An Interview with Santosh Ghate
by Rupinder Kaur – iCN Journalist (India)

Santosh Ghate
Santosh is a passionate & performance driven CHRO with 21 years of Business experience in fast paced & high growth organizations. He has proven capabilities in setting up & scaling up of businesses across multi-cultural & complex business environments. An astute HR Leader with strong consulting skills coupled with expertise in developing and executing organizational interventions to meet business priorities. In his current role with Gartner, he is the Managing Vice President – HR and serves as a strategically oriented leader for India. He is responsible for designing and developing the people strategy with a focus on engagement, retention, employee experience and building a high-performance culture.
He is a certified Solution Focused Coach, and firmly believes that coaching is a powerful tool to build strong leaders and agile & innovative organisations.
- Do share about your journey – you started with people development, moved to head business unit for Experian and back to people role. What lessons did you learn and how did that benefit you?
I would like to introduce myself as an optimist, traveller, amateur long-distance runner and a cricket enthusiast. I am a Production Engineer and completed my MBA in Human Resources and Marketing.
I am a passionate & performance driven CHRO with 20 years of Business experience in fast paced & high growth organizations. Proven capabilities in setting up & scaling up of businesses across multi-cultural & complex business environments. HR Leader with Strong consulting and coaching skills coupled with expertise in developing and executing organisational interventions to meet business priorities.
5 of those 20 years have been outside of the HR field. In the late nineties, after my engineering, I set up a Computer training institute and this seemed like a good business to indulge in during those times. After a couple of years, I realised that there was no entry barrier to this business and as a result, over 25 institutes had mushroomed around this place. So, I am a failed startup guy from the nineties.
Source: iCN Issue 31 (Life Coaching: Personal & Professional Empowerment); pages 69-72
About Rupinder Kaur
Rupinder is a military veteran, learning evangelist, women leadership coach with a strong emphasis on diversity and inclusion proponent. Her domain expertise is building, aligning, integrating & sustaining leadership development initiatives at scale. She has deep experience in creating a culture via values translating values into behaviours, managing change initiatives, building an environment of diversity & inclusion, designing a roadmap for embedding digital in learning, and instilling a culture of curiosity in the firm.
She is a Doctoral fellow in Organisational Behaviour and Development with IILM, Gurgaon