As chief strategy and talent officer at Standard Chartered, Tanuj Kapilashrami is part of the senior leadership team and oversees the bank’s global strategy and transformation agenda. Kapilashrami joined Standard Chartered in 2017 as group head of talent, learning, and culture and was appointed group chief human resources officer in 2019 before moving into her current role in 2024. She is also the coauthor of The Skills-Powered Organization: The Journey to the Next-Generation Enterprise (MIT Press, October 2024).
In an interview with McKinsey Senior Partners Brant Carson and Ishaan Seth, Kapilashrami discusses Standard Chartered’s transformation and the critical role of skills in enabling its agenda. Kapilashrami shares her perspectives on refocusing talent development around skills rather than jobs and encouraging a culture of innovation to develop both the “software” and “hardware” of organizational transformation that delivers sustainable change. She also discusses the potential impact of AI on talent, leadership, and transformation at Standard Chartered.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Brant Carson: How has Standard Chartered evolved since you joined the company?
Tanuj Kapilashrami: When I came in to lead the talent and culture team, my first piece of work was presenting a paper to the board asking, “Why do we exist?” That led us to identify our purpose and valued behaviors, establishing innovation and inclusion as pillars of our culture. The fundamental premise in this work is that our culture establishes the necessary environment for sustained high performance and that human centricity and high performance are not mutually exclusive. In 2024, we very purposefully created the strategy and talent team that ensured complete alignment between our teams to develop, execute, and communicate our strategy.
In the past year, we have sharpened our strategy to become clearer about what we do and what we don’t do. That has helped us make a set of very clear strategic choices about where to invest and what we should move away from. Now I think we’re at an interesting stage to explore the future.
Brant Carson: What are the biggest things Standard Chartered needs to do to accelerate its trajectory?
Tanuj Kapilashrami: We’re continuing to focus on execution while looking at some truths about what’s happening in the global economy, in the international financial system, and in AI and other emerging technologies. We have made good progress in addressing what have historically been seen as disadvantages we’ve had as a business. For example, we don’t have scaled home markets, but we do have a global footprint, and this comes with costs in terms of regulation and risk management. We need to make strategic choices so that our scale and network are recognized as the competitive advantages they are, instead of a constraint. This requires us to address questions such as: “What investments should we make in AI? How do we think about skills for the future? How do we think about strategic investments in digital assets? How do we think about partnerships—whether in the private credit space or on the tech side—to boost our capabilities?”
Brant Carson: What is your approach to embedding continuous and sustainable transformation initiatives?
Tanuj Kapilashrami: The question of what we want to be known for is a recurring one across our strategy, brand, and culture work. We know that our reputation will be driven by what we consistently do and don’t do, rather than by what we say we want to be. There are lots of characteristics that we leverage to transform our bank and deliver our strategy, but to truly drive the high-performance outcomes, we focus on three: client centricity, innovation, and collaboration.
To accelerate client centricity, innovation, and collaboration, three things need to hold true: 1) Our people must know what we are asking them to do; 2) they must have the time, resources, support, and social cues to do what we are asking of them; and 3) these behaviors must be reinforced by the wider organizational environment.
To help drive these, we have set out both the mindset and behavior “software” and the reinforcing process, procedural, systemic and rewarding mechanisms “hardware” that will enable us to sustainably deliver high performance and transformation in service of our strategy.
Focusing on skills versus jobs
Ishaan Seth: Let’s circle back to the point you raised about skills. What does a skills-based transformation look like in the context of a large, complex global bank?
Tanuj Kapilashrami: The underlying premise of our work at Standard Chartered, and of my book, is that the construct of jobs being the “currency” of work is a product of the Second Industrial Revolution. That’s when job descriptions, hierarchies, and reporting lines all came to be. Today, we’re in the period of the post–Fourth Industrial Revolution. So if you start thinking of skills, rather than jobs, as the currency of work, what choices would you make in how work gets done? How do you unlock untapped productivity that already exists in large businesses?
At a basic level, if you ask any large global company how much coding skill they have in their business, they will respond with how many engineers work for the company. There’s an implicit belief that the only people who can code in the company are engineers in the technology department. We know that not to be true—and definitely not in a world with generative AI. Because organizations are structured so much around job descriptions and job hierarchies, this means that the work is not flowing to skills, and skills are not flowing to work.
We started challenging that assumption by trying to imagine what our organization would look like if we flowed skills to work. About five years ago, we did a strategic workforce plan focusing on which skills would not exist in banking in five years and which new skills would be needed. We called them “sunset” and “sunrise” skills.
All companies have asked themselves which jobs will go away and which will stay. We took it to the next level to overlay the jobs with actual skills. We formed a very clear view of which skills would be needed to deliver our strategic aspirations—and we put a dollar value on them. We told our board that, on average, we would save $49,000 per employee who was reskilled and redeployed, compared to hiring that skill set externally. When we multiplied that by the number of roles we forecast would be replaced, it was a staggering number.
We then moved to “build, buy, borrow” conversations around skills as opposed to jobs. Now, if a piece of work needs to be done, instead of asking how many full-time-equivalent roles it needs, we talk about which skills are needed. We identify which skills we need to buy through recruitment, which we can build through training, and which we could borrow through strategic partnerships. We also ask which skills we should “bot.” This was a big shift for us.
Ishaan Seth: How have you put that concept into practice?
Tanuj Kapilashrami: A major initiative—and one of my greatest sources of pride and joy—was launching an internal talent marketplace about four years ago. Anyone in the company can post a “gig” online, clearly articulating the work to be done and the skills needed, and anyone in the company can offer their skills to get that work done.
There can be so much inertia and ineffectiveness in large global companies because corporate planning and investment prioritization processes are long-winded, and they’re all based around jobs. If you can deconstruct those processes into skills, put them into an open platform, and crowdsource the skills, you can create so much velocity to get work done.
As an example, two years ago, our retail banking business in India wanted to become fully accessible to customers who are deaf. The owner of the project put the gig on our talent marketplace, seeking an engineer, a communications expert, a diversity expert, and a product expert. The rest of the work would be done by the local team. They engaged people from New York, London, and Singapore to contribute to the gig, and we became one of the first banks in the country to offer deaf-friendly banking through video chat and in Indian Sign Language. This is a very powerful construct, which we initially used for project-based work but now use to get all kinds of work done. It’s very difficult to do this in a company that’s structured in terms of lines of business, functions, geographies, and different cost centers. Deconstructing work into skills means you need a very different operating model.
Ishaan Seth: The marketplace effort hits multiple themes, including speed, employee purpose, and dynamic resource allocation. How do you think about talent management under this model?
Tanuj Kapilashrami: When we piloted the talent marketplace in India, we put in a guardrail that you couldn’t work on a gig for more than four hours a week. That linked to well-being because we had a young workforce in an emerging market and didn’t want to create a culture where people were doing three jobs in a week.
The number-one reason people join Standard Chartered and stay is because they want to do purposeful, impactful work. The second reason—very close to pay—is that they want to be in an environment where they can develop and grow. We knew there was no guarantee that the talent marketplace would work, but we had 12,500 people sign up for a gig in the first year. And we now see that people who sign up for these gigs are much more likely to pivot their careers into another part of banking that is more aligned with future skills and work. Their retention and engagement rates are much, much higher.
A lot of people think they have skills that can be deployed outside their current area of work. This gives them a safe space to test that out, and if they do well, they can pivot into a completely different line of work. It’s about learning and growth and having career longevity—and not being stuck in a narrow definition of what you’ve been doing.
Accelerating change with AI
Brant Carson: Let’s talk about the impact of AI on skills. Obviously, this space is moving very quickly. How do you see it contributing to change at the bank?
Tanuj Kapilashrami: The transformation of pivoting to skills has been happening for a long time, and now AI is accelerating it. In my book, I talk a lot about the shrinking half-life of technical skills. What’s become very clear is that the way educational institutions and companies have thought about hiring and skill development has been disproportionately focused on technical skills. Today, you need to be data literate and understand technology, but you don’t need to be a deep technologist to be a tech leader—because technical skills are going to become far more commoditized.
If we believe human–AI collaboration is going to be the next big transformational work pattern, what skills are going to be really important? They will be the things that machines can’t do, such as managing ambiguity, dealing with change, and exercising judgment. The focus needs to shift from technical skills to human skills.
It has become very clear that the adoption of AI at scale is not going to be a tech challenge—it’s a skills, leadership, and culture challenge. You obviously have to do the foundational work to establish solid data platforms and focus on strategic areas where you want to invest in AI. But most importantly, you need to do skill building at scale so people can engage with these tools—not just to maximize their productivity, but to engage with clients differently. This is an area companies have not invested in enough and where they are now catching up.
Brant Carson: Tell us more about the hardware and software analogy you’ve developed in terms of building culture in this new environment.
Tanuj Kapilashrami: After working on our culture for years, we developed the strategy for the next stage of our evolution, which focuses on client centricity, innovation, and collaboration. Historically, a lot of culture work has focused on the rhetoric, but not on the hardwiring—such as embedding culture into the flow of work. You can talk about client centricity, but if your colleagues’ day-to-day experience is filled with friction, there is a massive mismatch in the kind of culture you’re trying to build and the experience of your brand from the perspectives of your employees and your customers.
When I think about it in terms of software and hardware, I mean that software is the mindset and behavior. We need clear congruence between what we say, what we do, and how we prioritize. That’s the traditional culture work all of us have seen in our careers—role modeling, clarity from the top, leadership training, et cetera. The hardware is how you rewire your processes and reinforce your procedural mechanisms so you can activate the culture through the flow of work.
I realized during this process that for years, I had focused so much on culture while thinking that the hardware was somebody else’s problem. For me, bringing together the hardware and software has been the biggest shift I’ve made in the last 18 months in this job. We started this work by mapping out the processes of the bank and being very clear on accountability; for very big processes, it took us a while to establish just one person as the global process owner [GPO]. Once we did this, we gave the GPOs the tools and empowerment they needed. Only then could we talk about how to hardwire this culture of client centricity and innovation into the flow of work.
Rethinking leadership in the AI age
Brant Carson: How has this experience changed your perspective—and the bank’s perspective—on leadership?
Tanuj Kapilashrami: My biggest personal leadership reflection is that as you get more senior in a company, the work flows to you—leaders don’t flow to the work. And that’s a problem. If you can set up a mechanism where leaders flow to the work, you make very different choices and bring the culture to life in a very real way for your clients and colleagues.
GPOs are not the most senior leaders from a hierarchical perspective, but they are leaders who flow to the work. For me, the moment when you can redefine the context of leadership not as the hierarchical leader but as the person closest to the work, the conversation will change.
I did a session with our GPOs and said to them, “What if we give you the tools to make the ‘build, buy, borrow’ choices? You own your process end to end. What do you need to drive 5 to 10 percent continuous improvement?” We’re building a lot of infrastructure around that—governance, measurement, performance management, et cetera—but we’re telling our GPOs they can make the choices. Do they need a human solution or an AI or tech solution? Are they going to buy the skills we need to get this done or borrow them? Should we be doing this process completely in-house? Being able to have those conversations at that level is where the culture comes to life in a very real way.
Ishaan Seth: Picking up on your leadership point, where do you think the banking industry needs to head in terms of leaders using AI?
Tanuj Kapilashrami: I fear that leaders think the challenge facing them is the choice between humans versus machines at very junior levels. However, my firm belief is that while some tasks will be automated, humans will not lose jobs to machines. Humans will lose jobs to other humans who use the machines. It’s a significant reframing of the paradigm but one which places the emphasis on leaders understanding how AI will augment, not replace, work.
I also think businesses will have to get quite firm around consequences for leaders who are not leveraging AI tools. That is, perhaps they will not provide investment for the tools unless leaders become accredited users. Companies also need to create an environment in which everyone is using AI in the regular flow of work and leaders are forming their own views on how it augments the business. I recently joined a training with our marketing team on how to leverage AI to generate content—not because I’m generating content myself, but because I want to know what AI-generated content looks like from my own point of view.
One of the first pan-bank generative AI experiments was enhancing our performance management processes two years ago. We did this for two reasons. One was to come up with a safe process that touches everyone and helps people see how they can start augmenting their own capabilities. The other was to flush out some of the ethical dilemmas around using machines in a very visible way in the firm. The day we launched it on our intranet, we had a barrage of comments saying things like, “I’m not sure how I feel about my boss using gen AI,” or “English is not my first language, and I’m nervous about putting commentary in writing, so I love this,” which prompted the kind of debates we needed to have in a very visible way.
It’s important for businesses to select processes where they can safely use AI in the flow of work and have senior leaders ask themselves, “How do I leverage this functionality to make me a better version of myself?” Until then, you’re not going to change the culture and skill sets of the company.
Brant Carson: What do you see as the three biggest priorities for Standard Chartered to fully embrace this transition of leveraging AI at scale?
Tanuj Kapilashrami: First, we need to be very clear about what creating value means in the context of our business and our strategy. Most people think value creation is only about cost reduction. But I think we have a value creation opportunity in taking away some of the traditional constraints we’ve faced in our business. For example, some of the best use cases are in risk regulation.
The second thing, which is incredibly important, is to think about business models that will get completely disrupted. Wealth management is a key one. There are certain businesses in banking where human dependence is very high. If you look at the traditional wealth management business, it all comes down to the number of relationship managers [RMs] and the volume of clients they have. But we now need to focus more on how these RMs leverage AI to deliver a better experience and outcomes for their clients, considering what kind of investments we need to start making now, not just in technology but also in humans and the different advisory skills they will need.
The third priority is one I feel very passionate about. The gap between how we are experiencing technology as consumers and the way we are experiencing technology at work is wider than ever. If we don’t bridge that gap, we’re going to become very unattractive to the talent we want to bring in. If we don’t think about incorporating some of these tools in the flow of work to augment productivity and individual creativity, we’re going to lose the war for talent because people now want greater convergence in the way they’re dealing with these technologies.
