Growth and change are inevitable in modern industry, but transformational leadership can inspire workers to embrace change by fostering a company culture of accountability, ownership, and workplace autonomy.
Transformational leadership is often a key to motivating and promoting individuals, beliefs, or products. It has the potential to make significant changes in the organization through example-based leadership. Gaining a better understanding of this leadership type may help you identify the most appropriate ways to exhibit leadership in your current role.
For any transformational leadership charisma, it is critical to intellectually challenge the people they lead, attentively analyze their unique ideas, motivate them and act as a positive influence. Certainly, Megha Singh Nandiwal comprehends all these fundamentals with a unique skill set.
Megha is a cheerful person and an exemplary HR leader, being Senior People Officer at Vamstar. She goes out of her ways to interact with employees across the organization and build strong relationships with them. During her career, Megha has displayed a knack for making tough decisions while also being sensitive to employees and going the extra mile to bring them on board with such decisions.
In an interview with Insights Success, Megha shared valuable facts highlighting her experiences and her journey at Vamstar.
Megha, please tell us about the saga of Vamstar since its inception.
Vamstar was founded in 2019; Vamstar brings together expertise in commercialization and market access, Artificial Intelligence, as well as software engineering and data science to transform the way healthcare organizations discover and connect with suppliers.
What was your inspiration behind venturing into the business arena?
I am an MBA from Harvard University, Boston. Seeing the healthcare business for a decent time, I was quite fascinated by how this is managed at several ends. In my opinion, healthcare companies struggle daily to find buyers for their products and services.
We have heard this countless times from customers, friends, and colleagues in the industry. The cost and complexities of the manual processes involved in traditional healthcare procurement are far too cumbersome. For many, there is a lack of comprehensive supplier insights.
That’s why we built an AI-driven healthcare and life sciences marketplace, centralizing and shaping data in one format and aggregating all buyer and supplier intelligence. Vamstar makes it easy for life science industry professionals to identify more market opportunities, analyze real-time data insights, and optimize supply-demand connections.
What were the initial challenges you had to surmount to ensure Vamstar’s success rate reached greater heights?
While we set up the business, it was a challenging time with the outbreak of COVID-19. There was a complete lockdown with high needs for healthcare in both B2B and B2C segments worldwide. The topmost challenge was recruiting relevant folks.
As a Senior People Officer at Vamstar, I wanted to appoint employees who believed in the vision. If you look at the traditional hiring practices, you tend to recruit people who can perform their jobs well.
It was not possible virtually. I firmly believe that in order to find like-minded people, you need to meet them and spend quality time with them instead of a zoom video interview. It was deep tricky to match up to working from home, connecting with people in different time zones and making blind choices.
We are lucky to have found the initial set of the first 25 employees who were brilliant and compatible. Together with our efforts, we scaled up the business not just in the United Kingdom but in India, the United States, the Middle East, and Europe. Today we have more than 150 employees in these countries, supporting 65+ clients and over two Trillion healthcare products in less than three years!
What professional values and qualities do you think your clients value most in you and Vamstar?
On the business front, we believe that we are driven by Customers, Community and Compassion. On top of this, we believe that staying true to yourself and your values and having the continued focus on what you want to achieve; will for sure get you success. I think our internal and external customers appreciate the transparent process in carrying out business activities with us. We either believe a job is done or not done; at Vamstar, we always believe in staying tuned in.
As an experienced professional, what would you like to advice the budding aspirants willing to enter the business world?
Human Resource is a challenging profession. Apart from choosing the right talent for the specific job, an HR professional also needs to train and develop new workers, engage them, resolve legal hassles faced by the company and ensure a high level of productivity.
About the Leader
Megha has displayed a knack for making tough decisions while also being sensitive to employees and going the extra mile to bring them on board with such decisions. Megha had a larger vision in mind. She believes getting great people on board is the key to building a great business.
Megha came up with practical and strategic HR plans to improve the employees’ condition during stressful times. She invested her time in engaging with employees, apprising them of the company’s situation, and talking to them about how they all can work together to tide through the challenging phase. This approach led to a remarkable turnaround for Vamstar during the crucial stage of the COVID-19.
