InSight Special Lecture (20)“Mapping Abilities versus Aspirations — Myths and Realities" by Dr. Sanjeev Sukumaran
Dr. Sanjeev Sukumaran, CEO, ForceFulcrum Solutions Pvt. Ltd., Bangalore, delivered an inspiring extempore speech at the MYRA School of Business, Mysore, on Saturday, August 1, 2015. Dr. Sukumaran comes with a basic degree in Mechanical Engineering combined with Postgraduate degrees in Marine Engineering, Management and Applied Psychology. He has topped it up with a PhD in Human Resource from London School of Business. A highly result-oriented professional, his approach is always from the customer’s perspective; he invests time in his people, truly inspires them and challenges them to be the best they can be. He is a consummate professional and like anyone at the top of their game, executes brilliantly; he has mentored several people in various organizations across the globe and guided them to achieve their career goals.
An exceptionally dynamic personality, he took the students through the essentials and nuances of understanding their individual abilities and aspirations and the importance of fine tuning them to fit well in their preferred career options. Define your goals and your passion, else you will be force-fitted in to a responsibility in an organization that mismatches your profile, he emphasized. He explained how employees are categorized as ‘high potential employees’ as per the Leadership model of employee potential and the three factors in the model — Ability, Aspiration and Engagement of an employee. While ‘ability’ is much more profound and a quality ‘to be able to do something’ and is drawn out of one’s knowledge, technical and interpersonal skills; ‘aspiration’ is ‘the extent to which employees desire or wish to achieve prestige, recognition, advancement, influence, and financial rewards; and ‘engagement’ is the extent to which the employees believe that staying with the organization is in their self-interest and therefore they would be willing to go above and beyond the call of duty; engage in multiple work areas; and make their presence felt throughout the organization. The ‘High Potential Employees’ are those with a good mix of all these qualities and therefore are best suited to rise and succeed in more senior and critical positions, he explained.He educated the students about the subtle difference between motivation and inspiration. While ‘motivation’ is the level at which you are able to find "a reason to perform" and is an intrinsic quality that enables you to perform to the best of your abilities and succeed accordingly, it is what ‘pushes’ you; inspiration is more of a process — a person, a book or an event can inspire you and connect within you to bring about a purposeful change; it is what ‘pulls’ you, he said.
He said academic institutions like MYRA act as enablers or facilitators to help you identify and drive an inner passion in you to fine tune your inherent abilities; achieve what you want and engage in a passionate way with the organization of your choice. So as a first step, it is every student’s responsibility to come up with an individual development plan; put in writing their abilities on one side and their aspirations on the other side. A work plan to fine tune your abilities and map them with your aspirations will then be possible and will guide you to your dream career path, he advised.
Dr. Sanjeev Sukumaran is associated with “Sherpify” — an organization with a name inspired by Sherpas who lead mountaineers to their summits. The organization guides students all through their college life and guides them to their coveted first job and internships via a network of HR professionals, recruitment professionals, career guidance and general management professionals working globally in some of the largest and most successful organizations. It provides a common platform to leverage the best principles of Big Data technology to deliver the right information and expertise to all the stakeholders. Students, educational institutions and organizations can register. Students get access to information about companies, attend webinars, networking events, network with industry experts, recruiters, and alumni; Educational Institutions can associate with a partner to help their students find jobs and internship programs, use the industry input to design and customize their courses as per trends in job markets, and build a more motivated and engaged student body while networking with other institutes; Organizations benefit through this common portal to select their best future employees, understand the thinking of millions of students as they plan their entry in to the job market, provide inputs to educational institutes to tailor industry-specific courses. All in all, Sherpify promises a win-win situation for all its stakeholders.
The talk was well attended and well-received by the entire student community. Students proactively interacted with the speaker and look forward to meeting with him and his organization in the near future.