In this episode of AdvantageClub.ai‘s Inspiring Leaders & Leadership podcast, we speak with Sudeep Ralhan, an HR leader, consultant, and coach who has built people strategies across some of the world’s largest organizations as well as high-growth startups. Hosted by Girish Bindal, Chief Marketing Officer at AdvantageClub.ai, the conversation traces Sudeep’s 22-year journey, from his early days in marketing and teaching to HR leadership roles at Accenture, GSK, Walmart, and Upstox, including the career break that reshaped his perspective on work, leadership, and life.
A Chat with Sudeep Ralhan
Sudeep reflects on why he questions conventional thinking around work-life balance, explains why he believes HR should operate with a marketing mindset, and shares experiences from building recognition programs and leading change across different organizations. The discussion also explores his views on leadership beyond technical expertise and why humility and adaptability continue to matter in today’s rapidly evolving workplace.
Here is the excerpt:
Girish
Welcome to the latest episode of Inspiring Leaders and Leadership. I am Girish, the Chief Marketing Officer for AdvantageClub.ai, and today we have a very special guest. He’s an HR leader, a consultant, and a coach. He’s worked across various industries, some of the biggest brands, and some of the most promising startups. So welcome, Sudeep. Welcome to the show.
Sudeep
Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Girish
Great, so let’s dive in and let’s understand how your journey has been. I want to know a little about your background. What have you done, and how did you get to where you are today?
Sudeep
There’s this famous quote by David Bowie saying, “I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise you it won’t be boring.” I think it sort of encapsulates the way I have lived my life and my career in many ways. So I’ve stuck to a core set of principles. I always listen to my instinct. I believe in making my own decisions and my own mistakes, and that’s fine. So I actually started my career much earlier. I started working along with my graduation, but I did marketing, advertising, and a bit of teaching at that time, which was rather unconventional for people of my generation at that age. Then I decided to do my MBA, specialize in HR, again something that wasn’t that popular at that time, but I really believed that HR as a function had truly arrived, and I believed it was the right thing to do.
And then, as you said, I’ve been fortunate enough to work with fantastic organizations over the last 22 years. I started with Polaris Software, then moved to Accenture for nearly 10 years, doing multiple roles across multiple geographies. I just sort of kept putting my hand up, saying, “What’s next, what do I want to do next, there’s an opportunity, let me know,” and I kept trying, and things kept going brilliantly. But I felt I wanted to get a bit more business experience, and that’s when I switched to FMCG, and I joined GSK Consumer in Delhi. That was excellent. I still remember my first sales visit, my first market visit, and my first factory visit. So it was just like a new world had opened up for me. I spent about five years there, and then made another switch to a different industry, into a retail GDC with Walmart Tech. We were just setting up in India, and we grew significantly and established ourselves as a brand for the next four years. And then again I had the itch to go back into a business space, so I joined Upstox, spent about a year there, which was fun, and then realized I needed to take a break. My body was telling me, my mind was telling me, I really needed to slow down and take a break. So I did that, took a break, spent a couple of months just chilling and looking after myself, and then started a new phase of my career, which is doing a bit of consulting, some coaching, and some mentoring. I thoroughly enjoyed myself on the way.
My principles have always been about prioritizing the journey over the destination, and that’s how I live my life, keeping one foot in today, one foot in tomorrow, as Accenture CEO Bill Green used to say, and then just sort of embracing diversity in my career in whatever I do. So, that’s been my story so far.
Girish
Superb. So I see that you’ve dabbled in the business, you’ve obviously been a thorough HR leader, done sales, that’s super exciting, and getting a 360-degree view of the business definitely helps.
Sudeep
Just to clarify, I didn’t do sales; I was the HR partner for sales. But yes, I always say that I am a business leader who specializes in HR, and that’s how I like to think about myself.
Girish
So early on when you started, and now where you are, what’s the one thing that you feel that somebody would have told you, and you would have spent your career journey on a different trajectory or at a different speed, or if you have to go back in time and tell yourself one thing, what would you tell yourself?
Sudeep
Somewhere in the middle of my career, I was caught up, like many people are, around promotions, and six months, and this and that, and other stuff like that. I was just spending so much energy and thought on things like that. And I wish, even while they were good mentors and counselors around me, I wish I had the maturity to realize that your career and your life are a marathon and not a sprint, and that’s the lesson I think I learned too late in life. I wish I had appreciated that, because then you would conserve your energy and deploy your energy towards more constructive things, and not get obsessed with these little milestones and, honestly, just distractions. So, that’s one piece of advice I would give myself, but I wish someone had given me at that time.
Girish
So, you’re talking about work-life balance, and you also have taken a career break to focus on yourself, and then you’ve sprung back to being a leader and a coach now. The term “work-life balance” is being thrown around a lot these days, but there’s a belief that it’s just a myth. So how do you personally define work-life balance, and how do you ensure that even when you were the HR head, your employees got a good balance? How do you manage that?
Sudeep
Right, the topic has been the subject of a lot of conversation and controversy. I do stand with the group of people who do not like the word “work-life balance.” I do believe, fundamentally, that if you love your job, then you can be working 10, 12, 14 hours a day and you’ll feel good about it, and if you don’t like your job, then you might be working six, eight hours a day and you won’t feel good about it. So I don’t know if “balance” is the right word. I do believe that with remote working, with hybrid working, it’s more about work-life integration, and I do believe it’s about balancing different aspects of life, because I don’t necessarily appreciate the fact that work is something distinct from life. Life will happen, life happens outside work, life is happening all the time, and there are different aspects to life. So, one needs to balance it. I find my own way. I’ve tried to physically draw boundaries in my calendar and make sure that that works. I think being open with people around you makes a lot of difference, and people appreciate that. I’ve been candid with my teams, with my peers, with my bosses, with my stakeholders, about how I prefer to work and what kind of flexibility I need. For example, I’m a texter, I am an emailer, I am not so much of a talking person, and that makes it different, the way you work with people around you, etc., and it makes a difference because the time and bandwidth it takes from you changes depending on what your preferred mode of communication is, and that links to your work-life balance. I think it also makes a very positive impact if you’re transparent with people about what your situation is at home, what kind of commitments you have, and just give people a heads-up about it. I think it’s just sensible to do that.
Thankfully, I have always worked in places where leaders believed that workforces and employees do need to have flexibility, need to find the right balance, and I think creating a culture of trust, honestly, is the right way of going about it. You can put all sorts of mechanisms around it, for example, one of the things is, you put a lunch hour on the calendar, and put “No meetings”; some teams did “No meeting Fridays”; all these are great things, I’m not saying they’re not, but I’m saying these are process-centric ways of managing things. What we truly need is a cultural shift, and that’s where it makes sense to build a culture of trust. It’s the culture of trust that allowed me to take a break after 22 years because I felt comfortable enough to share this with people around me, with family, with friends and colleagues, and take my decision to take a break. So I think that culture of trust is super empowering.
Girish
Super, and I think these are some fantastic ideas. Let’s dive a little deeper into it and maybe broaden it and understand what you’ve practically done in your organization, or any of your previous organizations that you want to talk about, on how you have innovated, let’s say, the employee engagement programs or recognition programs, so that people feel valued and they don’t feel that there is a work-life and there is a home life and we have to balance it. So what do you want to talk about- anything that you’ve done in any of the previous organizations that you feel was a good program and people can learn from that?
Sudeep
One of the things I’m very fond of saying, and I keep repeating it because it’s become a mantra in my career, is that HR has to behave like a marketing function. So you have to think about people as consumers, keep track of trends, and make sure that you’re actually giving people not just what they want, but what they need and creating that. And that’s super important. For example, a few years ago, there was this entire madness around the talent rush, and people who were hiring. Everyone was having five to seven offers, which they were putting up on LinkedIn. There was this entire conversation; I was with Walmart at that time. People were saying, I don’t know which company it was, that was giving BMW bikes. All sorts of stuff was going on; it was imaginative, fun, and mad.
I think the decision we took at that time was to go back to people and ask them what they felt they wanted and needed at that time. We did focus groups, we had conversations, and we actually were very transparent with people about sharing the budget. This is how much the company spends in a year on these various items. Where would you like us to spend it? So one of the great initiatives that came out of that, and that we combined with a couple of other things that we were doing, became like a 360-degree recognition platform that people built themselves because we were a bunch of techies, so we built it ourselves. We built a fabulous 360-degree peer-to-peer recognition platform, which saw fantastic usage and made people, especially because we were working remotely, feel so connected with each other. It did such a great job.
Way back, again in my GSK days, I’m so glad that we were one of the first companies to take the first step on truly talking more deeply about inclusion and diversity, and when Women’s Day came around, we went beyond, giving roses and doing things like that, but really going a bit deeper, creating, having inclusion conversations, celebrating individuals, which really brought it home to people on what that was about. What I’ve realized is that people are searching for a sense of meaning and purpose in their day-to-day work and their lives. One would like to think that people approach jobs in a transactional manner, it’s about money and title, but that’s only the starting point; you’re not going to spend 8, 10, 12 hours a day on something which is just for transactional reasons. I think any engagement program that makes people feel a deeper sense of connection with the ecosystem around them, or with each other, really helps. I personally believe the best way of doing that is to go and talk to people and figure out what they want.
Girish
Super, that’s nice. Do you want to talk about any challenges that you faced on the way? How did you overcome them? This is more from the perspective of the future HR leaders wanting to bring these innovative programs into their organization, but they hit a roadblock many times as they don’t get enough buy-in. Any challenges that you faced, and can our viewers learn from that?
Sudeep
I think change is always difficult. Why? That’s because I believe that one of the critical skills that any HR leader needs to build fairly quickly and fairly deeply is the ability to drive change. For example, proposing a new innovative engagement program is not a change; what is a change is that you actually work with the leadership team, you work with your workforce, you work with your HR team, and get them to come up with the ideas. And they come back to you and say, “What we need is something completely different; what we need is to just drastically change the way we’ve been doing things and now help us find the solution,” so it’s about creating the need and bringing that awareness.
And I’ve burnt my fingers plenty of times; there have been times, not just engagement programs, but performance processes, career pathing, as well. There was a time in one of my organizations when I was proposing a complete redo of the way we manage careers, and I had completely not taken into account that leaders like to take ownership and responsibility for the careers of people under them, on their team. And what I was proposing was people taking accountability for their own careers, which was logically the right thing to do, but the change management wasn’t really done well. So I actually did something smart, finally. I paused it, and I didn’t push it. And what I did over the next few months is link it to the fact that we are changing as an organization, and the people were asking for something different. And when people came back and brought out their needs in a much more articulated manner, the team leader came back to me and said, “We need to rethink the way we manage careers.” So I mean, there are a number of instances like this that I feel I’ve made mistakes and then learned along the way. I think change management is one skill that I feel we all can do a much better job of as HR leaders.
Girish
Superb. I see that you’ve turned around when things weren’t going the way you wanted and just pivoted. That’s a great quality in a leader.
Sudeep
Well, it’s not that great; you just need to do it. You don’t have an option. You have to be smart enough to pivot, you have to be smart enough to know where to pick your battles, and come back and then do it the right way. I think more than what you do, doing it the right way is more important. Most people just keep pushing the agenda without realizing whether it’s right or wrong, and knowing when to stop and when to pivot is a good virtue to have.
Girish
Yes. Just a quick segue from this: what do you think is a common belief about leadership that you disagree with? So people think about leadership, and they have certain perspectives. What is that one thing that you disagree with in a leadership quality?
Sudeep
One is equating leadership with pure technical or functional expertise and competence. It is a mistake that a lot of people tend to make. Leadership is a lot more than that. In fact, leadership is a lot of intangible stuff which, even with the best psychometric assessments, can’t be measured. People tend to view, assess, sometimes even dismiss leaders at a distance just because they don’t meet a certain checklist of skills and experiences. That’s one big notion of leadership that needs to go.
If you look at the greatest organizations and the kind of choices they make in their CEOs, a lot of times people react with regularity, especially with things like, “How’s this person? This person has been brought in for this reason, or this political reason,” etc. And then you realize leaders have a much more significant role than just bringing their functional or technical expertise to the table. They have to influence, they have to lead, they have to work with investors, they have to convince the media, and many other things. They have to carry people along with them. There are hundreds of things that leaders need to do. So viewing leadership through a very narrow prism is one of the biggest mistakes that people tend to make.
The other one is something I witnessed a couple of days ago. People were talking about some leader who was always in meeting after meeting; people don’t realize what leaders actually do. Good leaders, I would say, are paddling beneath the surface constantly. So the meetings and everything are just the front, and there’s actually a lot of pumping the water going on underneath, like the typical iceberg model. And people don’t see it, and they don’t need to see it. They just need to see the big-ticket sort of result, and the needles that the leader moved. You don’t need to see all the frenetic activity that goes on behind the scenes. That’s another notion that I would dispel.
Girish
Absolutely, and I completely agree with that. There are so many things that keep happening, and there are so many wheels turning. At the end, you’ll have to look at the bigger picture, and the leaders are the ones who have to show the bigger picture and look at it. I completely agree. So now that you’re a coach and a consultant to many leaders, what do you think is the most important quality in a leader? And not just an HR leader, but because you’ve been in HR and you must have hired leadership teams all across these organizations, what do you think is the most important quality of a leader?
Sudeep
Humility and agility. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of humility and servant leadership in a world like ours, where things are changing, where new challenges are thrown at you every single day, and where the ecosystem is constantly upending itself. The only way you can get through it is by keeping your head down, truly knowing that you serve something bigger than yourself, the company and its workforce, and then backing it up with the actual ability to constantly reinvent yourself and so on. I’m a huge admirer of leaders who are able to do that, and leaders across every spectrum. Leaders, I don’t mean just business leaders, but leaders across the political spectrum, leaders like the Dalai Lama, for example, artistic leaders. Look at Madonna, look at Taylor Swift, people who are breaking barriers, people who are constantly able to reinvent themselves. It’s absolutely amazing, and I think they’re able to do that because there is a sense of serving, there’s a sense of doing something bigger, there is an acknowledgment of, and a humility about their own awareness, about their own self, and their strength, and their limitations, and what they need to work on. This combination of humility and agility is truly what I believe makes a great leader in any function, any industry, or any spectrum.
Girish
That’s very profound. I completely agree with you. So you spoke about a few people that you’ve admired. Who has made a significant difference in your leadership journey, or on your journey, and any learnings that you have had from them that you want to share with us?
Sudeep
All the people that I mentioned, I just really get inspired by them, and so many different people at different stages. And the biggest inspiration in my life is actually my grandmother. Her ability to evolve and adapt and be very forward-thinking and progressive in her approach is just something I admire deeply. I’ve admired how the women in my life have played a major role. My grandmother, my mother, my sister, my friends, there are people who really reinvented themselves, got into new careers, and did brilliantly at it, and that makes a big difference.
Leaders like the Dalai Lama, and others such as Doug McMillon, the CEO of Walmart, who exemplifies servant leadership in many ways. If you read his articles, watch his videos, and see how he steered the company through such extremely challenging times with such great humility and grace, he’s a huge inspiration. There are books too. There’s a fantasy fiction series called the Mistborn trilogy. It actually is fantastic. It talks about so many things and about leadership and journeys, which I completely get inspired by, especially the characters. So I just seek inspiration from so many different people, and I just feel very fortunate that I’m able to do that and learn from so many different things that I keep coming across every day.
Girish
Okay, so moving on to my next question, and these are the last two questions. I know we are almost inching towards the end line. What do you believe are the key responsibilities for HR leaders in today’s evolving world? You’ve been an HR leader, you’ve seen so many organizations, and you’ve led so many organizations. So, somebody who’s stepping into those shoes now, who’s going to become an HR leader now, what do you think are their key responsibilities, or things that they should keep an eye on and work towards in getting things done?
Sudeep
I’ll speak from the perspective of what you said, about people who are sort of either starting or midway through their career, and they are sort of taking on leadership roles. The first is getting the basics right. I hate to say this, but it’s important to always remember that, everything else aside, your first job is to do a good job. You have to be damn good at your job. That’s number one, so get that right first.
I think the second one is what I mentioned earlier, which is truly building your capability and skills around driving change. That is going to be the single most important job of any HR person in the coming years. As you said, the world is changing so rapidly, new challenges are being thrown at businesses constantly, and leaders, very rightfully so, will look towards their HR partner to help them, advise them, and coach them on the change journey.
So I think how to drive change around you is going to be the second most important skill. But to drive that change, you need to be able to change yourself, and therefore that readiness to change, to let go of all the things that HR people hold dear, badge parity, years of experience, performance processes well documented at exactly the right time. I’m not saying these things are not important; I’m just saying we need to be able to re-look at our holy cows and be ready to sort of shed the baggage and change and evolve along with the businesses. You can’t be constantly advising the business to change and reinvent while you don’t do it yourselves. So, do a fundamentally good job, start with the basics, build your skills in change management, in driving change and managing change, and be ready to reinvent and change yourself.
Girish
My last question is usually around one mantra that you have to share for future HR leaders. I’ve got so many quotable quotes from you already.
Sudeep
I’ve already shared so many; I think I’ve given enough pearls of wisdom, too.
Girish
It’s fantastic, my social media team is going to have so much fun because they’re going to get so many quotes, and some of them I’m also going to use, but still, if you have to sum up this entire conversation and say, “Hey, listen, this is one mantra I want the HR leaders of tomorrow to live by. What would that be?”
Sudeep
Again, I’m going to plagiarize Bill Green, who’s one of the ex-CEOs of Accenture, his “one foot in today, one foot in tomorrow” model. I think that’s a good mantra to always live by, irrespective of function, and irrespective of what part of life you’re looking at, but that’s a very good one.
Girish
Great, thank you so much for this conversation. It was so nice talking to you. I thoroughly enjoyed it, I hope you had a great time too.
Sudeep
I did, thank you so much. Thanks for asking me some fun questions and some tough questions, but I really enjoyed myself, and thanks for giving me this opportunity. I hope you and whoever is watching this found it useful.
Girish
It’s because of leaders like you who open up and share their experiences with our viewers that we are able to progress ahead and learn from each other and grow further.
Sudeep
Next time we talk about authenticity.
Girish
Yes, absolutely, let’s do that. Maybe for season three, we will pick that as a topic. Thank you for your time.
Concluding Thoughts
Sudeep’s career, spanning marketing, FMCG, tech, and HR, is a reminder that the best leaders often take the least conventional paths. His emphasis on treating employees like consumers, building trust before imposing process, and knowing when to pause and pivot offers a grounded playbook for HR leaders navigating constant change. As he puts it, keeping “one foot in today, one foot in tomorrow” isn’t just a mantra for HR. It’s a philosophy for leading through uncertainty with humility and grace. Thank you, Sudeep, for sharing your journey and your wisdom with us.
This podcast with Sudeep Ralhan, HR Leader, Consultant, & Coach, dated 26 September 2023.
