Up close and personal with the assistant general manager of Amazon: Rajesh Nair
Here are a few excerpts of the conversation:
You have been widely recognized for your success and impact both as a Naval officer and in the corporate sector. What do you think is the key to your success?
Coming from a military background gives me the insights and advantages that other candidates vying for his position may not have. With my biggest achievement as a commanding officer of a warship, it has given me immense experience in managing ambiguous situations. People say that they can work under pressure, but when you’re in charge of a multi-million-dollar ship and responsible for hundreds of lives, that is a totally different kind of pressure which, I guess, makes me a prime candidate to be where I am today.
I joined the Navy as a commissioned officer after my graduation, where I got different leadership opportunities to lead cross functional and multi-cultural teams. The experience and expertise I gained during my time at Navy is invaluable in terms of personal and professional development. During the course of my tenure, I was involved in strategic operations and management planning and execution which led me to doing an MBA to re-tool myself for corporate roles.
After my MBA, I joined Amazon to continue my journey in operations management in the U.S. I love operations management, as it encompasses three main aspects of any business – people, process, and technology.
Throughout your career, you have shown an extraordinary degree of success in everything you do, as well as a flair for learning. Can you please tell us how your personality traits have benefited your career?
I’ve always loved engaging with people and understanding different concerns and barriers they may face so that I may come up with simple solutions which can make their lives easier. Operations management comes easily to me in that sense, since it has direct consumer impacts, a key factor which I enjoy. I have been closely working with different teams at Amazon to ensure that we are giving the best experience for our employees as well as our customers. In my opinion, having clear understanding of the expectations and right tools for doing the job will make everyone successful in their career. Most of the time, these two are overlooked and managers and team leaders will not make it a point to spot check with the employees if they are set up for success and if not, what they can do to help them. Throughout my career, I have worked with my team members very closely to understand their strengths and opportunities to create SMART action plans for them to be successful. One important aspect I always focus on is inclusion, be it providing someone an Induvial Development Plan or having a tough conversation giving performance feedback. Another important aspect for being successful is diving deep and understanding the business very well to make the right decisions at the right point of time.
You are responsible for not only overseeing large customer demands, but also working closely with internal and external stakeholders to identify and implement new best practices for the company. Given these important responsibilities, what are three things you do to ensure that you are always on top of your game?
I think whether you work with large institutions or small ones, you need to build good relationships with not just your own team but also across teams. Managing upwards is equally important to managing downwards. My focus throughout my career was to build good working relationships with not only my team, but the support teams and other stakeholders involved in the process. This helped me to seek the right partnership to solve business as well as customer issues and barriers. I have piloted Automatic Receive Offline System (AROS) and developed the Hyden sub sorter project in conjunction with Amazon engineering teams to improve manual processes and to improve the business to next level.
Communication is vital for any business to succeed. When you are working with big teams, it becomes extremely important to establish clear communication channels. Team meetings and weekly/daily touch points to understand the level setting is really important to ensure that information is disseminated downwards the same way it flows upward. I find it very effective to have 1:1s to ensure that the clear and concise information and expectations is set for every member of the team.
Another important factor that needs to be considered is delegation. Delegation is a way to empower and encourage creativity and innovation out of the team members. Sometimes it will be overwhelming to take everything on your shoulder and you will have not enough time to get to all the details and accomplish the goals. I find it’s a way of developing someone to manage higher responsibility and get to the next level in their career. Delegation is a way to plan for succession and strengthen the organization. The projects and tasks that I manage, I would delegate to my team members with frequent check points for updates and providing feedback/support.
Since this interview is for our start up and business section, can you tell us the one thing small businesses should pay attention to for success in today’s competitive business world?
Analytics plays a key role in today’s business. Analytics can be used in all spheres of the business. Without analytics and data, it will not be feasible to predict the consumer demands, supply requirements, growth opportunities, and new market trends. It is very important for companies and businesses to do the short-term and long-term planning to properly prepare and place in the right markets and customer segments.
