Nandini Matiyani, group chief human resources officer at Strides, did not initially plan a career in HR. She started in sales, progressing steadily until the birth of her first child prompted a career reassessment.
She moved into a non-sales role as her organization began a Six Sigma quality initiative. Matiyani earned her Six Sigma Black Belt certification and worked on projects to reduce days sales outstanding and improve engineer productivity.
This experience eventually led her to HR, where she led transformation projects, including an initiative that helped reduce attrition from 28 per cent to 14 per cent in nine months. In 2005, she accepted a full-time HR role, bringing her understanding of business operations and process improvement to people management.
Transition to HR
Matiyani’s transition to HR shaped her belief that HR leaders need to understand commercial realities rather than approach organisational problems solely through the lens of people processes. She believes sponsorship is part of her job, not a side project, and ensures women are considered for critical roles during talent and succession reviews.
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She personally sponsors high-potential women, recommending them for visible assignments and advocating for them with the executive team and board. Matiyani also monitors representation, promotion rates, and pay equity, holding leaders accountable for progress.
One of the most influential lessons in Matiyani’s career came from an experience of gender-based pay disparity. Early in her professional life, she discovered she was earning less than half of what her male counterparts received for the same role.
Her supervisor, Varsha Anand, challenged the disparity, declining her own increment and asking her boss and HR to use that budget to correct Matiyani’s salary instead. Management eventually agreed, and the incident became a defining example of advocacy for Matiyani.
Leadership and Sponsorship
Matiyani sees sponsorship as essential to her responsibility as a CHRO. She believes individual sponsorship is not enough if the systems governing career progression remain unequal, so she works to fix the system and demonstrate that professional ambition and family responsibilities can coexist.
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She relies on a simple test for making difficult ethical decisions, introduced by Azim Premji during her early years at Wipro: imagining how she would feel if her actions appeared on the front page of a newspaper. Matiyani has used this test throughout her career to remind herself that integrity should not depend on visibility or immediate advantage.
At Strides, Matiyani is helping prepare a traditionally manufacturing-oriented workforce for a digital future through initiatives like the Lighthouse Digital & AI Capability Programme. The program provides training in digitalization, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, enabling employees to apply these capabilities to operational challenges.
Matiyani is proud to see shopfloor teams using data to solve real problems, and she believes these efforts reflect HR’s larger responsibility: building culture, capabilities, and leadership for the organization’s evolving business.
Matiyani’s morning ritual includes an early walk without her phone, followed by 60 minutes of yoga and dhyan with her guru. This clears her mind for dealing with the challenges of the day, and she believes calm and steady is a strategy in crisis situations.
