You know how every home has that one spot, the place you think
about throughout the day where you can finally exhale?
For me, it's my bed. But here's The funny thing, it's
not just my bed anymore. Be honest.
Who in your house tries to sneak into your bed the most?
At mine, it's a toss up between my husband and my daughters.
And I get it. Like, it's technically my
husband's bed too, but it's my bed, you know?
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And I have the silk comforter and the linen duvet cover on the
silk comforter. It's like being the VIP lounge
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and being wrapped in a cloud hug.
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Their sheets, as I've shared with you, are made from viscose
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too. Cozy Earth makes that possible.
Welcome to the bringing the human back to human resources
podcast. I'm Tracy Chernoff, and I've
spent my entire professional career in HR.
Each week, we'll explore the delicate balance between people
and business with the aim to reconnect the two and create
meaningful outcomes. Listen in as I share my own
experiences, challenge the status quo, and chat with guests
from various industries about our mission to bring the human
back to human resources. Hi everyone, welcome back to the
podcast. Thank you so much for being here
for another week. This week we are speaking with
an experienced and accomplished business leader and we're going
to spend a lot of time focused on upskilling and reskilling,
which is actually something that many of you reach out about.
How do you make yourselves, you know, future proofed?
How do you get your career to go from point A to point B?
And so we'll talk a lot about that.
And especially for those who are, you know, maybe decision
makers and businesses, you'll hopefully also get a lot of
information about what you can do to best set up your employees
for things like getting from point A to point B in their
careers or making some shifts to really future proof, not only
themselves, but also your business.
So let me introduce you to our guest this week, who is Tan
Morthy. Tan is an accomplished business
leader with over 3 decades of experience in the global IT
services industry with expertise in multiple corporate functions
such as strategy, operations, education, talent development,
and technology implementation. He's currently an Advisory Board
member and strategy consultant in the areas of workforce
transformation and sustainable development.
He retired from Infosys as an Executive Vice President after
working there for 23 years, which is so amazing.
As part of the Infosys core team, he worked as a head of
delivery operations for US, Canada and Lat M, which is Latin
America. In case anyone is not currently
in a global role as a group, head of HR Global Head of
Education, chairman of the Board for Infosys Public Services and
trustee on the board of Infosys Foundation USA 10 continues to
be a champion of innovation and sustainable development and has
even LED AUN workgroup for defining industry specific
metrics for corporate for corporate teams to meet the
sustainable development goals such as SDGS.
So Tan welcome. Thank you so much for joining
the podcast this week. Racy, thank you so much for this
opportunity to interact with you.
Thank you for the introduction. Just add that I'm currently the
CEO of Ravitcher, which is focused on bridging the talent
gap for clients and workforce transformation.
Fabulous. Thank you so much for adding
that, which is actually a very important part of your
introduction here too, because you've taken all of your
experience and all of your knowledge, and now you've put it
into your own organization effectively.
Yeah, it's a great opportunity now to be working with Ravitcher
as the CEO. Yeah, absolutely.
That's amazing. And I'm curious, you know, where
did your interests and passions start?
And especially when, you know, we read through your, your
background, you've kind of covered a lot of operational and
strategic territories, including HR, but where did where did that
inspiration kind of come from? Great.
Thank you, Tracy. So I think for me, the journey
started of course as a software engineer myself.
But what I figured during the course of my journey and quite
early in my journey was that it is not enough to have content,
but you need to have communication as well.
And that content and communication are two sides of
the same coin if you need to succeed.
And that came through several experiences I had, one of which
was where a client actually rejected a work that my company
had given to them because they thought the technology solution
was great, but the person who was leading it didn't seem to
communicate well. And that was me.
And so the company lost the proposal.
And that is when I realized the the need for both content and
communication and started focusing on my own development.
And. And learn about communication.
I joined Toastmasters and then started interacting with a lot
of people. You know, one of the
accomplishments in that journey for me was to be on the same
stage as actually Steve Ballmer, who was at that time the CEO, I
think of Microsoft. So the ability to, you know,
learn and really do what is required to be professionally
relevant started with that experience.
And since then, it's all been my passion to say, how can we help
people who have the inherent capability but not have been
able to reach their goals, learn the need to learn right and
continuously develop themselves. And that's why I'm passionate
about learning. That's really wonderful to hear
and thank you for sharing your own personal experience with
this. You know, when I, when I think
about what you've just said around learning and, and being
what, you know, many would call like a lifelong learner, I think
a lot of us, myself included, yourself included, would
attribute ourselves to that type of category, you know, in terms
of how we describe ourselves. And something that a guest
recently said to me is that, you know, podcasts and YouTube
channels and, and even like AI, like Chachi PT, which we'll
probably talk about AIA little bit later.
Those are all avenues for people to not really even just teach
themselves, but find additional learnings outside of their
typical work day. Or, you know, I certainly hope
that my podcast provides people with some additional knowledge.
And so when you share your own experience, I also am curious
when you think about this hunger for learning and really growing
yourself, do you have other places outside of maybe coaching
or different training sessions that you've you've been a part
of that allow you to continue to learn even at this stage where
now you're a CEO? And for many people that's like
they're pinnacle, like where they the very top of their
career goals, right. So how do you how do you
continue to learn even after achieving what is generally the
highest level in business? I think 1 is to be curious and
the second is to spend some time reflecting.
Both of those help. The third is also to move
outside of comfort zones. In fact, the many roles that
have had the opportunity to play, especially at Infosys,
came from my own desire to move out of a comfort zone.
Because when I got comfortable in a role and when I saw that
there could be other opportunities, especially
related to people, I started to venture into that.
And I've been very, very lucky to have had a great company and
a great set of managers who encouraged me to do that.
But the opportunity came because I also pushed the boundaries and
wanted to get out of comfort zones.
For example, going from a line of business into corporate
function was something a lot of people told me that, you know, I
shouldn't be risking that because I was doing well in
business. But I took that opportunity and,
and because of fashion and, and that led to a lot of other
opportunities that came through in my life.
So getting out of comfort zones is another thing that you need
to do to continuously learn. Yeah, what a great point.
And when I think about, you know, generally this topic of
upskilling, reskilling and, and as an individual future proofing
ourselves and being able to adapt to new roles or new
environments easily through learning and like I said,
through upscaling and rescaling. I also think about what I talked
about just at the beginning, which is there's a business
context here too, that when employees have this opportunity
to upskill, reskill, there's a future proofing on the business.
And when I say future proof, just for everyone listening,
when I'm kind of referring to the ability for a business to
flex and kind of be elastic, let's say in their, in their
abilities and in their, their sustainability.
I mean, we think about even the last five years, right?
It's 2025. And in the last five years, we
went through a pandemic that shut down businesses, closed
offices, everyone started working from home to getting
through that pandemic, pandemic, having to adjust.
And some businesses did extremely well.
Some businesses suffered, some people did really well, some
people suffered. And then you, you Fast forward,
there's another election, there are all of these economic
changes. And so that's just in a five
year window. And when I think about the
elasticity needed for a business to be able to survive and really
thrive through all through all of that, it's not just the
product or you know, what you're delivering to a customer.
It's, it's to me fundamentally how the employees are able to
adjust and be elastic through those things.
And I think upskilling and learning and reskilling are a
big part of that. So I'm curious how you have,
especially as a business leader yourself, how you have helped
your teams to be prepared for those types of like climate
changes in businesses. So or in business I should say
so that they can future proof or be elastic and adapt.
So, you know, if you look at competence, which is really a
combination of knowledge, skills and attitude, it is important
for people to know what exists out there and also know their
own passion to bring that together.
Right. And and learning comes from a
combination of things. One is your own education and
how do you use the opportunity that you have to learn new
things? That's where the knowledge part
comes. And then the skills come from
practicing those, so giving people the opportunity to
practice those skills. And the third is exposure,
exposure to people who have already have those skills.
So looking up to others who are doing it and learning from them.
So it's the combination of education, engagement and
exposure with experience that kind of helps people to learn
and up skill themselves. And that is really creating that
ecosystem is an important job for any leader.
So as you look around your teams, it's important to see
what is their passion, what is the business need, and how do
you marry the two to create a learning opportunity for them?
How do you line up or align them with people who might be able to
mentor them? And how do you also give them
maybe projects that they can work on that can help them
practice those skills and become better?
Yeah, that's so great. And I was thinking about
something as you were talking about even these projects and
and how you marry the passion or the interests of the person with
the needs of the business. And the two thoughts that came
across my mind or that first and foremost, there is a huge value
proposition here for businesses to do that because not only are
you investing in your people, your people then feel invested
in and they are more committed. And the second is, is that I
have, I'm sure you probably have too.
In my experience in my career, I've heard other business
leaders say I, I don't have time for, you know, developing people
in this way. We're busy.
We have a lot of things to a lot of fires to put out.
We have a lot of things to do. How do you navigate push back
that might come up like that? Because it does happen.
I don't think I've ever worked at a company where it didn't
come up where someone was like, you know, how do we balance this
with all the work that's going on?
So I'm curious about your approach there.
Yeah. I mean, I think that's natural
because that's a natural tendency to take the path of
least resistance, right? Unless you're passionate to do
something that happens. But I think the value comes in
educating people on the need to do this and how they benefit.
Then at the end of the day, you got to show a win for people who
do those as much as people who are being mentored, right?
And the sooner you get people to recognize that this process of
mentoring is not one way, but a two way.
For example, if you are a mentor for a Gen.
Z, there is so much you will learn from how they approach
things. Right, so.
True versus looking at it as saying, you know, I don't have
time to talk to them or trying to mentor them.
It's really not. Mentoring is never a one way
state though it is kind of meant to be or it's classified as a
hierarchical thing. It is not.
It is a peer-to-peer learning. And sooner we make that mental
shift to say what I'm trying to do here is peer-to-peer
learning. I think you'll find people
acknowledge and get involved in the process of working with
others to make that difference. And that I think is an important
shift that needs to happen in people's mind.
And it happens over a period of time.
It happens as people see other people succeeding with it.
Absolutely. I think those are great points.
And, and there there's also this element to mentorship that
really reminds me of the value people have or get or receive, I
should say, when they volunteer, when they do something in their
communities. It's a very similar feeling or
sense of self worth that you invest in when you're like, oh,
I'm helping someone else. I'm helping them navigate a time
in their career that I remember was quite challenging, whether
it's, you know, first career or first job, I should say, in
their career or first time managing people or first time
with a large team, whatever it might be.
Or just that they want a mentor because they want to grow.
And that feeling that you get when you actually are able to
help someone and help guide them and they, they rely on you and
they're grateful for the things that you've you've learned and
that you're sharing with them. It's that same, you know, that
same feeling or that same sentiment as when someone goes
out and cleans up a local park or, you know, serves out food at
a soup kitchen. We can all understand, you know,
what that feels like because we've probably done it in our
lives. And it's like, oh, I'm doing
something for someone else that feels really good.
And to me, mentorship is very similar to that because you're,
even though to your point, it is certainly a two way St. you are
hopefully a mentor because you want to be able to do something
for someone else and help someone else other than just
yourself. So I think that's a really
important point. And one of the things that I
also thought about here too, is that something that I share with
my team all the time is that when we share knowledge, we're
investing in one another. And so often I hear from
listeners from, you know, people in the industry, even colleagues
in the past who are either afraid of sharing knowledge
because they're afraid that it will create a redundancy for
themselves, or, you know, they're, they're so close to the
to the chest because they don't want someone else knowing how to
do their job because it's like a threatening thing.
But that's so short sighted. And it's really not how we
collaborate best, right? People need to be a part of
understanding how things work. And so to me, sharing knowledge
is a huge, it's a huge window into how someone thinks, whether
it's a leader or an employee. And I encourage everyone really
listening to see just something as simple as like, Hey,
colleague, so and so I want to show you how I do this because
it's better for us all to know how to do these things so we can
support each other. And that's how I lead my team
because if I'm doing something, they should also be know how to
do that same thing. And it's a development, you
know, opportunity for them. And I see you nodding your head.
So I'm curious, I, I'm assuming you agree with that, but I'm
curious, you know, how do you, how do you kind of reflect on
that? Like especially when it's
sharing knowledge, but but also just from a team element, when
you have people who are working side by side, how they interact
in that and not see things as a redundancy, but actually as an
opportunity to build each other up.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And first of all, it's important
to realize that if you don't share knowledge, somebody else
will. Second, that knowledge is not
proprietary to you. It is available.
If somebody wants to learn, they're going to learn it no
matter what. You are better off sharing it
because then you can also learn from them and you can benefit
from it as much as the other person benefiting from you.
So sharing is is something that people need to learn to do more
because fundamentally what I believe is the more you give,
the more you get. Agreed.
I love that.
And and that's why you need to share.
So right give to get and it's, it's interesting because I was
thinking too about your point that the the knowledge is
available and what happens when you actually are the one
sharing. And it leads me to think about
this concept of like innovation. And we talked a little bit when
you and I first connected about AI and things like that.
And of course, AI is probably one of the first things that we
think about when we think of innovation, because it is not
necessarily a new. Technology, but it's something
that now is accessible to all of us in a different way or in many
ways I should say. And yet innovation is not
necessarily just a technology. It's also how we share ideas and
create new ideas. And so when someone is sharing
knowledge, to your point, if there's a mentor mentoring
someone who is in a different generation from them and the the
ability for them to learn from that mentee, let's say there's
there's opportunity for innovation because that mentee
could ask questions that the mentor never asked themselves.
Yeah, yeah. That that's the value of
interaction. That's the value of getting
multiple perspectives. Because if you're going to
surround yourself by the people who think like you and act like
you, neither one of them is going to learn.
Right is so true. You need to be surrounded by
people and you need to have the courage to have that interaction
with people who are different from you because that's how you
learn. And that's where you can test
your own capability and learn from others and what they
already know. And together you can innovate
because the two perspectives might lead to something
different which neither one could have thought through
individual. Absolutely.
That's it's such a great point. It's it really is.
And I think it's really relatable, right?
Because we all as individuals, yeah, we're we're all thinking
that way or acting that way or want you want to be in a
situation where like sharing ideas and having that, that
interaction with people. I mean, it's true.
That is the value. And I have said on my podcast
more times than I can count on both my hands that as much as I
would love to be in a room full of me, you know, and a bunch of
traces, there's no value there because it's just an echo
chamber at that point. And I like to call it diversity
in perspective. And so you can have diversity in
all of these other ways, which is amazing.
And having diversity in perspective and backgrounds and
education, that's really very valuable to the overall, like,
innovative experience that businesses need ultimately go
through all the time. People probably don't even
realize they're innovating. But anytime we brainstorm, like
going back to grade school, right, brainstorming sessions
are basically just exchanges of ideas.
And it sets us up for being innovative thinkers, yeah.
Absolutely. Yeah, bringing it back to the
basics, right? Yeah.
And which is where upskilling comes because when you do the
upskilling part, what you're really doing is 1, you know,
from a business context, you know, when you need a certain
skills for your project, you have two options.
You go out and get somebody who has that experience or you look
at people that you have and upskill them to be able to do
that. When you go out and hire
somebody who has that experience, and sometimes you
will need to do it, one, you are for sure have to pay more than
what you pay somebody you have internally, right?
So you create the imbalance, right?
But on the other hand, if you upskill the existing person,
you're now giving them a pathway to be better, earned more.
And most importantly, here is somebody who already knows your
systems, who knows the ecosystem, who knows the people.
Because getting work done is not just about the knowledge that
you have, but also knowing the ecosystem and the people that
you're going to work with. And that is really what
upskilling helps do for a business, create people who
already know a lot and now need to get that topping on the skill
part and can be most valuable to you because they're productive
on day one. Because somebody coming from the
outside will take certain amount of time to know the systems and
know the people, even though they might have the knowledge to
do stuff right. And that's the power of
upskilling. Amazing.
I love that it's, it really is a wonderful place to be to realize
like where, where the value is and for us as individuals and
business leaders, how we can see that really as again a value
proposition with a very distinct return on investment frankly.
And so it leads me to my final question for you, which is for
the listeners who are really interested in gaining more skill
set, being even more competent, being able to again be elastic.
What is like one recommendation that you would make to them
today to upskill themselves further or at least inspire
within themselves this, you know, thirst for constant
learning so that they can have a deeper sense of competency
within their industry, within their roles?
I think the first thing is to have a personal goal to be
better than what you are today and think of the future where
you have no definitions of what that can look like, right?
Because with the pace at which technology is changing, it is
hard for you to now define a roles or positions that will
exist 510 years from now. And the only way you can stay
relevant in that changing times is you're learning with the
times. So you know, got to learn at the
speed of change for you to stay in the same place that you are,
let alone to run right? Right, that's great advice and
I'm certainly walking away with some added things that I can do.
And frankly, I think personal goals is it's really a great
piece of advice because again, it's not overcomplicating this.
When we think about even just going back to our beginnings of
education, there was always that when we think, at least in my
experience growing up, there was such a focus on, OK, what is
your goal for this year? What is your what, what do you
want to be when you grow up, right.
Like those questions are really asking us to identify personal
goals and and focuses on our achievement.
So I think your advice is really well positioned for us to all
think about how do we upskill ourselves by starting with the
foundations and the the fundamental pieces to this.
Yeah. And and a more fundamental
question to ask is how do you plan to stay relevant in this
changing world? And and the only way to stay
relevant is to learn with the types.
Right, absolutely, absolutely. Well, Tan, thank you so, so much
for your time today and for imparting all of this wisdom on
the listeners. I know.
I certainly appreciate it. I'm sure they will as well.
Where can everyone find you and get connected to learn more?
LinkedIn Tan Morthi at LinkedIn Will Will.
You can find me there. I also want to thank you, Tracy
for doing this and also like the title of your program because
I've always believed that any HR professional needs to realize
that the H in HR stands for human.
And therefore the more people think of people 1st and then the
resource in HR, I think we'll all be better served.
So thank you for doing this. Thank you and Amen to that.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
I really appreciate that. And and I think you are you are
certainly in good company there for sure, because the listeners
I think agree with you. That is why they hopefully
listen well. Tan, thank you so much.
And and it was really a pleasure getting to learn more from you.
And we'll be sure to share your LinkedIn and all of the links in
the show notes as well. All right.
Hey. Just before you go, don't forget
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Thank you so much for tuning in and I'll see you next week.