Welcome to the next edition of Leadership Matters where we ask leaders around the Pacific Zone for their insights and advice about leadership matters to support our continuing journey of personal and professional development.
In this edition, we hear from Vice President, Channels & Partners Farokh Ghadially. Farokh is a strong advocate of ‘digitising and connecting power’ to enhance safety, availability, and efficiency for businesses. He firmly believes that digitalisation and electrification will enable a smarter and greener future and that Schneider Electric has a strong part to play in this.
Farokh has over 20 years’ experience in the electrical and automation industry, working across commercial buildings, data centres, and industrial infrastructure. He started his career as an electrical engineer in Mumbai, India, and has since held various positions in design and development, marketing, sales, and general management in the US and Canada.
Farokh is customer-centric, loves building diverse teams, and immerses himself in new technology. He is an empathetic and strategic leader, and is experienced in driving sustainable business growth by challenging the status-quo, deploying new business models, and building strong partnerships.
What motivates and excites you about your role at Schneider Electric?
Our purpose as an organisation truly excites and motivates me. I love this opportunity we have to bridge progress and sustainability, while empowering people to make the most of our energy and resources. For me, this purpose is a chance to make a difference in our world and leave it in a better place for generations to come.
What makes you most proud of your team?
Our sense of achieving together. I am so proud of my team for truly embracing the commercial transformation to saturate the channels (and our partners) with everything that Schneider Electric has to offer. They passionately represent all our technologies to our customers. I have been humbled by my team’s resilience, fighting spirit, resourcefulness, and growth mindset over the past challenging 2 years. They truly inspire me!
How do you see the market for Channels & Partners evolving in the next 5 years?
Digitisation, electrification, and decentralisation are changing the landscape. Continued investment and growth in electrification will keep fuelling channel and partner growth.
However, digitisation is going to change and shape the way this growth happens. I see our partners evolve to embrace digital in the way we interact and engage with them as well as how they engage with their clients. We will increasingly see our partners use data from our technology to drive digital services. We will see them use smarter tools to estimate, design, and transfer engineering data across the ecosystem in a more seamless and sustainable way. I also see e-commerce entering this space in a bigger way.
Finally, decentralisation is creating the need for distributed energy resources (DERs) management and control, where our partners will have to skill up and enable the industry to truly scale.
How does your team support our leadership in Electricity 4.0 in the Pacific Zone?
Our Channels & Partners team operates across all our segments, supporting our partners to embrace Electricity 4.0. Our team ensures that our partners can bring our technology stack to life and deliver value to end-users.
Our Digital Power team focuses entirely on Electricity 4.0, where its prime mission is to ‘digitise power’ and achieve sustainability and energy efficiency ambitions.
Our newly created New Energy Landscape (NEL) team will support our customers on their energy transition journey, with a focus on e-mobility, microgrids, and storage systems (BESS).
We’re one of the leading companies in the world when it comes to sustainability. How is your part of the business contributing to this leadership?
Our Digital Power and NEL technology are enablers of sustainability and assist our customers to take sustainability to the next level. Our team works with customers to design, develop, and deliver power management and control, microgrids, and e-mobility solutions to help them achieve their sustainability ambitions.
Our partners also play a role in deploying our technology to enable sustainability for our end users. Our team continues to build programs to support our partners to learn, grow, and perform.
I also see an opportunity through our Sustainability Business consulting and advisory services, where we empower our partners to build their own sustainability ambitions and support them in achieving them.
Describe a ‘customer first’ moment that you’ll never forget.
I see our ‘Customers First’ value play out every day in my team. One example is when a mine site in the Hunter region was facing challenges with some air circuit breakers (ACBs) that weren’t behaving normally. As per Murphy’s law, it was a Friday. Being a critical application, it impacted the primary process of the plant, and so risked production and financial loss for the mine. Our team worked hard throughout the evening to troubleshoot the issue, with a decision made late in the evening to replace the ACBs.
Due to the criticality of the issue, the team from our adaptation centre at Ingleburn came in on the Saturday to build new ACBs. Our BDM from Newcastle drove down on Saturday evening to pick up the ACBs and deliver them to the site.
Many people gave up their personal time and went out of their way to resolve a customer challenge. Our customers remember this kind of authentic ‘Customer First’ behaviour forever and is what truly differentiates us from our competitors.
Which of our other values resonates with you most and why?
Dare to Disrupt. This value is what truly ensures that ‘Life Is On’. It drives an innovative mindset and pushes me to not accept the status quo and continuously look for what more can be done. I love the concept of ‘not being afraid to fail’ and if we do fail, do it fast and use the setbacks as a learning path to success. I am motivated by experimenting with new business models and new offer sets, and love it when people think big and achieve their goals off the beaten path. After all, it’s failure that gives you a proper perspective on success.
What makes someone a leader?
Great leaders don’t follow a single path or personality type. Throughout my career, I have always been intrigued and enamoured by the concept of leadership. I’ve realised that you don’t have to be the CEO, the manager, or even a team lead to be a leader. There’s a ‘leader’ in every one of us. It is more a mindset. For me, what makes someone a leader is their ability to inspire people to dream and go where they never imagined. It’s about authenticity and impact.
Who has influenced you most during your career and how?
I would have to say it was my first manager in Larsen & Toubro (L&T) in Mumbai, where I joined as a rotational graduate engineer. I worked with him for 7 years, where he invested a lot of time in coaching me to be patient and resilient. He taught me to aim high, work hard, and value relationships. Those early years really influenced and built my work ethic. Since then, I consider myself fortunate to have worked with many different and amazing leaders who have influenced the way I think and act, and the journey continues….
What is the best advice you’ve ever received?
As you can imagine, there’s a lot of advice I have picked up over the years through the various inspiring people I have had the pleasure of working with. A few punchlines stand out, including always view your role or function as ‘under construction’, invest in and look after yourself first and you will do a better job at assisting others (“put your mask on before you help others….”), and genuinely care for people.
