Shaping leaders from coders is biggest challenge of IT sector, say experts

Bengaluru: Top HR leaders from the IT sector congregated in the city of Bengaluru on Friday to discuss current and future challenges in enterprise people management under the aegis of the multi city event ‘The Breakfast Alchemy’. The spotlight at the round table discussion hosted by Mettl, a talent measurement organization,was on ‘From Coders to Leaders’, among the most talked-about HR agenda in the Indian Information Technology landscape.

Indian technical prowess is universally acknowledged as a cut above the rest but rarely have they transcended from writing code to understanding PnL structures, even more so in India. This void has seen organizations struggle to build a robust leadership pipeline and seek external talent to steer an organization to sustainable profitability.

‘From Coders to Leaders’ is an attempt to devise solutions to this conundrum by involving distinguished HR leaders from Oracle, Virtusa Polaris, SAP, Dell and ITC Infotech, deliberating about this issue in a round table format.

 Ketan Kapoor,Co-Founder and CEO Mettl said, “Shaping leaders from coders is easily identified as one of the biggest challenges in the Information Technology sector, and the Mettl powered Breakfast Alchemy, India’s most robust HR e-event, spotted a chance for a second gathering of HR leaders. Since Mettl is instrumental in identifying future leadership prowess at the recruitment stage through pre-employment assessments that predict the existence of a leadership gene in technical talent being hired, this event was a much required intervention for the HR community seeking answers to it.”

Coders are of brilliant minds, architects of algorithms that make much of our lives simpler. These coders, who are more often than not inclined to outperform themselves, become the high performer every organization would love among their ranks. However, organizations want more than a mere coder architect, no matter their potential as one; they also enjoy the idea of coder leaders.

There are certain challenges that hinder this seamless transition, however. The Breakfast Alchemy saw panelists deliberating a host of challenges like  lack of proper diagnostics of the leadership gene at the hiring stage, a coder’s manager not letting him or her showcase skills at the PnL level, the risk averse environment that throttles a leader-to-be, and improper compensation benchmarking at executive roles to name a few.

The panel posted actionable insights for the group to come out with a strategy to deflect and defeat these issues at their core. The session was later broadcasted to a group of 500 HR professionals through web streaming.

Global Business HR Head Dr. Christina Augustine from Virtusa Polaris, Global Director – People Supply Chain & Talent Transformation VimalKakade from Dell, VP – Capacity Building & Knowledge Management Sanjay Kumar from ITC Infotech, Senior Director APAC – HCM Strategy &Transformation Pramod Sadarjoshi from Oracle, and Director & Head HR Vibha Shukla from SAP topped the set of HR panelists.

The Breakfast Alchemy (TBA) is a 90-minute round table discussion where a panel of distinguished HR Alchemists would generate gold nuggets working with base metals. The base metals in this case would be general HR problem statements, which the panel would aim to transform into comprehensive HR solutions by means of collective group think.

The format of the event would see the HR leaders deliberate a case study that seeks to improve the Leadership Bench in the Information Technology Landscape, to allow individual contributors to thrive as a leader while holding onto their passion to code.