HRNZ Member Profiles: Kavita Khanna

Kavita Khanna is currently Director of People and Capability at Tonkin + Taylor. In addition, she is a Board member for HRNZ. Human Resources magazine caught up with her to gain an insight into her world.

1. What do you do in your current role to help your organisation be successful?

The way I look at my role is that it’s all about getting the organisation to think about how to create a workplace that gets the best out of its people. Then I try to work out where it will choose to invest in terms of people resources, time or money to get the best possible outcomes for both the individual and the business. Ultimately, my role is to help the business become successful and help the people in the business have successful careers. A significant part is helping to mature the conversations about people and culture and managing the outcome the organisation wants. I do this by joining the dots where required, holding up a mirror and asking the awkward questions. I get involved in a lot of ‘what ifs’ and ‘why do we do it this way’ conversations and, luckily, I work in a people-focused business, so everyone wants to engage in this way of thinking.

2. What attracted you to pursue a career in HR?

I did a Master’s degree in literature. Career-wise, however, the usual options of academia or journalism were not really my thing. I did not find them real enough. So I went for a management degree, and it is there that I found my niche. I’m curious about and fascinated by what makes people tick, how they respond to their environment. Organisations are an interplay of people, purpose and passion, and what happens when collective energies are harnessed for a good outcome. A career in HR allows me to play in this space.

3. What motivated you to apply for the role of HRNZ Board member?

I want to give back to the profession. It’s a highly rewarding profession, and I want good people to take up a career in HR. HRNZ has a significant role in shaping the profession, and I thought I could contribute by being on the Board. I had previously looked after the mentoring programme in Auckland and undertaken various initiatives within the Institute. So when I started exploring a governance career and the opportunity came along, I put my hand up for the role.

4. What has been a highlight in your career to date?

Over the past year and a bit, I have introduced a new performance framework that will help shift the way we enable good performance in the business. It is a cultureled approach, designed for an introverted organisation to have good quality feedback conversations in a non-judgemental way. People avoid feedback and performance conversations because they tend to be cringe-worthily artificial and no fun for anyone involved. The performance framework is our attempt to make these conversations more ‘human’ and meaningful.

5. What do you most value about

HRNZ membership? I like the connections and networks that we can generate. I really like the discussions that we are generating about the future of the profession and, more recently, some of the thought leadership that is emerging through the course offerings, the conferences and the discussions we have at the Board meetings. I am encouraged by the strategy of HRNZ and how we are positioning the profession for the future. The strategy development work has, for example, identified that we have to take a position as a profession around how organisations respond to climate change and how we, as HR professionals, can be literate on that. I am excited by the possibilities this kind of thinking creates for our profession.

6. What’s something that not many people know about you?

Call me soft-hearted, but I like to try to revive dead plants. When I go to the garden centre and see plants that need TLC or are nearly dead, I sometimes feel sorry for them, and I take them home and try to revive them!

7. If you could have dinner with three people living or dead, who would they be and why?

I enjoyed coming up with the answer to this question. The trouble was to reduce the list to only three. I don’t want just to ask them questions at this imaginary dinner. I also imagine the conversations that would emerge as they exchanged ideas from the various times they represent. I would have JK Rowling and Charles Dickens on the list. They both broke new ground in their time. Charles Dickens was a pioneer in creating a plethora of characters – all developed and delivered in instalments – a precursor to the modern ‘soap opera’. And JK Rowling famously revived interest in reading books for whole generations. My third guest would be Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of Black Swan and Antifragile. I call him the modernday philosopher who is considered one of the most influential thinkers of our times. What fascinating conversations would that combination generate!!

8. What’s your happy place?

For me, it is anywhere I can suspend thinking and get perspective. Any beach that offers solitude, where I can listen to the waves and get a sense of how infinite the world around me is and how ridiculous my own problems are in that vastness.