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 afterwards, but what stayed with Modak was not the compliment. It was the experience of discovering that confidence does not always precede responsibility.
“Confidence does not always come before action,” he says. “Sometimes, confidence is built by stepping forward despite the fear.” Pressure, in his view, does not suddenly create capability. It reveals how much has already been built before the moment arrives.
Modak won the Rewards Guru title at the HRKatha Rising Star Leadership Awards 2025, recognition in the specialism that has defined much of his career: compensation, performance and incentive design.
When the plan was right and still failed
One of Modak’s most instructive experiences came from a variable-pay plan that appeared sound on paper. Senior management had approved it. The design was linked to business objectives. Goal-setting followed a structured top-down process. Employees still did not connect with it.
Looking at the document again offered little explanation. The mechanics were coherent, the measures defensible. The problem only became visible once Modak began speaking to local, plant and regional HR teams. Several had not been meaningfully involved in designing the plan, and some of the measures employees were assessed against did not feel sufficiently within their control. The weakness, Modak realised, was not technical design. It was ownership.
The plan was reworked with greater participation from the people expected to operate it, corporate and local teams together examining which measures were strategically important and which employees could realistically influence. For Modak, the lesson travelled well beyond compensation: a system can be logically correct and still fail if the people living with it don’t understand the reasoning or believe they can influence the outcome. Diagnosis, he learnt, matters more than rushing to improve the design.
Where incentives become strategy
Modak’s professional curiosity sits most naturally at the intersection of pay and performance. He sees incentive design as one of the clearest ways an organisation translates strategy into individual behaviour, a compensation plan doesn’t just determine who receives what, it signals what the organisation values and expects people to prioritise.
He’s particularly interested in incentive frameworks incorporating measures beyond traditional financial performance, safety, sustainability, customer outcomes, ESG priorities.
The harder question isn’t whether these measures can be included, but whether they actually influence behaviour. A metric can look strategically sophisticated and still become another box to tick if employees don’t understand the connection between the measure, their decisions and the organisation’s broader priorities.
Trade-offs, not sides
When leadership priorities and employee expectations pull in different directions, Modak doesn’t see HR’s role as automatically choosing one side. He prefers to make the trade-off explicit. His example is business travel: leadership wants cost discipline, employees argue travel is necessary for customer relationships or effectiveness, and neither position is inherently unreasonable.
The challenge is distinguishing what’s genuinely necessary from what’s merely habitual, prioritising travel linked to customers or operational requirements while moving other interactions online. The test, for Modak, isn’t whether everyone likes the outcome. It’s whether they can understand how the organisation arrived at it.
Judgement, not automation
Modak’s use of AI has expanded across research, communication, presentations and testing his own ideas. In rewards, he expects it to become increasingly useful for market analysis, pay-equity detection and compensation modelling, putting sophisticated analysis within reach of far more decision-makers than before.
But he draws a clear line between analysis and judgement. A system can identify an anomaly or model different salary scenarios. It can’t determine what the organisation should do next, or account for the fact that two recommendations that look equally rational in a model can land very differently once they reach employees.
Simplicity is not the opposite of strategy
One of Modak’s clearer convictions is also one of his simplest: an incentive plan doesn’t need to be complicated to be strategic. Complexity can create the appearance of sophistication while making a plan harder for managers and employees to actually understand, and if an employee can’t explain what drives their incentive, the plan has quietly failed at its most basic job, making priorities visible.
Quick Takes
Coffee, tea, spreadsheets or storytelling:
Coffee, mostly milk these days. Spreadsheets supported by storytelling, data provides the foundation, storytelling gives it meaning.
An unpopular HR opinion:
An incentive scheme doesn’t need to be complicated to be strategic. If employees and managers can’t understand it, even a sophisticated design can fail.
Dinner with any HR leader, living or dead:
Dr Santrupt Misra, a mentor across his career. He’d ask how you know when it’s time to leave a role you’re succeeding in for something entirely new.
On the reading list:
Breakpoint: The Crisis of the Middle Class and the Future of Work, Saurabh Mukherjea.
A surprising skill that makes him better at HR:
Patience. The first explanation is rarely the real one.
Why he is a Rising Star
Modak’s strength is recognising that rewards problems are rarely only rewards problems. The failed variable-pay plan makes the point clearly: technically defensible, organisationally incomplete, because the people expected to operate within it hadn’t developed ownership of it. His response wasn’t to add complexity. It was to go find what the design had missed. That same instinct, favouring diagnosis over quick fixes, clarity over sophistication, runs through how he treats AI, conflicting priorities and incentive design alike, in a discipline where numbers can easily create an illusion of objectivity that isn’t actually there.
Rising Stars is HRKatha’s editorial series profiling the next generation of HR leaders shaping the future of the profession. The series features winners and finalists of the HRKatha Rising Star Leadership Awards alongside emerging professionals whose work, ideas and leadership potential deserve wider recognition.
