Madan Nagaldinne spent nearly nine years in senior HR leadership roles before his tenure as director and head of HR for Amazon's India and Singapore operations. At Amazon, he led the firm's Asia expansion and oversaw people growth of its engineering, operations, customer success, supply chain, and finance teams across multiple countries. Before becoming chief people officer of ContextMedia, Nagaldinne served as HR leader for Facebook's global sales teams and was the HR lead for its New York office.

How do you see your current position differently than previous head HR roles?

At ContextMedia, I have an incredible opportunity to author creating a fulfilling, world-class workplace. People, talent, and culture are critical to the organization. And with ownership over these areas, I wake up every day thinking about how to get all the leaders and employees to make great people decisions around how we hire, onboard, learn, reward, recognize, lead, and grow. At both my previous roles, at Facebook and Amazon, though I started early, the level of ownership and responsibility was different.

What do you love most about your work?

In the past 10 years, the world had rapidly moved to a people-centric approach to work where an increasing number of companies understand that talent is their biggest differentiator. I am lucky to be in this role at a time of so much positive change in how organizations are viewing their talent globally. We are seeing a huge shift from capital-intensive, financially well-engineered organizations to mobile-centric, digitally foundational and talent-first workplaces.

How has the industry changed since you started working?

The industry shift we are seeing is seismic. In the past few years, there is a growing expectation from HR leaders to help organizations get maximum output from their talent. We are seeing less of HR fighting for a seat at the table, as talent is the critical currency at many organizations today.

What advice would you give to young professionals starting in the field?

Don't go into the field of HR just because you love working with people; it's the wrong analogy. HR is about helping organizations achieve their business objectives through talent and helping people grow to their fullest potential. If you apply a business lens to talent, you need to develop expertise in how you allocate your capital—and in this case, it is talent.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love working with people and helping them grow and develop into better leaders and better professionals. However, the primary reason I chose HR is because I am passionate about achieving results through talent.

How should someone stay current on what's going on in the industry?

You have to employ a series of strategies, from reading to networking to studying great companies and analyzing what makes them great. You also will need to keep up with why companies are failing. This is possible if you are humble about the knowledge you seek from others.