Mrs. Shivani Chavan: The HR Star Who Didn't Wait to Be Asked

    How Sterlite's HRBP Shivani Chavan turned an unassigned gap in employee training into MDP and SDP programs that lifted engagement company-wide — a masterclass in Initiative, the EQ trait that separates stars from the rest.

    Mrs. Shivani Chavan: The HR Star Who Didn't Wait to Be Asked

    Mrs. Shivani Chavan: The HR Star Who Didn't Wait to Be Asked

    Shivani Chavan joined Sterlite as an HR Business Partner and noticed something within weeks that nobody had asked her to notice: employees weren't being developed the way they should have been. It wasn't in her KRAs. Nobody flagged it in a review. She fixed it anyway — and that decision is the entire difference between an employee and a star.

    In short

    Where this sits on your Winning Kite

    Every trait in Stars at India Inc. maps onto one side of what I call the Winning Kite (KITE Leadership Framework) — a four-sided kite where the top is Success, the left is EQ, the right is RQ, and the bottom is PQ. You rise only when all three sides pull together. Initiative is Trait #10 on the EQ side, sitting inside the Self-Motivation cluster, right alongside Commitment. Where commitment is about staying the course once you've started, initiative is about starting before anyone tells you to. Shivani Chavan is the clearest proof I have that this trait, more than almost any other, is what management actually notices — because it shows up as results nobody had to ask for.

    The Star Who Saw What Wasn't Her Job

    I got to know Mrs. Shivani Chavan while working with Sterlite on a corporate training project. She's an HR Business Partner there, and before that she'd worked at Cosmo Films Limited and Endurance Technologies Ltd. — solid, credible HR experience. But what her colleagues and associates kept telling me, unprompted, was not about her resume. It was about what she did after she joined.

    Within a short time at Sterlite, Shivani noticed gaps in employee training and development. Nobody had asked her to look for gaps. It wasn't written into her KRAs, and there was no committee that had flagged the problem and handed it to her. She simply saw it — and instead of noting it privately and moving on, she brought it forward.

    She came forward with proposals for two structured interventions: Management Development Programs (MDP) and Skill Development Programs (SDP). These aren't small asks. Designing and pitching a training architecture for an organization takes research, stakeholder buy-in, and the confidence to put your name on an idea that could just as easily be rejected. Shivani did all of it, and then she stayed with it — working tirelessly, as her colleagues described it, to actually implement what she'd proposed, not just present a slide deck and move on.

    The result wasn't abstract. Employee productivity and engagement at Sterlite improved measurably. The culture shifted. And all of it traces back to one HR professional who decided that 'not my job' wasn't going to be her answer to a problem she could clearly see.

    Initiative Before the Title: The Upul Chandana Parallel

    I often pair Shivani's story with a cricketing memory that captures the same trait in a completely different setting. In the 1996 World Cup match between India and Sri Lanka, the crowd — a hundred thousand strong — turned hostile as the game slipped away from the home side. Bottles and garbage started raining onto the field. It was genuinely dangerous.

    At mid-wicket stood Upul Chandana — not a superstar, not even a particularly famous player at the time. He read the danger instantly. Without waiting for instructions, he ran to his captain, Arjuna Ranatunga, and said: send me to the boundary line, let the more experienced Aravinda de Silva field in the inner circle instead — because if a senior player gets hurt by these bottles, Sri Lanka could be disqualified from the tournament. He was willing to take the personal risk himself.

    Sri Lanka went on to win that World Cup. Upul Chandana didn't get a trophy named after that decision. He got something more durable — a reputation, inside his own dressing room, as someone who leads before he's given a title. That's the exact same instinct Shivani Chavan showed in an HR office in Sterlite: see the risk, absorb it yourself, act before anyone assigns you the problem.

    What Initiative Actually Looks Like at Work

    Initiative rarely announces itself with a big, dramatic moment. It shows up in ordinary jobs, in ordinary weeks, in decisions nobody is watching closely enough to reward in real time. Consider a shipping clerk whose only formal job is tracking incoming and outgoing shipments. One day this clerk notices the company is overpaying its courier service provider. Nobody asked for an audit. There's no bonus on the table. But the clerk researches alternative rates, calculates the potential shipping-load savings, and takes a proposal to management — saving the company real money, purely because they cared enough to look beyond their job description.

    Or take a salesperson who calls existing customers not to sell them anything, but to check how a product is performing and offer maintenance advice. There's no commission attached to that call. It builds trust instead of revenue — this quarter. That's initiative operating in its quietest, least glamorous form: doing the thing that helps the relationship and the organization, with no immediate payoff attached.

    Mr. Alok, an Operations Manager at a design company overseeing multiple offices, is another version of the same instinct. Reviewing monthly expenses, he noticed the electricity bills across all locations were unusually high. Nobody had complained. Nobody had flagged it. Alok called a staff meeting, educated the team on energy conservation, put up motivational reminders next to switchboards, installed automated timers, and replaced inefficient old equipment. The bills dropped sharply, month after month, and the savings compounded into real money for the company — all because one manager decided a number on a spreadsheet was worth investigating instead of ignoring.

    What connects the shipping clerk, the salesperson, Alok, and Shivani Chavan is the same underlying move: each of them saw a gap that belonged to no one in particular, and each of them decided it belonged to them anyway.

    Why Initiative-Takers Are Rare — and Valuable

    Initiators are not fearless. They simply calculate risk differently. They understand their proposal might get rejected, their idea might not work, their extra effort might go unnoticed for a while. They act anyway, because they've made peace with the possibility of being wrong — which is a very different thing from being reckless. They are not chasing rewards or incentives either; they act because they believe it's the right thing to do for the team or the organization, independent of whether anyone claps for it.

    Non-initiators, by contrast, are often waiting — for permission, for someone else to raise the issue first, for a formal mandate before they'll move. It isn't usually laziness. It's more often a quiet fear of being wrong, of being criticized for stepping outside a lane that was never clearly drawn in the first place. Daniel Goleman's research on emotional intelligence has long pointed to self-motivation — the drive to act without external prodding — as one of the clearest predictors of who rises in an organization and who plateaus. Shivani Chavan is a living case study of exactly that finding, played out in an Indian HR department rather than a research paper.

    Building the Habit of Initiative

    The good news is that initiative is trainable, not just innate. It starts with a simple discipline: look one layer beyond your task list and ask what, if fixed, would actually help the team most. Align yourself with the bigger goals of the organization so gaps become visible to you the way Shivani's training gap became visible to her. Set yourself a clear intention to act on what you notice rather than filing it away. And accept, in advance, that not every proposal will land — the cost of staying silent is almost always higher than the cost of being told 'not now.'

    This is exactly the muscle I build with teams through our Signature Corporate Training Programs and through focused sessions under our full training-topics catalogue — because initiative, like every trait on the EQ side of the Winning Kite, grows fastest when it's practised deliberately, not left to chance.

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    Avinash Chate

    TEDx Speaker · Founder, The Future Corporate · Author of Stars at India Inc.

    Avinash has trained the Indian Army, BRO, RBI, BARC, JSW Steel and 1000+ corporate leaders across India. His work focuses on leadership, emotional intelligence and behavioural training rooted in Indian values and modern business needs.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is initiative in the workplace, according to Avinash Chate?

    Initiative is taking action without being told — seeing what needs to be done and doing it, even without a reward or a request. It is Trait #10 on the EQ side of the Winning Kite framework, part of the Self-Motivation cluster.

    What did Shivani Chavan do at Sterlite that made her a star employee?

    As HRBP at Sterlite, Shivani noticed gaps in employee training that were not part of her KRAs. Without being asked, she proposed and implemented Management Development Programs (MDP) and Skill Development Programs (SDP), which measurably improved employee productivity and engagement.

    How is initiative different from just doing your job well?

    Doing your job well means completing what you're assigned. Initiative means acting on what you're not assigned — spotting a gap outside your KRA and closing it anyway, because you care about the outcome more than the job description.

    How can I build the habit of initiative at work?

    Start by looking one layer beyond your task list — ask what problem, if solved, would help the team most. Propose it before you're asked, accept that it may not always work, and treat the risk of being wrong as smaller than the cost of staying silent.

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