When Shailesh Singh, Chief People Officer at Axis Max Life Insurance, talks about capability building, he does not begin with training programmes. He begins with culture.
“If it is not consciously anchored,” he says, invoking a Rajiv Gandhi quote on corruption to make his point, “you only have 15 paisa reaching the branches and stations.”
Singh uses the analogy to explain why capability building must be anchored in culture if it is to scale consistently across the organisation.
In the inaugural episode of The CHRO Playbook, HRKatha’s new 12-part video podcast series powered by enParadigm, Singh joins host Prajjal Saha and John Cherian, Founder and CEO of enParadigm, for a candid discussion on what it takes to build capability at scale across more than 400 branches, a workforce of over 40,000 employees and a distribution network of 60,000 to 70,000 agents.
The two capability bets
Asked where Axis Max Life has placed its biggest capability bets, Singh identifies two clear priorities.
The first is customer obsession. Rather than treating it as another learning intervention, the company has embedded it into performance assessments, managerial expectations and business metrics such as Net Promoter Score, turnaround time and claims settlement ratios, which have consistently remained above 99 per cent.
A flagship initiative, Project Vishwas, helped translate this philosophy into action. Singh describes it as a movement rather than a programme, extending customer obsession beyond frontline teams to the entire organisation. The initiative received Gold at the Brandon Hall HCM Excellence Awards in 2025, although Singh insists the real objective was never the award. It was to reshape organisational behaviour.
The second priority is supervisor capability.
As organisations scale rapidly, leadership and culture can become concentrated in a small group of individuals. Building stronger supervisors, Singh argues, is the only way to distribute both consistently across the organisation.
“How do I ensure that the experience in Gurgaon is similar, if not identical, to the experience in Hooghly or Coimbatore?” he asks. That question continues to drive the company’s investment in frontline leadership.
Why culture comes first
For Singh, culture is not an HR initiative. It is built by every supervisor through every review conversation, field visit and customer interaction.
“Many organisations delegate this, sometimes even abandon it, to HR. It does not work like that,” he says.
Culture, he argues, provides consistency without creating rigidity. It enables new ideas to travel across the organisation without losing their intent and ensures initiatives do not fade after the initial excitement.
“We do a few things and do them very well. And they sustain.”
Connecting learning to business outcomes
John Cherian brings the perspective of a learning partner that has worked closely with Axis Max Life.
He argues that organisations often begin capability building from the wrong end.
“Companies are not training colleges. They have a business to run and outcomes to achieve. The starting point should always be the business outcome. From there, you work backwards to the behavioural shift and then to the learning design.”
On measuring effectiveness, Cherian believes artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed the equation. AI-powered simulations, scenario-based assessments and conversation analytics now make it far easier to connect learning interventions with business outcomes. The challenge, he says, is no longer the availability of data but whether organisations are prepared to use it.
Watch the full conversation
From customer obsession and frontline leadership to measuring learning with AI, the discussion offers practical insights into how capability is built at scale.
Watch the full conversation in the inaugural episode of The CHRO Playbook, powered by enParadigm. New episodes will be released regularly.
