THE EVOLUTION OF LEADERSHIP | Culture Crunch - Harsha Jalihal

Welcome to Culture Crunch.

We’re here to showcase leaders within People and Culture and explore how the fastest growing tech companies are amplifying performances through increased employee engagement. By highlighting and celebrating the executives driving the evolution within the highest growth software companies in the world, we aim to uncover:

- Why engagement is critical

- The importance of diversity, equality, and inclusion

- How to achieve true scale by attracting a diverse workforce of A Players

Today we are joined by Harsha Jalihal, Chief people officer of MongoDB, to discuss her thoughts on what it takes to create a good company culture in a digital world and find out why we need to focus on the human element in this age of technology to increase productivity, reduce attrition and create better business outcomes.

“Every business problem in any company boils down to human behaviours. It's why so many CEOs and C level execs talk about how much time they spend dealing with people issues. Especially here at a MongoDB, we've got all the other raw material - we've got a great product, we've got a great business model, we've got all the things we need to run a successful business - when problems arise, it always boils down to human behaviour and that understanding of human behaviour is what we bring to the table. My goal is to get managers to learn how to do that well so they can then make decisions more independently and not rely on HR to tell them what to do.”

Sharing key leadership lessons with us in this interview, Harsha explains the ongoing cultural challenges being faced by organisations in the tech space due to the repercussions of the Covid-19 pandemic. She describes how the melding of people's personal and professional lives has resulted in the development of a new leadership paradigm and emphasizes that the skills required for a future in tech are actually human skills: e.g. communication, empathy and cognitive thinking. As technology continues to change at an accelerated pace, Harsha believes that the key to good company culture is educating leaders and managers to understand human behaviour and set the tone from the top down. Outlining how high growth environments can have both positive and negative impacts on company culture, Harsha offers advice to forward thinking leaders on how to embrace change whilst preserving core company values.

“A lot of leaders, particularly in companies they have built or seen grow from ground up, tend to want to protect the culture, sometimes at all costs, and that's not necessarily a good thing. For me, it’s not about protecting it, it's about keeping the conversation about culture front and centre in your business strategy conversations.” With a variety of tools and techniques to help you transform your workplace culture, listen to discover Harsha’s future-proofed solutions to increasing revenue and productivity by bringing culture and core values to the centre of your business conversations.