Fix the Manager First. The Culture Will Follow | Chetan Swaroop

Chetan Swaroop Sharma is not a theory-driven HR professional, and he will say so directly. What drives him is what changes on the shop floor, what shifts in culture, not the slide deck, not the framework. He has led HR across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia over 15 years, working in environments ranging from fully informal owner-driven businesses to structured multinationals and everything in between.

He now serves as CHRO at Caballo Commodities DMCC in Dubai, where he applies that cross-cultural, cross-sector lens to one of HR's most difficult challenges: scaling organizations without losing the culture that made them work in the first place.

In this episode #27 of Xobin Talks, host Nikita Saini asked him the questions growing companies wrestle with privately: how to spot when an organization needs a real HR overhaul, what actually fixes semiformal cultures, whether culture is salvageable when it breaks at scale, and how to transform a family-run company without triggering the backlash that kills the effort.

What Are the Early Signs Your Organization Needs to Revamp Its HR System?

Chetan starts by drawing a clear line. Semiformal versus formal isn't about company size or industry, it comes down to how decisions actually get made.

Chetan: "In a semiformal organization, leaders usually consult two or three people before making a decision. As a result, decisions may vary from one situation to another. To a similar kind of problem there are different solution practices existing, but practice depends on the manager's recommendation. A semi-formal environment is an environment where people are pleasing people, not protecting the interest of the organization. There is speed but no governance."

Three Observable Signals

Chetan identifies three things he looks for when joining any organization, not policies, not org charts, but behavioral patterns.

The first is leader behavior: not what leaders say but how they execute work and what they model for everyone below them.

The second is mid-level talent retention. In semiformal organizations, senior leaders have often been in place for ten, fifteen or twenty years. Mid-level managers cycle through quickly. That pattern tells Chetan everything about where value is recognized and where it is not.

Chetan: "In semiformal organizations, leaders and managers often stay for 10, 15, or even 20 years. Mid-level talent, however, keeps changing, and their tenure is usually much shorter."

The third signal is how often routine stuff lands on top management's desk. In a well-structured organization, managers handle daily operational problems themselves. In a semiformal one, everything gets pushed upward because there's no framework for deciding things locally.

A company can outgrow its way of working before anyone realizes it. The old approach still feels familiar, personal, and closely tied to the company culture. Because of that, people may mistake strong relationships for a healthy system. Over time, those relationships can hide growing coordination problems.

What Standardization Means for a Growing Organization

Chetan flips the usual framing here. Standardization isn't a bureaucratic checkbox, it's a psychological one.

Chetan: "People want clarity, not confusion. They need to know where they are starting, what they can expect, and where they are headed. When those things stay unclear, they have little reason to stay, and over time, we risk losing good talent."

What Clarity Fixes

When roles, goals, and career paths aren't clear, employees don't experience that as a policy gap. They experience it as unfairness, confusion, and a sign the organization doesn't think they're worth being straight with.

Chetan: "Standardizing our processes makes things clear, fair, and transparent. It also helps people feel more connected, reduces attrition, and keeps performance steady."

Cultural alignment among employees can increase performance by as much as 22% (LSA Global), and organizations that align culture with business strategy strengthen engagement, improve retention, and create a foundation for sustainable growth.

Chetan: "Teams need a clear framework for performance, hiring, rewards, and talent assessment. Otherwise, personal connections, emotions, or short-term priorities can influence decisions. People should know what their role involves, what they need to achieve, and how they can grow in the future."

What One HR Practice Could Make the Biggest Difference in a Semiformal Organization?

This is the sharpest moment in the whole conversation. Given a blank check for any HR system, framework, or platform, Chetan's answer is: none of it.

Chetan: "I'd focus on manager capability, especially how effectively managers lead and support their teams. High-potential employees don't always leave because of the company itself. Poor workplace culture can push them away, and managers have a major influence on the culture people experience every day."

What a Bad Manager Actually Does

Chetan is specific about what "bad manager" means in practice. Not incompetence, the failure is in not prioritizing three things employees need to stay engaged: their well-being, their ideas being heard, and first-line support before anything reaches HR.

Chetan: "Managers often overlook employee well-being and fail to welcome their team's suggestions. Before involving HR, they should put people first and support their teammates whenever they need help."

The cascade is pretty direct: a manager with strong people skills builds trust, keeps your best people around, and steadies the whole team, no new platform required. Fix the manager, and the manager fixes the culture.

Chetan: "When we fix the manager, the manager fixes the culture and everything else follows."

When a company has about 100 employees, staying flexible is often more important than having highly specialised roles. HR teams are typically made up of generalists who work closely with founders and business leaders. Once the company reaches 300 to 500 employees, leaders usually need to assign clearer ownership to specific functions. That makes the 60-to-200 employee stage the best time to strengthen management before the structure becomes harder to change.

What Breaks First When a Good-Culture Company Scales from 60 to 200 People?

Chetan's take on the cultural breakdown at scale is one of the most practically useful bits of the whole conversation.

Chetan: "When a company has 50 or 60 employees, the owner usually makes most of the key decisions. Everyone knows who to approach, who makes the final call, and where the company draws the line. Personal relationships also play a big role in those decisions. As the company crosses 100 employees, that close connection becomes harder to maintain, and people start feeling less certain about how decisions get made."

Why the Break Happens

Here's the mechanism: what used to be one coherent decision-making unit, the owner, two lieutenants, and a dozen people who all knew each other personally, turns into multiple managers running multiple teams with no shared framework and no direct line to the founder's judgment.

Chetan: "Similar kind of managers with whom we used to deal before, now they are dealing for multiple companies under the same logo. Different managers start running different companies. Then people do not know what is right, what is wrong, whom to approach."

The break happens in the gap. Culture does not collapse all at once. It leans, then leans further, until one day it is broken and no one can point to the moment it happened.

The Four-Part Fix

When Chetan steps in to fix culture at this stage, he works on four fronts.

First, a non-negotiable code of conduct: ethics, values, fairness, respect, and leadership behavior, formally codified, communicated, agreed upon, and enforced, not aspirational.

Second, matrix-based decision making for people-related decisions: one rule for one type of decision, applied consistently across hiring, promotions, and rewards.

Third, advance manager capability building: before the organization needs it, not after the damage is done. Competency mapping, trainability assessment, performance improvement plans for managers who cannot make the transition, and decisive hiring of new skills where internal development is not viable.

Fourth, implied throughout his framework, making culture measurable rather than declared.

Chetan: "Culture is not on the posters. What my workforce is doing night in the night at 2 a.m., that is the culture."

How Do You Transform a Lala Company Into a Merit-Based Organization Without Cultural Backlash?

The Lala company, a family-driven, patriarch-led semiformal organization common across South Asia and the Middle East, is one of the most challenging environments for professional HR transformation. Chetan approaches it by acknowledging genuine advantages before naming the real problems.

What Lala Companies Get Right

Chetan: "The kind of exposure, learning, over-ambitious environment, high-end pressure, what it constructs in you, that a structured company can never build when it comes to candidature building, when it comes to skill set acquiring. First it makes you adoptable. It makes you able to deal with over-ambitious pressure, over-ambitious timelines."

The resilience, ambiguity tolerance, and speed adaptability that come from working in a Lala company are genuine advantages, producing candidates who can handle pressure that structured-company alumni often cannot.

What Lala Companies Get Wrong

Chetan: "Everything is gut-based, nothing is data-based. Relationship-based, if I like you, I don't care about your skill set or experience. What matters is my likability. In Lala companies, tenure and loyalty overshoot potential and skill set and capabilities."

The pattern is almost too neat: what these companies preach and what they actually practice don't match. Lala companies complain about lacking ownership, accountability, and retention, while taking their best people for granted and capping how far they can visibly grow.

Chetan: "What they preach they do not practice. They will always complain that we are lacking people with ownership, accountability, sincerity, we don't have retention, but when it comes to rewarding real talent effort, it is not taking place. They are taking them for granted."

The Transformation Roadmap

Chetan's advice is pragmatic: start small, start with purpose, and change systems rather than sentiments.

Benchmark compensation, benefits, and performance practices against the organizations people are actually leaving for. Build belongingness deliberately, preserving the emotional warmth that is a family company's genuine asset. Remove favoritism from decision-making through structured criteria, not to eliminate family relationships but to prevent them from overriding merit in decisions that should be data-based.

Chetan: "Don't let emotions drive your decisions. Start small, but know why you're doing it. Replace gut-based choices with data and a clear process."

About Chetan Swaroop Sharma

Chetan Swaroop Sharma is Chief Human Resource Officer at Caballo Commodities DMCC, Dubai, and one of the youngest CHROs with hands-on cross-regional experience across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Over 15 years he has led HR in semiformal and formal organizational cultures across multiple industries, with a particular focus on building HR systems that actually change behavior on the floor rather than generating impressive slide decks. His practice is grounded in a single conviction: culture is not what is declared, it is what is enacted, and the only reliable way to improve it is to develop the managers who carry it, standardize the decisions that shape it, and measure rather than merely celebrate it.

Connect with Chetan on LinkedIn