand people if he's going to spend most of the time working from inside a room? I mean, you know, you can have a situation where, if this pandemic had gone on forever, for another two years, then people would have been inside rooms, and they would be like sewer rats, where the outside world would look quite strange when they come out. They'll be unfit for it. So I think there is need for the leadership to be conscious of the fact that if you want your team to manage people, if you yourself want to manage people, there is nothing like interacting with them face to face. How to make that happen, how much to make that happen, would depend upon the variables of where you are actually operating.

And two more points before I wind up. One is, when people do not come to office so often and they can work from home, their sense of identity with their organization, their sense of belonging to an organization, is also weakened. This is a psychological impact. But it is important that that sense of belonging, of being identified — that I work with EY or KPMG or Dabur or whatever it is — there must be a sense of belonging, because that is finally what will make you give your best to the entity that you are working for. Strengthening that is very important, and it cannot be strengthened unless that guy comes to that place as often as you can, and he says here is where I am, here is where I belong. And this therefore will have to be now structured differently — how do you make this happen and yet keep the hybridity going as much as you can.

And the last point I want to — and this is actually a personal thing. Now I think in the type of leadership which is required for working in a hybrid environment, if there are two types of leadership, one is the type of leader who flogs his team, gets them to do work very well, produces the best, and then the leader claims all the benefits. The leader claims all the, or takes responsibility — I am the one who did it. I think in hybrid atmosphere the best leader would be the one that, once the mission is done, once the task is done, then every team member should feel that he did it himself, and the leader does not actually take away the glory which belongs to the team members, because he will get it separately. People who know the leader will understand what he has done, but the team members should feel they did it themselves. And I think this is to do with the style of leadership — when it has to be done, how it is to be done, is a matter of an individual approach. And on that note, I think I'll stop here. Now you can shoot the general and the consultant both together.

Thanks Picash. Any question to anyone please? All right. I have a question to ask both the panelists. Wesley, I'll follow you Deepak after that. Yes sir. Sir, first you. First you sir. Okay. Thanks Deepak.

Special thanks and gratitude both to Mr. Karthik Rana and Praash Man. I met him only during the Golden Jubilee celebrations of the National Defense College, and what a marvelous job he did. I recall that vividly. Now thanks a lot. Thanks a lot to NISSMAT also. See, my question about this entire online, offline and hybrid is that it's a digitally transformed world, or transforming world, with artificial intelligence and all these things coming in. Even we talk about metaverse, and in schools and colleges there has been online schooling going on in these two years. Now they've opened up. So it threw up lot of challenges in the institutions itself, starting from the students, the parents, the teachers and the trainers, everyone taking it forward with a hybrid sort of environment, which is, I feel, going to remain the future reality.

The entrepreneurs, or those of you who are professionals in the field at the higher levels — new entrants are going to be the one with a different culture, culture of hybrid, and this is very important for leaders to absorb the new entrants. It's a big challenge. We have talked about team leadership and all. Well, armed forces, particularly the army, for us it remains the same. It is physical. There's no other choice in our case. That is our form of leadership, and the army functions on. But in this case I personally feel this challenge has to be taken forward, so that the team building, which is so important in a physical environment, and isolation from where you operate at home, these have to be reconciled. Both are great luminaries here. I do not know whom to address. Both who take it on, one by one, I'll be grateful. And Karthik, what do you have to say for this?

You're muted. Please unmute yourself. Now you know the problems with virtual. Okay. I think the issue that he raised about schooling is much more serious than anything else, because we're talking of a generation, particularly for a country like ours where education has been very much at the forefront of focus. And I can see — I myself am involved in a lot of social work in which we are educating people all over again on what they were supposed to have learned in the year gone by. And a lot of it has to do with economics, in the sense that, you know, there were many people who went through two years without even access to a computer, leave alone access to internet connection. So we have formed a group and we are actually educating people almost a year back to bring them up to date. A couple of schools have cooperated with us on that.

So definitely we have this huge — I take a place like Bihar. Bihar, internet penetration, if you talk of actual, with electricity connections going and everything else, and doable levels of connectivity where you know you don't have bandwidth problems, is 38%. 62% of Bihar isn't a comfortable environment to use online as a key point. So I think I buy your point about this, and I think there has to be a blend of both government initiatives as well as social initiative. I'm very happy to share with you that we are a group of 17 people and we are spending two days a month each one of us in different — you know, it's also linked with our area of expertise. I'm not a guy who's very strong in, say, accounting. Finance is not my area of specialization, but I'm comfortable with maths and I'm very comfortable with other subjects. So I take those, and we are trying to do this in basically duanuri, mongalpuri and belt.

There's a question coming from John. John, please ask your question. There's a question. Unmute yourself, please. There is one. Yeah, John. Yeah, please. You had a question to ask. Please go ahead, John. Is hybrid a new word that has gained service? There's some problem. I have a question for both of you. Is hybrid a new word?

No, no, no. The comb is not a new word. When I started, the combination of working, doing a blend of virtual and non-virtual, is very very old. But I would say hybrid in the form that you see now, yes, that is relatively recent. Certain industries like IT and all were using this earlier because it lent them to do that. So you had examples of companies that would allow people to work for 10 days or 12 days from home and so on and so forth, but it was few and far. I think the intensity with which hybrid is hitting is far more now, and it has to be seen as not an exception but almost like a rule.

I have a question on this. You see, in the earlier system there was an interpersonal relationship between the leader and the people who are working in that organization. In the hybrid system now it's all virtual. You meeting maybe once a month or whatever the case, how what the company decides. Is the responsibility of the leader to carry out appraisal of the people who are working under him? Does it pose any problem to the leader in working out, in doing the appraisal of the people who are working under him?

See, first and foremost, leaders, as we have all recognized, need to change. So leaders can't operate in the way they used to earlier. There has to be far more, you know, connectivity, far more collaboration, and the leader can choose whichever option he does. Does it change the review process? Well, actually the review process is impacted very interestingly, because data analytics has brought review to a very very good angle, where the appraisal of a person in terms of how he has performed, what are his levels of efficiency, has become so well developed that you don't necessarily always need a personal interaction to do that. So if I have laid down efficiency and effectiveness parameters, which are effectiveness being output parameters, then there are such fantastic methodologies that are available that you can do them almost on a daily basis.

I'll give you one illustration, and in fact there's a program I've designed. What we do is, a salesman when he's in the market, he faces an objection which he doesn't know how to handle. In the good old days he would write about it and there would be a process and all that. Today we have created a wall, and on that wall there are already people giving examples of objections that they faced and how they tackled them. So what the salesman does is that he immediately scrolls to that wall, and he finds out that this kind of a situation was handled in these three, four different ways by different people. So what is happening, the whole process of education and review has actually become much faster and of a better quality.

But nothing can replace face to face. I mean, you can't say it has fully replaced, but I think in many ways this has helped. What goes away, of course, is that total — that bit I talked about, the emotional intelligence, the empathy. To me, actually, this is — I mean, you and I are talking to thumbnails. We're not talking to people. I can hardly know what your body language is as I answer. Sometimes if you are an expressive person your face can show it, but had I been in front of you the feedback would have been far better. So my view is, yes, lot of thing has progressed, but nothing, nothing can replace. So if I'm a leader, I would invest a lot of time on improving my connectivity. Thank you sir.

May I say something, Deepak? Yes sir, please. You see, only it's a question of emphasis, as far as I feel, because the general has said ultimately that human capital is more important — and very important, not more important, is very important. The human capital, how to tap the human capital, is more important. The human capital is involved in both the cases, even in the case of digital or virtual as well as in the case of face to face or physical. Question is how to tap the human capital and what leadership is required. In face to face, you give a pat, you talk, see his expression, facial expression, you ask about his family and all. There you want to get into that emotional state where the man is operating, your human being is operating. You get into that sort of operational emotional mode so that he gets attracted to his leader, and that's what leader wants to do. As far as the hybrid is concerned, there also ultimate aim is the same, that you have to have the human capital, you have to tap. The question is how to tap without being physically in touch. I have a feeling that has very elaborate that little change in the style of leadership. You want emotional empathy — yes, you want in the case of physical, you also want in the case of digital. I like to know from the speakers to elaborate: do you consider A is important or B is important? Whether importance should be given more to the physical interaction or should be given to the digital interaction or the virtual interaction? That is the main question I like to ask the speakers to elaborate on this, please.

I asked General Man first because he has touched on the human capital. Yeah. I think we have to understand the trajectory of what is happening, that as the world is getting more and more interconnected, the virtual meetings are going to gain predominance and not lessen, even if you want to have it, because firstly you're connected better, and secondly the type of activities that you do can make, because of the connections which are able, you connect from a distance much more comfortable, much more easier to do. So the capacity for dealing and communicating with people is going to increase. So we are going to have more virtual meetings, not less, as time goes forward. That, I think, is a — we have to recognize what is the trajectory, and once you recognize this trajectory, the question then therefore is, you don't have a choice about whether you want to make it virtual or whether you want to make it physical. The choice is limited. Given a choice, you would always prefer to be physical, but physical means it costs money, it cost, you got to converge as far as time management is concerned, and it's got all of the other. The virtual meeting is much more easy to undertake. And I think in the generations which are to follow, and if people are going to actually communicate and live on in space and on the planets, I think the virtual meeting will become the predominant one. The physical will actually be less. But again, this depends upon the nature and the context of your business or your entity. So the choice is very clear, sir — if I can, physical, which is more.

Virtual. I'd like to ask Karthik. There's a little chance, as, see, I would break this up into two parts. One, as far as corporates, the digital transformation — hello — chance of the digital transformation going back totally to the physical, according to General Man, we agree with. But question is, when there's a little chance, what do you, in case there is a chance, in case there is chance, then a man says it should be physical, more of a physical. But when there is, at the same time he's very skeptic that we'll go back to the physical — you have to go ahead with more of the digital. So what is your view? Can we have, with your areas, the style you have touched, that is dexterity, flexibility and all, will it meet the requirement, or anything which is lacking from the physical one, will it all be able to meet it? Because in the remote, even when you are not, even you're sometime muted, I have to say unmute, something like that, while sitting there talking to you there will be no need for me to say unmute yourself. So what do you suggest, that with these styles of leaders you have suggested, will you able to cope up with the entire, and will the physical interaction go into absolutely back burners? That's what I'm saying. Thanks.

Pal Singh, I just want to say something, that perhaps we are all very very concerned right now because we are going through the process of transition. There will come a time when we will not even be asking this question, because we were got used to a new way. How long that will take will vary. Let me illustrate this with an example. I'll take the example of my granddaughter who has just gone into class 10. This has been a boon for her learning. The way she has evolved by having access to the computer, doing her exercises, going into Google, going and finding out — it has been amazing. What in the last two years she has enriched herself has been much more than what would have happened in a pure face-to-face environment. So we can't really dismiss this. There is a huge body which the internet has, and there is a lot that can happen.

Having said that, in a corporate world, for the time being, my view is exactly the same as General sahib's, that there is nothing that can one to one replace physical contact. That is for sure, because as you very rightly put it, Pal Singh, that there is a concept of body language, there is a concept called understanding. I as a trainer, for example, and a communicator, I find that is very critical to my process of delivering. However, it doesn't allow you to have — that's the one side of it. So, yes, ideally physical. But today, the world has got so wide. For example, I have clients that are sitting in Sydney at one end. They are up north in Taning in China, and they are sitting in Saudi Arabia. These are my clients. Now, if I relied only on physical, there is no way I could have had such a bandwidth for clients. So yes, I go once or twice a year any time, but the bulk of my, you know, interaction has been online.

So looking at the future, I think there will be more and more happening online, and people will find a way. For example, there is a software called metal, just to, you know, inform you, which we now use in our leading management schools. The metal actually, when you are answering, the camera focuses on your face, and through artificial intelligence it can tell you if you're cheating, if you're looking here, looking there, looking at notes while you're answering. It will absolutely able to register as many as 53 movements on your face alone. So we've actually caught people who are plagiarizing or cheating in the process of writing an examination, and been able to identify and, you know, punish them accordingly. So artificial intelligence is bringing this in. It's looking very ancient to us today because we are looking more at what is not there rather than what is there. But I see things, you know, dramatically changing.

I don't know if you watch Korean soaps, sir. I'm sorry, John, you asked a question just now, but we let him finish here — still not finished. Okay. So, what I was saying, but if you look at Korean soaps, you will find that the Koreans look amazing skins, amazing faces, and very realistic. But actually, it's all taken care of through virtual enhancement. In real life, they don't look the way they look. And this used to happen. If you remember, we used to use the word photogenic. You remember, we used to say that. So, that's what it does. So I have a feeling that the dominant part will be the online because of the nature of contact it improves, but when you're doing something intense and you need a lot of focus etc., people will be happily flying people from all over. I mean, I know this last two years I have been teaching online, but from this November they have said Dubai, and then I'm going to Singapore in October and Dubai in November, and I'll be doing February in Sydney. So they've realized. So certain things will happen, but to reflect General sahib's point, the future is digital.

One of the things that I'd like to say up here is that even when people are physically present in a room, it is not that they are attentive. So you know, so you could be sitting in a room and yet not be attentive. You're physically there but you're mentally not present. Whereas all the softwares that you mentioned — tax course is one of them — where you can actually measure and see for yourself whether the person is attentive or not attentive. Absolutely. So softwares are an aid to also performance. Physical touch is something that would go missing in any case. But the point is that you can be physically present in a room and mentally not present. That's true.

Thanks both the speakers. Sepala, we request you to sum up please. Very much. As far as giving summing up, I think in the discussion we have summed up a lot. Yet it seems from all the discussion that hybrid work is going to stay, or maybe going to increase in the form of digital. In the hybrid part, digital work is going to stay and digital work is going to go further. Thus a new level, I feel, of agility and dexterity, as mentioned by Mr. Rhina, then a quick adaptability and having that sort of approach with the employees, is needed by a leader. The style of leadership may have to develop, and new rules may have to — I mean, some of the rules have been, A B C D have been given, some of the ways it should be met, by Karthik Rhina. But I think new rules which face the hybrid leaders today probably are coming up, and this webinar is to some extent going to add to that sort of vocabulary, what are required.

There are certain problems need to be also faced in hybrid. There are incremental costs also in hybrid world, because need of added infrastructure may be there, need of having support both from the office and the homework. So there can be certain incremental costs also in terms of digital approach or virtual approach. The agility of the leader of course is there and has to be there as a new set, but the organizational agility, need of striking a balance between the innovative work of digital and the earlier festival, that organizational agility also is required from the organization.

There can be sometime communication breakdown also. Probably that also — the single biggest challenge which I feel can be in such environment can be the communication breakdown, and in India in particular, as mentioned, some places you may not have internet, so there is likelihood of that communication difficulties. This is one of the biggest challenges.

But I like to touch, I mean, in a lighter mood — Peter Drucker, who is considered to be father of management, he was the first, I think one of the first who was given something on management in A B C D. He quoted that very interesting: culture may eat into strategy, or culture may get eaten by the strategy. Now it's a question of culture. I am quoting in terms of traditional requirement, that is what, in the broader sense, culture, traditional requirement — it may be eaten up by the new strategy, or will the new strategy get submerged into culture? That is a question mark. But I think as far as today's discussion was concerned, I think gradually that traditional and culture — which culture I'm talking, the broader culture, mean face to face, anything, all those sort of traditional requirement which is culture — are going to be eaten up by the strategy. Let us hope the ultimate culture as such is maintained, because as somebody pointed out, artificial intelligence, yes, that means, I mean, overall thinking will be so synchronized that artificial intelligence gives much more than we can give. So in that case I hope the human element doesn't get sidelined totally into the digital world.

So with these words I thank both the speakers for very very illuminating talk, and they have touched certain areas which were of course not in the knowledge, because broadly we knew, but what are the fundamentals between the digital and what is fundamental physical, face to face, and how to combine both of them, and how ultimately to achieve the results. Because otherwise, if any organization does not rapidly adopt to this innovative age, it is likely to be, the productivity and business losses may be there as far as the business world is concerned. With these words I thank the delegates, thank the moderator, thank both the speakers very much for having come here and graced their opinion and given such scholarly talks, both of them. Thank you very much.

Our next — thank you very much. I just want to end by a share from — he says — well, well said. Very well said. Excellent. Our next interactive session is Taiwan, the new cauldron, its strategic importance and implications, scheduled on 9th September, and the speaker is Major General SVP Singh, retired, VSM. September 9, same time, 6 p.m. I solicit your presence here with us. With these words, I thank you all once again, and good night. Thanks Praash. Thanks Karthik. Thanks everybody. Thanks for having come. Thank you. Thank you.

Gratitude to all, to the NISSMAT organizers. It's been a great, great, great session. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thank you. SVP sir, we are looking for your talk on the 9th. Yes. The exacting standards which are set by NISSMAT, Kalan and yourself — I have to grow taller to measure up, and I must do justice to that. I really look forward to contributing a subject which is inviting the attention. We value your sentiments. We hope and only hope that they are genuine and we come up to your expectations. We'll try to come up to your expectations. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you sir. Thank you sir. Yes sir. Okay, Janak. Bye. Thank you Praash. Thank you, Dr. Man.