As we navigate the rapidly evolving world of work, authentic and transparent leadership has never been more important to the staffing industry, says Rishabh Mehrotra, CEO of Avionté and sponsor of the 2022 40 Under 40 list. He believes that great leaders can drive greater collaboration and empowerment of people to a point where every person in the team “has the opportunity to be a leader.”

Committed to helping shape and support up-and-coming staffing professionals, Mehrotra discusses leadership principles, common mistakes and how trailblazers must think beyond themselves to lead their teams and companies to greater heights.

Rishabh Mehrotra

 CEO of Avionté

What do you see as the two biggest challenges that CEOs of staffing firms and other workforce solutions providers face today?

We are operating in an environment of heightened uncertainty. Whether it’s the economy, work trends or the regulatory environment, staffing CEOs are being forced to make hard business decisions with limited guidance and contradictory information. Staffing has always dealt with uncertainty. What’s different is the sheer rapidity of change and the potential consequences for misreading the market. Speed and agility are crucial.  

At the same time, we are seeing a fundamental shift in labor markets. In the past, talent lined up to work for employers. Today, employers will line up for the staffing agency that has available talent. In effect, talent is behaving more like consumers. The staffing agency that earns the loyalty of reliable, qualified talent has a huge advantage. The consumerization of talent will force the industry to rethink every aspect of the staffing agency from the ground up: strategy, technology, operations and even compensation practices and work culture.  

Staffing CEOs are in the difficult position of figuring out how to respond to volatile markets on a daily basis while simultaneously figuring out how to reinvent their agencies to compete in the rapidly changing world of work. You can’t postpone strategic decisions, but you can’t drop the ball on execution either.  

What does great leadership in today’s economy look like?

In today’s volatile economy, staffing companies need to be agile and adaptable. For that reason, situational leadership skills are particularly important. As a leader, you need to be present and keenly aware of the situation at hand with the ability to adapt your strategy quickly to a changing market. Effective situational leaders are closely attuned to the rhythms and trends of the business, with the ability to read situations well. You need to put aside your ego to objectively review the facts in front of you and then act. You shouldn’t be afraid to say, “Hey, the situation has changed and what we’re doing is no longer right, so let’s move in this direction.” When circumstances change, you must be authentic and unafraid to call out the reasons and communicate to people and to bring them along the journey with you. That's very important in today’s volatile environment.     

You often use the term “authentic leadership.” What do you mean by that phrase?

For me, an important part of authentic leadership is just calling out things the way they are. You can’t be excellent without a commitment to the truth. As leaders, I think it’s extremely important to focus on the truth of the situation — to look at something and say, “This is what it is.” I sometimes compare authentic leadership to reading a GPS. You pick a starting point A and plot a path to point B. In theory it’s simple, but when it comes to business, people are often defensive, prone to wishful thinking or let their ego get in the way, and they pretend to be somewhere they aren’t.

When you put in the wrong coordinates, you always get lost. The only way out of this trap is to take ego and judgment out of the equation. “It’s just a GPS. These are my coordinates today. And good or bad, they’re just coordinates, and now I want to go there.” If you try to fool yourself on where you stand today, you’ll never get to where you want to go. And so, I think authentic leadership is about not being afraid to call out your coordinates of where you stand.

Do you have any real-world examples of authentic leadership that you can share?

When I first joined Avionté, I learned about a new technology platform that had been underway for some time prior to my arrival. Everyone in the company assumed the new platform was critical to our clients and our future, and no one openly questioned it.

But after looking carefully at the project and soliciting detailed client feedback, it quickly became clear to me that the project was not going to work. This wasn’t the outcome I had hoped for. A lot of expense and sweat equity had already been sunk into the project.

However, authentic leadership is not hiding behind a situation or an excuse but facing issues head on and then bringing people along. So, we cancelled the project, communicated the rationale to our teams, identified portions of the project we could salvage and reallocated our resources. Along the way, something funny happened. Team morale wasn’t hurt by the cancellation. On the contrary, people felt empowered to speak. All the core team members from the cancelled project stayed with Avionté to lead other work, and we experienced a surge in productivity across other initiatives.   

In a remote-work world, what aspects of leadership have changed? What stays the same?

Good leadership looks the same whether you have a company-located or a remote workforce. You need to engage and connect with people and bring them along for the journey. Our emphasis on communications and managing towards objective are the same, even if the tools and media are different.

Remote work provides us with new opportunities to be creative and enhance workforce performance due to the nature of flexible schedules and locations. For example, it’s often easier to cut across department silos because people are not sitting in assigned seats within their own functional departments. You can be anywhere and use Zoom to collaborate with co-workers from any other department. So, as a leader, you can drive greater collaboration and empowerment of people to do things asynchronously. Conversely, in-person meetings become a great way to build connections and camaraderie, particularly for cross-functional teams.  

Remote work does create challenges. It’s harder for leaders to keep a pulse on the organization when everyone is remote. It’s much harder to read emotions from a Zoom phone call versus when you’re sitting in-person. You need to make adjustments so that you understand where people are at.

How do you apply your philosophy of leadership at Avionté? What kind of work environment and culture are you trying to establish?

Our culture is simple: Everyone’s a player and everyone is on the field. Nobody sits on the sidelines. You are on the field or you’re not in the stadium. That means every Avionté associate has an opportunity to be a leader and make a difference regardless of position. Our front-line staff work directly with customers, so we have worked hard to instill this credo. At our annual CONNECT conference, we had over 100 people from our company hosting clients, managing events and delivering presentations, and that was just one example.  

Ultimately, I want to empower people to make an impact and grow as a result. My goal is to create an environment where people can be authentic and transparent. No one is trying to hide behind looking good. We are communicating and trying to be real. When an organization values honesty, differences of opinion matter less than collectively working to solve problems, gain insights and build consensus. Performance comes from staying focused on what matters most.  

The other thing to know is that as a company, we have a strong family orientation, and we value treating the team with empathy. If you can put both of those together, you have a good work environment.

And finally, we have created a lot of flexibility within this work environment. We have not mandated that people be physically present at the office. Part of the strategy is simply meeting people where they are. People are committed, working hard, but we want to give them the flexibility around how they can live their lives and work. And so, that's something we’re trying to bring into the mix.

We get 10% to 20% of the people in the office on a given day, but it’s not mandated. When people are in the office, we bring in lunch for them. We want to create a workspace for people to collaborate and build relationships, but we don’t need to replicate what you can do sitting on your own. If you want to sit on your own doing work on the computer, you can do that anywhere. This is about collaborating and making sure that you’re creating value beyond what you could have done sitting at a desk.

I’m looking at how we lean into remote work more and not manage the exact same way as we did when we were all in-person. Let’s take advantage of the fact that there are certain things we can do asynchronously and be a lot more productive. Then, let’s use the time we have together to make it worth more than me just presenting to you in a one-way stream. Let’s do that very quickly, maybe even beforehand, and use the time for discussion. We can be a lot more efficient.

What has your career taught you about what is most important? What advice do you have to offer up-and-coming staffing leaders, including the 40 Under 40 honorees?  

For me, the most important thing from a leadership standpoint is to think beyond yourself. I call it “taking yourself out of the equation.” Forget about titles and status. Instead, just go look at what you can do to make a situation better and have an impact.

Early in my career, I had more of a “what’s this going to mean to me” attitude. That mindset takes some of the joy out of the workplace, and it can also lead to poor decisions. Paradoxically, if you can take your ego out of the equation, then you are able to really bring your full self to your role. You are more likely to succeed and far more likely to have fun doing it.  

Outline two mistakes or common misconceptions executives have when it comes to leadership. Share a mistake that you made and what you would have done differently.

One big misconception that comes to mind is that leaders should look and act like iconic actors from a movie. Inexperienced executives sometimes overcompensate by adopting these stereotypical behaviors. Real leaders, however, act like normal human beings. The real art of leadership is figuring out how to motivate people to create a system and how to fill the gaps in that system to ensure that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

A second misconception is that the best leaders have to be on top of and in charge of everything. On the contrary, great leaders empower others to lead. Truly great businesses have the ability to create new generations of leaders.

As for something I would have done differently, earlier on in my career, I was pushing almost two steps ahead of where everyone needed to be and not bringing everyone along the journey at the same pace. Sometimes, just because you can see the strategy doesn’t mean you need to go there. As a leader, there’s no point going there if everyone doesn’t come along. One of the things that I’ve learned is that it’s equally important, if not more important, to bring people along, and that’s really where you have an impact. It doesn’t matter how well you think things through — it’s about how well we can actually execute as a team. And that’s something I’ve adapted to — even if it seems like it’s slowing down, the impact is actually far greater because we’re focused on execution.

To find out how Avionté can empower your staffing firm to connect people with meaningful work, reach out to info@avionte.com.