Pravin Naik

How did Birmingham Business School shape who you are today?

The most important piece that still sits with me is the people I met. It's a very culturally diverse university; you have peers from different corners of the world. They bring a different way of thinking and looking at things and that's really helped me fit into teams that have different demographics. It helps you work with different people, the way they think, and it also sparks the creativity in you. I think that's something that's really shaped how my career has progressed since I've graduated.

How did the Future Leaders Certificate benefit your career?

There were two key things. One was the group projects, the opportunity to work in different groups. We had a set of people you would work with and then the groups were shuffled sometimes through the program. That really helped turn things around because you sort of get used to one way of working and how one person likes to think, what they are good at and what they are not. Then suddenly, you find yourself on a company project and everybody has a different set of ideas. Being able to get everybody's ideas and and take the best bits from everywhere and putting it together, that sort of critical thinking analytical thinking, was one of the first aspects.

The second was the opportunity to work on the company projects. When we did our company project, they gave us honest feedback. They told us what was good what was not working, what could be done better. They gave us feedback in terms of what we should expect when we move into the corporate environment- what is expected of of you when you have a project or task to solve. 

Priori to the FLC and University of Birmingham, I had no work experience. So these things really shaped me and got me ready for the corporate world. I was able to seamlessly fit in once I joined my first job.

What do you understand a responsible leader to be?

In my opinion, a responsible leader is someone that can bring the best out of everybody on their team. They know what the strengths of each individual are, maybe what the weaknesses are, and they are able to take different pieces of a puzzle and effectively put the puzzle together.

Different leaders might come up with different shapes. It's not that there's just one puzzle that can be solved. Somebody who can take different pieces, put them together, and build something efficient that works and gets a result is a good leader.

How would you define responsible leadership in your line of work?

I'm currently an analyst, and as an analyst there's not a lot of opportunities to demonstrate leadership skills. Recently, I've had the opportunity where we were working on a project where I had to develop new reports and new management information that was required from our stakeholders.

I would say my manager displayed this responsible leadership where she told me, "Pravin, go build this. This is what we need. I'll be here to support you, and I want you to go out and train our colleagues in a different team so that they can take over this process."

While I was doing this, I figured both the colleagues I was training had different skill sets. One was good at something in particular, the other was good at something else. Somehow I was able to understand this from the very start of the training. I figured what their strengths were, what their weaknesses were, and I started curating my training to them in a certain way where they understood what was expected of them, and they took the learnings with them quite well.

Moving on now, I think we are four months in since the training was completed, and I've already gotten fantastic feedback from my managers. They have given their own feedback in terms of how the training went. Their managers have fed back the training to my team, and everything's now pieced together. There are executives from my company who are also really happy with the outputs that's been produced and what they are gaining in terms of information, where they can go out and make those decisions that drive profitability for the business.

How are you creating positive change in your current role?

I would say FLC and my time at the University of Birmingham has really helped me develop an agile mindset. An agile way of working, being able to work on different things with different people at the same time. Working now for a few years, I've never really had a problem with multitasking. I'm able to work and collaborate with different teams at the same time, work on different pieces which might be completely irrelevant and not even related to each other.

Second, I would say creative thinking, and being able to work with different teams and people of different mindsets. Everybody likes to think a certain way, and the experience I've had here now helps me understand how a certain person thinks. If I were to bring solutions to you, I would take some time to myself and think, "What is it that she would expect out of a certain project we are working on? What are the solutions she would like? What would be her thoughts?" I would work around those metrics.

I put in my thoughts, I know what you would expect of me, and bring that creativity in and be able to work with different people. I think that's really important because everybody currently in my team—we are, I believe, the most diverse finance team on the finance floor—and all of us have different ideas. When our manager comes up with a problem, saying, "Okay, this is not working," we are all throwing ten solutions at her. Once we have each communicated our solutions, we sit together, then we start brainstorming. We say, "Okay, this path is making sense. How about we add this aspect of what he or she said?" We always end up coming to a solution that works.