6 HR Leaders Honored as Bengaluru Summit Rethinks 'Whole Leader' Model

For CHROs and talent-development leaders, the productivity-first leadership playbook has run its course: a decade of optimizing for agility, resilience and influence has coincided with stubborn burnout and attrition. The Asia Leadership Summit 2026 in Bengaluru — with speakers from KPMG, Adobe, Dell and Manipal Education — reframed the debate around "the whole leader, not more... whole," giving HR teams concrete language for redesigning leadership pipelines around purpose and humanity, not just output.

The Asia Leadership Summit & Awards 2026, convened in Bengaluru at the Fairfield by Marriott and organized by TimesAspire Unicom Network, offered a pointed rebuttal to the productivity-maximizing leadership model that has dominated corporate discourse for the past decade. Under the theme "The Whole Leader, Not More... WHOLE," the event's stated aim — according to the organizers' September 28 announcement — was to move leadership development beyond the constant pursuit of greater agility, resilience, influence and productivity, and toward a more integrated vision that balances growth with resilience, ambition with purpose, performance with humanity, and technology with human connection.

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The Asia Leadership Summit 2026 in Bengaluru — with speakers from KPMG, Adobe, Dell and Manipal Education — reframed the debate around "the whole leader, not more...

The framing matters because it names a tension that HR and talent functions have been living with quietly. Leadership competency models, executive coaching and succession frameworks have largely been engineered around "more": more speed, more resilience, more influence, more output. The summit's premise is that this additive approach has produced leaders who are stretched, not whole — capable of hitting targets while disconnected from purpose and people. For HR leaders, that is not an abstract philosophical point; it is a design problem that shows up in burnout metrics, attrition among high-potential talent and engagement surveys that track exactly the dimensions the summit says leaders are under-optimizing.

The speaker roster gave the argument institutional weight. Rajesh Mishra, Partner at KPMG in India, moderated a session titled "Growth vs. Resilience: What Should Leaders Optimise For Now?" — a question that crystallizes the summit's central debate for operating executives and CFOs, not just coaches. Raghuram Krishnan, CFO of Adobe, and Nishant Banthia, Vice President at Dell Technologies, brought line-of-business and financial credibility to a conversation that could otherwise be dismissed as soft-skills rhetoric. Mansij Majumdar, Head - Corporate HR at Manipal Education, anchored the people-function perspective, while executive and leadership coach Sushma Banthia led sessions with deliberately provocative titles: "The Leadership Contradiction," "The Leader Who Doesn't Have the Answer," "The Leader Who Walked Away," and "The Uncomfortable Table."

Those session titles are a signal in themselves. "The Leader Who Doesn't Have the Answer" attacks the omniscient-CEO archetype that many leadership frameworks still implicitly reward. "The Leader Who Walked Away" gestures at the growing willingness of senior leaders to exit roles that conflict with values or wellbeing — a real retention risk for organizations. "The Uncomfortable Table" points to the psychologically safe, difficult conversations that high-performing teams require but that performance-management systems rarely measure. Together, the program reads less like a traditional awards gala and more like an attempt to define a post-productivity leadership curriculum.

The recognition ceremony reinforced the HR dimension. The organizers reported that professionals and organizations were honored across more than a dozen sectors — HR, finance, marketing, hospitality, business, technology, CSR, healthcare, education, insurance, manufacturing and social impact. In the HR categories specifically, six professionals were named "Great HR Leader to Work With," including Neha Kapoor of Vodafone Idea, Buravalli Swarna Latha of Skyroot Aerospace, Gagan Jyot of RMSI, Manas Kaviraj of Advanced Weapons & Equipment India, Sonu Gupta of Coders Brain Technology and Dr. Balaji M. S. of Critical Facility Group. A parallel "Influential HR Leader" list included Hemant Patel of Acutaas Chemicals, Nikhil Raj of Equiniti India, Srinivas Kuchimanchi of HFCL, Ramesh Nandyal of Cprime Inc. and Hari Nair of Nahars Engineering India, among others.