HR Grapevine 2015 Speakers - Ben Debnath, Director - Global Talent Systems, Kantar

Ben Debnath, Director, Global Talent Systems, Kantar, will be speaking at this year’s HR Can Change the World conference. He talks to HR Grapevine about his motivations and inspirations…

What have been the highlights in your career journey that have enabled you to sit where you are today?

One of the critical experiences for me was going from the corporate world to self-employment in a consultancy. Having to sell and deliver at the same time really focuses the mind. It gives you a very different orientation towards what the value of HR is all about. It was a great learning experience about business generally and how HR really needs to get out of its ivory tower. I think starting to work for an organisation for a longer period of time also changed my perspective. In the early part of my career I did shorter spells: three and a half years with Reuters, two years with ICI, two years with Thomson.  Later on I spent ten years with Siemens across a range of different functions within that firm. You start realising how powerful the network is and how you instinctively know how to get things done yourself. You get a deeper insight into the culture of the organisation. I know that sounds strange, as it surely shouldn’t take a decade to understand the culture of an organisation, and it doesn’t. However, I think that for me it was a tipping point compared to the earlier parts of my career when I was doing my job and not really understanding that broader context.

What motivates you and drives you?

Delivery. That’s the thing!  There is an internal drive that I have of wanting to get things done and feeling good when I complete/conclude something. I feel somewhat immodest saying this, but I am really proud of the fact that the Kantar Connect [Global HRIS implementation] project that I completed here at Kantar was delivered on time and 12.7% below budget; - there are not many people that can say that about an HR IT programme. That’s where I get my motivation from and that’s the thing that gets me up in the morning and out of bed.

How do you know when you’ve done a good job, what gives you satisfaction?

I suppose knowing you’ve done a good job is about the acknowledgement that your peers and your colleagues give you about what you’ve delivered, and them turning to you because they are confident that you will know how to get things sorted out and resolved. It’s that type of stuff - the acknowledgement - that I find really satisfying.

Who inspires you?

My previous boss, Helen Russell. She no longer works for Kantar; however, she is absolutely phenomenal and inspirational. I’ve spent the last three and a half years working for her. The thing that stood out for me about her as a leader is that she is a humble and very approachable, down-to-earth individual, who has an insight into the breadth of activities in HR that I’ve not come across before. In addition, she has a great way of engaging and enthusing people - so for that reason she’s probably the best person I’ve ever worked for.

Why does Kantar matter to you?

I feel it is critical that you ultimately feel a passion and an engagement with what the organisation is doing. With Kantar it is no different. Everybody talks about market research and they’ve got this vision of someone standing on a street corner with a clipboard – nowadays it would be an iPad – asking questions of you. That’s only one small aspect of market research. When you think that this organisation also has, in its portfolio, products whereby companies can sit someone in front of a computer with a webcam which is monitoring – using neuroscience – their facial expressions for the duration of an advertisement and they can tell you at exactly what point that particular individual got turned-off or got engaged by the advert and started paying attention. Time-slicing it by one second snapshots and increasing that to cover a larger sample of individuals, starts giving you real, meaningful insights into the effectiveness and power of a particular piece of proposed advertising. This means we can add incredible value to our customers with this type of technology and surely something like that has got to excite anybody. The range and depth of solutions that Kantar can offer its customers, and the value this adds is incomparable to any other organisation in our market. I am really proud to be able to say that this is what we do.

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