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usiness executive Chandra Vaidyanathan believes that providing opportunities for skill development through challenging work assignments are vital for boosting business innovation and competitiveness.

Businesses can attain greatness when they constantly keep their employees highly motivated through learning and career development opportunities, according to Philips Lighting Indonesia senior vice president and country manager Chandra Vaidyanathan.

'€œYou need to hire and retain the best people and ensure that they remain motivated and committed through not only financial incentives but also career growth. This will lead them to give the best not just because they like their jobs, but also because they get constantly stimulated with new challenges,'€ the 46-year-old Indian told The Jakarta Post in a recent interview.

According to him, businesses need to develop their best and brightest team members through various learning opportunities, be it training programs or different work assignments.

'€œYou need to give people assignments that will help them realize their potential, their abilities. You need to keep them engaged. This will raise their commitment to drive the company'€™s innovations and performance,'€ said Vaidyanathan, who has been working with Philips since 2003.

He added that learning opportunities in the form of new work assignments could also help companies groom future leaders, as these experiences could help them to develop strategic thinking skills, which were extremely important for people in managerial positions.

'€œYou need to have a good balance of strategic outlook and detailed execution. At the lower level of your career, however, you learn a great deal about execution because you implement your superiors'€™ strategies. This is why, as you step up your career ladder, you need to learn to make long-term strategies and ensure that the strategies can drive innovations to meet market demands,'€ he said.

According to him, work assignments in which employees have to deal with different situations and challenges are very important as they can broaden a person'€™s strategic thinking and ability, thereby helping him or her to evolve.

'€œWhile taking these assignments, people fundamentally need to be coached. They need to understand why they need to follow a certain strategy in a certain situation. Once they understand that, they can start to simulate and learn and by the time they assume senior positions in the company, they will already be able to understand the implications of their strategies,'€ he said.

Strategic thinking

Aside from a sound strategic thinking ability, Vaidyanathan said that a good leader also needed to possess another trait that was related to the skill, namely a firm decision-making ability, something that he practiced in his day-to-day work.

'€œI don'€™t like to get out of meetings without an action plan. I would like to reach a decision by the end of a meeting before we all leave the room, thereby having an action plan. Issues on the ground need to be addressed quickly,'€ he said.

He added, however, that decision did not always have to end in agreements but could also end in disagreements. Whatever it is, the most important thing is not leaving a particular issue unsolved.

'€œIn order to be able to do this, you need to really understand the situation so that you can analyze it quickly to know to gauge the impacts that your decision might bring about. This is what strategic thinking is about,'€ he said.

'€œWith the abovementioned skills, namely strategic thinking and quick decision making, a company can drive its innovation, something that is extremely important to win the tight competition in the marketplace,'€ he concluded.  (Sebastian Partogi)