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Speaking to Umairah Nasir, she shares how she is rethinking workforce strategy in the age of AI, including taking a ‘zero-based design’ approach to reimagining work and prioritising skills such as learning, unlearning, and adaptability.
For Seetal Bhatti (pictured above), the journey to HR started with a fascination. While studying economics at university, she found herself drawn not just to systems and incentives, but to how behaviours shape outcomes. It was the human dimension behind performance that captured her attention. That curiosity followed her into a general management graduate programme, where she discovered a strong interest in coaching people and teams and unlocking their performance. When the opportunity to step into HR came up, it felt like a natural fit. She took it and did not look back.
Over the next two decades, Seetal built her career with intent. She sought out experiences across industries, transformation contexts, and different stages of the business lifecycle.
From mergers & acquisitions to evolving commercial business models, each experience added to her understanding of how performance is created in different environments. Along the way, her leadership style evolved into one that focuses on enabling leaders to lead, while staying comfortable navigating ambiguity, pace, and constant change.
Today, as Global Head of HR for Technology and Operations at Standard Chartered, Seetal sits at the intersection of people and technology. In this Snapshot interview with Umairah Nasir, she shares how she is rethinking workforce strategy in the age of AI, including taking a ‘zero-based design’ approach to reimagining work and prioritising skills such as learning, unlearning, and adaptability.
She also reflects on the importance of creating more inclusive pathways for women in technology, particularly in environments that have traditionally been male dominated, and why understanding and supporting different expressions of ambition matters more than ever.
Q What first drew you to HR and how has your leadership style evolved through leading growth transformation and mergers and acquisitions across global organisations.
I studied economics at university, and whilst I was studying that, I was really fascinated by how systems, incentives, and behaviours shape outcomes in an economy. When I then joined a general management graduate programme, I noticed that my fascination was really about the human dimension of that. I was really interested in how leadership choices, leadership styles, impact teams and impact their performance. I also really enjoyed coaching people and teams and unlocking their performance.
When I came to the end of my graduate programme and there was an opportunity to join a business as an HR partner, I thought that would be a really good fit for the things that I was really fascinated and intrigued by, and I just didn't look back after that. I spent the next more than 20 years seeking out different experiences in a quite a deliberate way — thinking about different industries, different transformation contexts, different points in a business's life cycle, to get experience of performance and how you create performance outcomes in those different situations and scenarios.
Leading through all of those transforming contexts — whether it is mergers & acquisitions or transforming a commercial business model, has really evolved my leadership style to one that can scale my impact by enabling leaders to lead; as well as one that is quite comfortable with leading through ambiguity, leading at pace, and leading through change.
Q You now sit at the intersection of people and technology. In your new role leading HR for Technology and Operations, how do you hope to reshape workforce strategy and work design in the AI era?
This is a huge agenda for us at the bank, and for most organisations right now.
It is not about incremental change. It is about transformation starting with principles, and we are taking an approach which looks at a blank sheet of paper. We are calling it ‘zero-based design’.
We are imagining what work will look like in the future and working back from there. It requires us to think about the human and the digital interaction fundamentally and differently; think about the way work needs to evolve in order to deliver on our strategic ambition.
We ask questions such as:
- What are our clients’ expectations in the future?
- Which clients are we serving?
- Where are they?
- What do they need from us?
- How should work be designed to meet those expectations at the scale required?
Thereafter, we think about the best ways to bring technology and people together. That means being clear about the work itself, the skills we need now and, in the future, skills that are constantly evolving — and adopting a more dynamic approach to planning, including preparing for what we cannot yet foresee.
It also means being more agile in how we build, redeploy, and acquire skills. Finally, it also means being thoughtful about how we develop our people to face uncertainty towards the future, but also [encouraging them] to embrace the learning opportunities that come with introducing AI into the organisation.
Q Talking about future skills, are there specific skills you are staying on top of?
Some of the generic skills, are about learning and unlearning. Behavioural skills are as important as technical skills, if not more important. The ability to take charge of your own learning, to learn new ways of doing things, to adapt, and to be resilient. It's probably more of those leadership-type skills – self-leadership and leadership of others – than it is the technical skills.
Q What is one pivotal career moment that fundamentally changed the way you lead today?
Around 10 years ago, I worked for SABMiller. They were acquired by AB InBev, and that was the UK's largest ever takeover, and I believe the fifth largest takeover in corporate history globally, and it brought together 200,000 people from those two organisations into one.
That was a pivotal moment for me, because I worked at the centre of that integration. Why it was so pivotal was because we were integrating more than two completely different corporate cultures, multiple nationalities, different leadership styles, as well as different outlooks on the markets that they were serving, and harmonising them as quickly as we could in order to drive a sort of a more effective combined business.
It was a pivotal moment for me, because it reinforced that transformation is not just about structure and process. At its core, it is about shared intent and clarity of outcomes – about engaging the hearts and minds of the workforce at scale. Transformation is about leadership: bringing leaders together, creating alignment, and showing empathy for the profound changes people experience both personally and organisationally.
Q Redesigning work in the AI age requires courage and prioritisation. How do you decide which changes truly matter?
Prioritisation starts with business strategy. We think about what our strategic ambitions as a bank are, and where AI [can be] best deployed to help us achieve those ambitions.
You can look at it top-down, from a strategic perspective, but you also need to listen to your colleagues, because they understand where the points of friction are in the business, and therefore where the most value can be created by leveraging AI alongside their efforts — whether it is to streamline processes or to create a totally different outcome that was not possible without the use of AI. So, it's that combination of a top-down strategy and listening to your colleagues, engaging them, and prioritising based on value.
Equally important is recognising potential adverse impacts of AI within the organisational construct. We are deeply committed to ensuring that AI does not introduce unintended outcomes such as bias. That means rigorously testing for where such risks might arise and safeguarding against them, so that our efforts move us forward in building a more inclusive and diverse organisation, rather than setting us back.
Q You are a woman HR leader in a global role. What deliberate actions have you taken to uplift the participation and progression of women in environments such as tech and operations, that are typically male dominated?
In my experience, technology — more than operations can be particularly male dominated. I am just getting started here at Standard Chartered, but in the past my approach has been multi-faceted: creating inclusive environments and diversifying pipelines for technology roles.
It has been about building diverse pipelines by really understanding the talent base within your organisation, digging deep to find the existing diversity, and then looking at roles – such as in operations – where there is more diversity, and creating pathways for that talent to move into technology.
An example of that is from my previous organisation. We took people from our contact centres, where the need for those roles was declining, and trained them as cybersecurity specialists. That meant moving a diverse population into a less diverse one, and it was a successful pivot for them from a career perspective.
The next piece is making sure that leaders are accountable. They must be clear on where the organisation stands and on the value it places on inclusion and diversity. They need to understand, from a data‑driven perspective, how they are performing against that ambition, know that they are personally accountable for creating a more diverse and inclusive environment, and have that accountability baked into the performance management system.
Q What kind of culture do you strive to build within your own HR team, and how does it reflect your personal leadership style or philosophy?
I always talk about a culture that is about high ambition, high integrity, and high collaboration. When you get those three ingredients right, you create inclusive cultures that are high performing — that fits very well with the values that we have here at Standard Chartered.
You build that through role modelling, an alignment with the value system of the organisation, the way you select leaders who are in leadership positions, and how you reward and recognise the behaviours in the system.
Q What are your top workforce priorities for the next one to two years, and how will you work with the leadership team to achieve them?
The top priorities are about reshaping the workforce for the future and having a clear view of how we expect that to evolve in line with our strategy.
We think about the skills we will need, what the balance between technology and human interaction will look like, and the ways of working. We also consider the kind of culture that will create high-performing teams, supported by leadership development, a strong employee value proposition, and effective performance management.
I always talk about the 3Cs of HR: culture, capabilities, and organisational configuration. If you get these three right, they will help you shape the culture and the conditions that you need for organisations to succeed.
In terms of how I take the leadership on the journey, it is their journey as much as it is mine, because this is all about enabling their strategy to succeed. So, it is co-created. I am responsible for the people enablers, but they are shaped by the leaders. So, I coach, facilitate and own the people enablers, but it is entirely designed by the leadership team in collaboration with the HR team.
Q What’s one leadership myth you secretly enjoy proving wrong?
I think one is the idea that leaders always have the answer and that you can command and control from the top. Maybe it was the case in a less complex world 10 to 20 years ago, but it has not been the case for a long time, and it certainly is not as we move into the future.
The future is very uncertain. It is very ambiguous, and so the role of leaders is to be a calm and steady role model that sets direction, that is curious, and cultivates from the workforce.
A sense of calm and ability to be resilient and to succeed through change. I think it is about setting clear direction and enabling others to solve problems at scale. So, the myth is that we have all the answers — we don’t.
The other myth, and one that I have been thinking about a lot more recently, is about the ambition gap for women into senior leadership roles. There's a lot being talked about now in terms of the complexity of senior leadership roles and the diminishing pipelines of women that aspire to be in CEO roles, or CHRO roles.
However, I think that is misread. The reality is there are still many ambitious women out there, but they express it differently. They express it in terms of intent to have impact, rather than pursuing a particular role for the sake of a status. Thus, I think that it is a myth that women are not ambitious.
Women are very ambitious, but we need to listen to their ambitions differently.
Photo / Seetal Bhatti's LinkedIn
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