A Managing Director mandated with driving transformation, through organization culture, performance mindset and people development.

A global engineering MNC, and an undisputed leader in its category, was looking to on-board a seasoned professional as the Managing Director for its Indian operations, to lead the implementation of India strategy.

Details about position

Client: SKF India

Mandate Position: Managing Director

Background

SKF India provides industry leading automotive and industrial engineered solutions through its five technology-centric platforms: bearings and units, seals, mechatronics, lubrication solutions and services – with 6 manufacturing facilities, 11 sales offices, and 2500+ employees

The global leadership were looking for a dynamic leader who would design and execute the strategic roadmap for India, emerging as a strategic and preferred manufacturing hub along with supporting world class, research-based innovation and technical development.

Challenges

• Drive relationships and high-level customer engagements and provide them with customized solutions
• Provide leadership support to the all BU’s
• Lead the ‘Make in India’ initiative thus providing the necessary impetus for the growth trajectory
• Drive change and transformation agenda for culture, people and organization development
• Being a listed entity, protect the interest of the stakeholders in the long run, by building and managing a sustainable business in alignment with the company’s global vision
• Represent India at SKF global level to attract projects, capacity expansion, technology transfer, investment amongst others.

Our approach

• Role definition and strategy creation: Keeping the client’s objective in mind, along with the challenges of the unique nature of the role, a team led by Suresh Raina narrowed the search field to include senior professionals from the engineering, industrial, technology and automotive sectors, while drawing the broad geographic coverage of Asia, Middle East and Europe for the sourcing strategy. We made sure that every potential candidate had prior experience and exposure to an MNC culture, along with demonstrated experience of driving change and business transformation in a large and complex business.
• Leveraging our network: With the role requirements clearly defined, we tapped into our wide networks, while scouring the entire market for potential candidates. With the partner leading every step of the execution we shortlisted candidates, across companies/functions, were presented to the client, along with relevant and timely business insights on leadership and functional assessment, personality profiling, motivations and more.

It was a difficult search, and we were able to close it successfully-Because of a deep understanding of the role, broad research coverage, very detailed and deep leadership assessment of the potential candidate pool and leveraging our relationships and network, both domestic and global, for sourcing the ideal profiles.

We placed Manish Bhatnagar, a successful, high performance, dynamic leader and change agent, who brought with him experience of having worked with pedigreed companies including Hindustan Unilever, GE, UL and Danaher Corp, in both Indian and global roles.