It was Baptism time, this thought lingers from those day, the decision to be made was a tough, one of whether to continue on with wood working, make designer stuff or to be an HR professional. After all, I didn’t know but knew and had seen work of people reflected in my wood working. Seeing work is nothing special, but to accurately analyze it and make career decisions for people was critical. To be an HR professional means to be honest to your salt, ethical and morally upright, and this led me to the conclusion, that I must see some more of the state of HR in the country. The first touch with Price Waterhouse Cooper didn’t go as planned but it still gave me hope that they would ask me to evaluate people they wanted to hire. At the end of my interactions with PwC it was clear I had to make a lot of presentations, I had to be mentally prepared to do a lot of convincing and there had to be documentation to substantiate my claim that to see work of a candidate, one would have to converge skills to wood working.
As most things it came to me later in 2024, that I was making the wrong choice, I had to evaluate Personality, Technical skills and Interpersonal skills. But that’s for later, in this section of the post, I want you to see the light of how decision making techniques impact our live. I was left ruing the fact that I was much better off being a wood worker than an HR professional, notice, I say professional and not specialist or generalist, I just didn’t have a degree or a peer group in HR. The decision to be arrived at was based on the following criterion:
There was no Money in wood working and no Personal development, Character building was a strong point for wood but I wasn’t going to leave wood working, I was just going to evolve it into HR. Yet, my heart was going for wood working. There is an old story from the mythical background of the Indians in North America, and I will go right ahead and tell you about it.
I have a Story to tell
The Eagle was old, at least the one I was looking at, as old as me, and it’s eyesight grew weaker, so as it flew in the sky, from high above it scanned for food, rats or mice etcetera. Though it couldn’t see well, it still had a broad vision, and suddenly it saw something move, swooped down to the Earth to pick it up, turned out it was a human being with some food in their hands. The old Eagle snapped the food item from the human beings hands and flew off with it.
The old Eagle led me to the path that I am on today, see, a broad vision when you are older and a narrow, sharp vision when you are younger, it told me that since I was older, I should keep my idea open to other ideas, as I didn’t see the target as well as somebody younger. In effect, a broad vision would help me survive the crisis of nothingness. HR was evidently the broad vision.
Joyant Nayak was a refined man, but it hadn’t always been so, I had known him since grad college where he had been a simpleton with no pretensions about himself, except that he was “holier than thou.” Time passes and we become who we want to be or sometimes we fit into the role that society wants us as. It was 20 years to graduation, a shade more, I hadn’t always been this hazy about timelines, but these memories are tough to go to even now.
The Man of the moment
Joyant didn’t ask a thing, he heard me out, my rambling about using wood for recruitment and placement and asked me to come over to his office. I dressed up real nice for the meeting, not the tie though, maybe that’s why I realized, that he was showing off his progress in life, he was a director with PwC. “Did you know that I never had a doubt, I would succeed?” what was I to say, “Never one in my mind,” I said, as we sat down to discuss. I had found parking with great difficulty and had told the parking attendant I would be gone in an hour. “Send me some resumes,” and I was gone.
Life is always harsh and I didn’t see the laughter on their faces, fortunately I hadn’t taken photographs for Facebook. This was my legitimate signal to ask for CVs and I did. I evaluated four of them but couldn’t send the evaluation report because “It was just a game,” they had already been hired.
It was a huge step up, I had seen work and could differentiate between good and bad work, and that was enough to set me up for my next step, which was to evaluate the IPL (Indian Premier League) teams and players. I was on the job working 9am-9pm everyday, from the Shane Watsons to the Rohit Sharmas, I did everything to perfection with wood. Honest to my salt and my morals and ethics held in the most high esteem, within myself I felt this respect for myself grow. Two years in a row I worked for Mumbai Indians and they won two trophies in a row, “Don’t expect me to understand this,” said Rohit Sharma, but I knew sooner than later my time would come. I built Rocking chairs, Tables, stools, coffee tables all to evaluate the skills of players, I didn’t have the resources to understand, like I do today, to evaluate for team play but I was happy with my work. It was perhaps payback for the Ozymyth days, the Aussies were back in the straddle in India, their bug bear.
“They are good players love,” I told her yesterday, and she said, “But not great sportsmen, I much prefer Ben Stokes.” I understand where that comes from, but this is way offline and let me get back to where I was. I started making presentation in 2020 and it began to click in my head, documenting ideas was good for me and then for 3 months in a row I must have made a 100 presentations, it was Covid time and they were zoom presentation. I have stage fear, you know, “I just nod, when they ask me something I can’t immediately answer.” Life seemed to be getting somewhere, and they say, self assessment is the biggest challenge for an HR person, I was looking good in my new avatar. The Role model was in my persona and I could seemingly crack anything. The desire was not lacking, maybe it was a Skill issue that is being addressed today, we always look good, coming from behind, “but can you lead Mister?”