As a young organization with just five years of operations in the country, we have grown tremendously. At every stage, it was repeatedly ratified that talent enabled us to achieve our business priorities. As an organization, we know that we can define strategic pillars for ourselves, but all these ultimately depend on talent. Hence, our quest is to always focus on talent.

For us the balance is shifting away from an informal, ad hoc orientation to a significantly greater rigor and formality in talent management. Over the years, the partnership with HR has also grown stronger to run various initiatives within the organization. As a leader, I personally take it upon myself to ensure my involvement. The entire telecom industry is at a crucial juncture right now and success would lie in meeting the ever increasing customer demands with flexibility and speed. One critical factor that is helping us in this objective is to ensure continuous supply of quality talent to key leadership positions across the organization.

Initiatives as strategic as creating a talent bench or ensuring highest level of reward and recognition for high performers is something that is extremely critical for the success of our strategy. In addition, we also lay a lot of emphasis on our Action Learning Projects in the form of an initiative called MPower. It is a cross functional team, working on core projects, which directly impact both our top line and bottom line. The program is so structured that the final presentation by the various MPower teams happen to me. Developing people—showing them how to progress in the organization—continues to be one of our biggest challenges. People, irrespective of levels, need a clearer idea of their role within the organization. Consequently, we have also developed “a career framework—enabling employees to themselves know what they need to do for their career advancement”.

We are in an industry characterized by rapid technological change, short product cycles and rapidly changing customer expectations. In this business scenario, communication becomes the key to bind the company together. The communication system is so designed that it promotes both upward and downward flow of ideas and suggestions. The challenge is to continuously engage and connect with employees in a manner so that the entire organization across all levels gets rejuvenated through positive energy.

Operating in a market like India is not easy. However, given the huge market potential, availability of good quality talent, not to mention the new progressive government being in place, one is really hopeful of even better days ahead for businesses across sectors. Given this backdrop, the war for talent is bound to intensify even further. We have been very particular about the people we want to hire. I personally ensure that due emphasis is given on elements like alignment of hires with the culture of the organization. This becomes all the more critical when it comes to senior hires.

We are committed to continuously improve our people practices so that brand gets recognized as an ‘Employer of Choice for Internal and External Talent’. Our structured focus on capability building has been extremely useful in the past and I am sure will also continue to serve us well in the future as well. I believe in and value meritocracy and it is also encoded in the DNA of the organization. The challenge now is to ensure that one does not get complacent. Going forward, building a performance-oriented culture is also high on my priority list. As a leader of the organization, I want to ensure that the best talent is adequately recognized and rewarded.

DMITRY SHUKOV is the Chief Executive Officer of MTS India