What started as a journey in marketing ended in the destination of HR for Rohit Dhody, a seasoned HR professional who recently completed 22 years in the profession. Recalling his journey, he says that it was nothing short of exciting. Rohit was keen to enter the marketing field and had joined an HR consulting firm to be its go-to person for marketing. However, fate had other plans. A recruitment service request at this company made him realize that his heart belonged to HR. He took a leap and never turned back ever since.

Rohit started his career early, experimenting with different areas to find out what he liked most. When asked about his career, he pauses for a moment and then replies, “I think I can divide my career in three phases.” Marking his first phase was his stint at HSBC where he polished his skills on how to attract top talent in the most successful manner. At Accenture, he learned how to navigate a reeling market and helped organizations withstand storms. The third coincided with the dotcom burst, 2008-09’s market crash and other recessions. This phase taught him invaluable lessons about how an HR professional can be a reliable people-partner and add value.

The greatest changing point of his career came with his tenure at Syniverse. After 12+ years of working exclusively for MNCs, Rohit decided to join a mid-size company. This turned out to be his longest stint at any company. Apart from learning every minute detail of Mergers and Acquisitions, Culture-building, Employee Experience, and Digital Experience, he understood what it means to be a ‘big fish in a small pond.’’

Taking up a strategic and senior role in a comparatively smaller company meant he got to work directly with the CEO and board of directors. In terms of collaboration, this was a major shift from his earlier work, one that helped him learn faster.

Having witnessed four economic recessions in his career, Rohit has seen things changing rapidly. With this change comes a shift in businesses’ requirements. He used all of these experiences to build a repository of lessons that he is always generous to share. Some of the most important points he shared were:

• Always keep learning on-the-go
• Don’t say ‘This can’t be done’. Ask- “What do we need to do to make this happen?”

Achievement is not in terms of trophies. Achievement for Rohit is when he goes to a college and a student writes to him asking “Will you be my mentor?”

Challenges are always people-related, Rohit says. This is why he terms the cultural unification effort at Syniverse after the merger as one of his hardest battles, but one that also had the largest scope for growth. Growing through M&As has different cultures coming in, underlining the challenge of cultural integration. Adopting a behavioral competency model, deploying it correctly and bringing every employee to one unified culture was not easy. But Rohit made it happen. With people coming together from different companies and varying cultures, the biggest task was changing people’s mindset to foster one common culture.

Rohit spearheaded his people strategies with the mindset that Mondays should be aspirational and considered as the first day of the week of achievement. If employees fear going to the office on Mondays, then the company’s culture sucks.

Rohit considers HR to be an opportunity to partner with the business, draw people agenda and people priorities in a manner that makes the people, the business and the environment successful. In simpler terms, Rohit calls HR a catalyst in the success journey of the business, its people and their environment.