Identifying a capable successor does not mean the succession plan will work. For Jeeva Balakrishnan, CHRO, Cholamandalam Investment & Finance, three things must come together: the individual’s aspiration, the individual’s capability and the organisation’s talent needs. If they do not, an organisation can invest heavily in a successor only to find itself back at the starting point. In this excerpt from HRKatha Futurecast: The Future of Succession in BFSI, held in association with People Business, Balakrishnan explains why the CEO must own succession while the CHRO builds the infrastructure that develops people for future roles.
Author: HRKatha Editorial Team
Winner, Rewards Guru | HRKatha Rising Star Leadership Awards 2025 Gaurav Modak was not supposed to be the person leading the discussion. He had joined a RemCo conversation involving executive salary decisions and market data to support his manager with analysis and background material. Then his manager had to drop out at the last moment, leaving Modak to take the room himself. He went back through the material, reconstructed how similar conversations had been handled before, anticipated the questions that were likely to surface and stepped in. The meeting went well enough to earn appreciation from the HR director…
First Runner-Up | HRKatha Rising Star Leadership Awards 2025 Himanshu Gupta has spent much of his career on the design side of HR: building performance and rewards structures, integrating policies and creating frameworks where established ones were either absent or no longer fit for purpose. That distinction has shaped how he thinks about the function. HR, in his view, creates value when its systems are closely connected to the way a business actually competes, grows and allocates resources, rather than when it simply administers processes efficiently. His career has given him several vantage points on that problem. Consulting assignments at…
Finalist | HRKatha Rising Star Leadership Award 2025 After more than two decades in HR, Ruben Arun Kumar has arrived at a deceptively simple view of what makes the function effective. It is not the number of processes it owns or policies it administers, but whether people trust it enough to seek its counsel before a problem becomes a crisis. Asked how colleagues would describe him, Kumar chooses three words: calm, composed, dependable. They may sound more like personality traits than leadership credentials, but they reveal something about how he sees HR’s role. Influence, in his view, is built less…
Succession planning has traditionally been built around a reassuring assumption: organisations know roughly what the next leader will be required to lead. That assumption is becoming harder to sustain in banking, financial services and insurance. The sector has always had compelling reasons to take leadership continuity seriously. Financial institutions operate in highly regulated environments, manage enormous amounts of risk and depend heavily on institutional trust. An unexpected leadership vacuum can therefore be considerably more consequential than an empty corner office. But continuity is only half the problem now. The leader who succeeds today’s chief executive, business head or functional leader…
India is set to expand its allied healthcare workforce by one lakh professionals over the next five years, as demand grows for skilled talent across hospitals, laboratories, rehabilitation centres and other healthcare settings. The expansion is being supported through competency-based training, digital workforce mapping and increased investment in allied healthcare education. The measures are being implemented under the National Commission for Allied and Healthcare Professions (NCAHP) Act, 2021, which provides a framework for regulating and developing allied healthcare professions. A key focus is standardising the skills and training required across different healthcare support roles. The National Commission for Allied and…
Winner | HRKatha Rising Star Leadership Award 2025 Every generation of HR professionals inherits a different challenge. Earlier generations had to prove HR belonged in business conversations. Today’s challenge is different. The HR function has to demonstrate that it can think like the business itself. Sumit Rastogi belongs to a generation trying to make that shift. An engineer by training, he approaches HR less as a support function than as a business capability whose success should be measured in commercial outcomes rather than activity alone. Whether discussing hiring, diversity, technology or workforce planning, he returns repeatedly to the same principle:…
Only 8 per cent of Indian organisations have reached what Deloitte describes as the highest level of people analytics maturity, a stage where workforce data is embedded in business decisions rather than confined to HR reporting. It is a modest figure to sit beneath a much louder one. The report’s headline finding is that 43 per cent of organisations now operate at “advanced maturity”. That larger number combines two very different stages: 35 per cent sit at Level 3, where analytics is accessible and used, while just 8 per cent have reached Level 4, where it is institutionalised across the…