Irina Butnaru, Wipro: “We are now working to create future job paths”

“Leaders need to listen to people’s needs, be there for them, understand that they have fears sometimes. It’s related to also being authentic as a leader because we also have hard times to actually manage the change. If we are transparent and open to get everyone involved, this works for me: being authentic and making sure we are inclusive,” Irina Butnaru, Romania Country Lead & General Manager, Wipro said during People Empowering Business Forum 2023 organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest.

“There are leaders who are there with a function and they are formally placed there. Then we have informal leaders. Being an informal leader is coming naturally, and people follow those informal leaders. If you look at them, they are authentic and transparent. They are like big brothers sometimes or they are people who don’t lead formally but they lead with a purpose, and they give meaning to everything they do.

Being a purpose-driven company, we have this advantage of being able to invest in education. We also have the advantage of people understanding that we need to be profitable to support investments in education.

But at the end of the day, people work to get their salaries, they have their own interests and when that personal interest on an employee is aligned to the interests of the company is an ideal scenario.

I always ask myself what I can do every day to help my team succeed, to help my team achieve those KPIs together. The HR KPIs are basically driven by the business KPIs. The fact that HR is investing in developing resources is helping businesses. We are now working to create future job paths. There are new needs that we see on the market. There are new roles that we didn’t even think of in the past couple of years. So, we need to prepare our workforce to be able to deliver those services of tomorrow. It’s my job as well to invest in developing resources and make sure that I have people with whom I can deliver those services. In my opinion, there is no difference between my KPIs and HR KPIs or talent development KPIs.”

Full recording of the conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y4LQs5x6Ng&t=3385s