Group head of HR

MasterCard, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa

What do you enjoy most about your work?

It would be talent development. We can hire people, but it’s how to grow the talent in the organisation that I enjoy most, probably because we can give [talent] project assignments, full-time assignments or other roles and it’s about how you can build more capability in the workforce and see people grow.

If you weren’t in HR, what would you be doing?

I would probably be running a restaurant with maybe a Mediterranean and fusion-styled cuisine.

What’s your proudest achievement in your career?

It was overhauling succession planning and talent management in my previous organisation, from the CEO to the board and all the way down. It was the
re-engineering of the talent management processes within a single corporation in the US. It took three years. We put in the tools and systems to enable everything to happen.

We put in hiring tools where HR could search for people, put resumes into the database so we could search skill sets or we could be proactive in making job offers to suitable candidates. There was also a succession planning process in terms of having more engagement with the senior executives and the board on how they really wanted to talk about talent and the skill sets needed. That took a significant amount of time, not only with technology, but also training people on how to do the assessments, rather than sending people to assessment centres.

What is the one item you can’t work without?

A cell phone because the phone is a portal to everything – the internet, the calendar, life and travel plans.

Do you have a best friend at work?

I have friends, but I won’t say best friends. In HR you have to be in a separate system, unfortunately. I keep it separate. To be objective, you really have to look at what we do and how we behave. There are some components that are mostly quite different here and outside work.

You can still be social and involved, but there is a line and the question is whether you are prepared to cross it.

Some HR people do and are the centre of everything. I’m not one of them. You can’t really be fully effective and make tough decisions if you have crossed the line because your objectivity goes a little awry.

My colleagues will be proud of our talent management efforts at the end of the day and they will buy me dinner when this is published.